How To Earn Over $4,000/Week Freelancing Part-Time
I’m going to show you exactly how I make over $4,000/week freelancing part-time.
Yes I said week and yes I said part-time.
That’s putting in around 20-25 hours of work per week, and getting over $4,000/week in return.
I’m going to show you the numbers and how the math works so you can be on your way to generating the income you want while having a much better work/life balance.
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to focus on Upwork as the platform of choice for finding freelance clients. You can apply the same principles that I teach you here regardless of what platform you use but you’ll specifically see how I generate that income through Upwork.
Upwork is only one of my revenue sources, but it’s a great way to get started on your freelance journey.
As you can see in the image below, this is my weekly time sheet for last week.
This was a bigger week for me, but like any freelancer, your income will fluctuate.
It’s important to always be above a minimum amount that you're comfortable with. For me, that number is $4000, and most weeks I’m above $4,000 per week.
Some weeks I’m right around there, other weeks I’m well above it like this past week depending on what projects I have going on.
So let’s break down my weekly time sheet here on Upwork so you understand what’s contributing to this number of $6,583.
First of all, you might be looking at the total hours and thinking, 63 hours?! That’s not part-time!
It’s not what it seems.
I did not work 63 hours, I billed 63 hours and no I didn’t commit fraud.
I only actually worked around 20 hours. I can do that because most of the contracts I have with my clients are flat rates. They pay me a weekly flat rate as a baseline for me providing as-needed consulting on their video marketing and other marketing strategy consulting that I do for them.
Then I also charge flat rates based on how many videos my team and I produce for them. However, I prefer to use the hourly contract format on Upwork because that type of contract has a lot more flexibility and you get paid faster with less admin time for the freelancer and the client both.
So for example, the second time log entry is for 2.5 hours, which equals $250 from that client for the week. I charge that client a flat fee of $250/week to provide consulting for their YouTube channel. So whether I put in half an hour of time or 4 hours of time, they still get charged $250.
You have to get in the mindset of focusing on the value you’re providing your clients, instead of the time you’re putting in.
That is the key here to overcoming the self-sabotage that will show up when you put in an hour of work and get paid $300.
Compared to your employee job it’s insane. But in the business world, you are providing a product in the form of a service and the client just needs to be satisfied with that product based on the price they’re paying.
When you buy an iPhone, do you question how many hours of labor went into creating that one phone?
OR do you just look at the price and then decide whether that price is worth what that phone can do for you?
That’s how you increase your income as a freelancer. You have to move out of hourly and start charging fixed rates for specific deliverables. You have to productize your services. And you have to focus more on the product you’re delivering and the results that it is bringing to your client’s business.
If a client:
Invests $500 in you to create a video
It takes you 2 hours to create that video
That video helped your client bring in $2,000 in sales.
Was it worth $500 to pay you for that video?
Yes! They made a $1500 profit from their $500 investment.
They don’t care if you only took 2 hours. They could have paid another video editor the same amount and it could have taken him 7 hours to produce the same results.
So as a freelancer it’s very important that you keep honing your skills and become more and more proficient and efficient so you can accomplish the same task in less time without sacrificing quality. That’s how you increase your income.
Let’s go back to my timesheet…
If you scroll down there is a time log for 11 hour at $125/hour. I’m just billing the amount of hours that is equivalent to the fixed rate we agreed on for the project, which was $1375.
I spent 2 hours of my own time on the project. I was developing a strategy for a client, and the value that I provided in that 2 hours was worth what I charged.
It’s taken years of experience to be able to create a strategy in 2 hours. My client simply doesn’t have the knowledge to do that themselves and might spend 20-30 researching sources that might not be credible to figure it out themselves.
Not all of the money I bill ends up as personal income.
There’s a certain amount that ends up trickling down to me as personal income, and a portion that pays for my business expenses to help me earn that money.
For that $1375 that I billed, it ends up coming out to about $400 in personal income from that project. So I’m actually paying myself more like $200/hour, not $687 per hour. But I’ve also built in profit in order to grow my business, and I have a small team of freelancers that help with client projects, and both of those expenses contribute to the money I’m able to earn.
So in any amount that I’m earning there are:
Business expenses that I’m paying for that have to be covered
The cost of my time
The cost of my team’s time
Profit
$1375 is covering my time at around $100-$200/hour, to be the lead strategist, and then it’s covering the time of an assistant on my team that is getting $30/hour. It’s also covering a portion of all my monthly business expenses, software that I pay for, internet, etc…
Once all of that is accounted for, then maybe $400 of that is pure profit. That profit then gets distributed to me and my wife because we’re the only owners of the company.
I get my baseline income based on the time I’m putting in to that specific client and that’s around $100/hour. Then I’m getting additional income from the profit distribution. Some of the profit needs to be invested back into the business in order to keep growing it. I also need to put some towards hiring people to help with sales or into advertising. But that’s how I calculate my income.
What do I consider “hours” that I’ve worked? It’s not just the time I put into client projects.
When I pay myself I consider every hour I devote to my business time I’m getting paid for.
In a given week I may only put in 10 hours towards actual tasks for client projects. The other 10-15 hours are spent running my business, growing my business, finding new clients, getting on sales calls, updating my website, processing invoices, and managing people on my team.
If you want to get the income that I’m talking about in this video, you have to think beyond doing work for a client. You’re also doing work on your business itself and you need to be paid for that time.
So let’s look again at the $6583 total income for last week and break it down further of where that money goes.
Now you know what’s adding up to that amount, it’s basically 8 different clients paying me fixed weekly rates based on the work I’m doing for them or based on how many videos produced.
It’s not based on me putting in 63 hours.
Now I want to show you what happens to that revenue before it becomes my personal income.
$450 is subtracted to Upwork their fee. My average fee is around 7% because I have clients that have paid me over $10,000 and the fee is 5% and then I have clients where the fee is 10%.
That money then gets transferred into my business bank account. The following week, I have charges that go through that are business expenses. One of those charges is the money I’m paying my team. I have about 5 freelancers that work part-time for my agency and it totals around $1,0000-$1200 per week. So we’ll subtract $1,000.
I have various subscriptions that my business pays for every month, things like dropbox and adobe software, etc… so let’s say $100 goes towards that.
Now I’m down to $5033 in profit.
Now this is where I get paid, but I have to decide how much profit gets distributed to me and how much gets reinvested into the business.
At the end of every month once all expenses have been accounted for and income tallied, I like to pick a certain amount of the profit to put into a business savings account to be used the next month for business growth.
One month it might be $500 that I put into that savings to reinvest into growing the business, and another I might decide to go up a little, depending on what my goals are for that month.
Then the rest becomes my personal income.
That’s the amount of money that was paid to me for putting in about 25 hours of work total. That includes 10 or so hours working on client projects and 10-15 on everything else to run and grow my business. You have to include all the other tasks you’re doing outside client project work when determining what you’re getting paid per hour.
So, it comes out to $190/hour that I got paid that week in personal income.
So, let’s sum up what it takes to earn that amount working basically “part-time” according to an employee standard of 40 hours per week.
1. You must start thinking about your pricing in terms of total dollar amounts, not an hourly rate.
Start converting your projects into fixed amounts.
Now, there is risk to this. If you don’t do the math properly you could end up getting much less per hour then you were hoping for. So, I don’t suggest a beginner freelancer start with flat rates because they don’t have enough data yet to know what to charge.
I have other videos all about hourly vs. flat rate and an upcoming video I’m doing is all about tracking your time which will become extremely important when determining flat rate prices for projects.
But with greater risk comes greater reward and when you’ve converted all your clients to flat rates, especially when it’s recurring flat rates like I do, a certain amount per week then you’ll not only have stability but you’ll have much higher income.
2. Consider hiring at least a personal assistant to take on some of the simpler tasks.
Not every task is worth the same amount of money.
In my business, uploading a YouTube video to a channel and filling out the title and description and publishing the video is not nearly as high paying of a task then developing a YouTube strategy.
But before I started hiring people, I had to do all the lower paying and higher paying tasks and that would affect my overall hourly rate.
Now I only focus on strategy and I pay other people to upload videos, edit them, etc...what this also did was freed up much more of my time so that I could welcome more clients.
Part of why freelancers hit a ceiling they can’t get through is because the only way to get more money is to increase the hours they work. People are only willing to pay so much for a freelance marketing consultant, and once you’ve maxed out the hourly rate that people are willing to pay you have to consider hiring people and changing your pricing structure to flat rates.
Then, if you can now take on 20 clients instead of 5, you will make a much higher profit that gets distributed back to you as extra income, even though you’re paying other people to help, because you’re building in profit in every fee.
If you are someone that likes just doing it solo, and you never want to hire anyone, not even a personal assistant, then you need to accept that your income will be directly correlated with the hours you put in and you will hit a ceiling.
There are solo freelancers still making good money because they’ve developed an expertise and charge a lot for it. However, if they stop working and take a week off, they get zero income.
When you have at least a small team, you can take time off and your business keeps generating income. So that’s the direction I’m going in. I’m going to keep expanding my team to accommodate more and more clients, and higher and higher profit.
If that’s not up your alley, it’s okay, you can still convert your pricing into flat rates once you’re ready and start building in profit to your pricing.
3. Freelancing is one of the best ways to increase your personal income while working less time and making more.
If you’ve noticed the price of everything going up recently, you’re looking at something called “inflation”. Freelancing is one of the best ways to protect yourself from the rising cost of living because of how much you can earn.
You get to choose how much profit you want to put back into your business to help it grow. You also get to choose how much you’re going to charge and how much income you want to make.
I hope this has been helpful in understanding exactly how I’m able to meet and exceed my income goals, and how that breaks down into profit.