Transitioning From Employee Job to Freelancing (While Providing For Your Family)
You’re raising a family. You’re the primary income provider. You have a 9 to 5 employee job and you want out. You don’t like the commute. You’re done working under someone else’s conditions, with no say in where you work, when you work, and how much you earn. Have you considered freelancing?
Maybe you have thought about going out on your own but you aren’t sure how to transition into being self-employed. Does anyone actually make stable income as a freelancer? The answer is yes, many do. In this guide, I want to teach you how to safely transition from an employee job to freelancing so you can work less, earn more, spend more time with your family, giving you autonomy in your career development.
The biggest fear you likely have is that you won’t be able to pay your bills and provide your family with the security they are expecting you to provide. That’s a very natural and valid fear to have. One thought that helped me get over that fear is, “Providing for my family is more than just money, it’s my time. I need to provide them with my time, and freelancing will give me more time with my family.” That’s also the rationale I used to enroll my wife into the idea. She definitely wanted me to only have to work 20 to 25 hours per week.
With that said, it’s still important to pay your bills. You don’t want to become homeless. That’s the underlying fear, that you’ll get kicked out of your house, and you and your family will starve on the streets. This won’t happen if you approach freelancing responsibly. Even if you make a bunch of mistakes or have a long learning curve, (like I did), you’re still unlikely to become homeless unless you choose to. It’s totally in your control to earn enough income to at least pay for basic survival.
So here are the steps you need to take before you ever consider quitting your job.
When you are starting a business and freelancing, it’s going to take time, so don’t abandon your current employment just yet. You have a lot of learning and foundation work to do first.
Step 1
Write down your why for taking the self-employment road. Is it because you want more time with your family? More flexibility in your schedule? More autonomy? More control over your income? Write as much detail as possible as to why you want to freelance.
Step 2
Create a financial plan with your wife. This plan should include numbers surrounding your current employment and whether it’s enough to cover your bills with some padding. You don’t want to live paycheck to paycheck throughout the whole process of building your freelance business just as much as you don’t want to live without income. You need some padding so that you’re providing for your family’s second level needs, but the goal is to freelance so that you can upgrade your lifestyle and have much more padding.
Your financial plan should include a budget for spending and your expected income. Refer to my free book for more details on creating this financial plan.
Step 3
Choose a focus for your freelancing. What skill or set of skills will you be selling as a service? If you’re struggling with this step, read my blog about all the different careers you can do as a freelancer. There are a lot!
Step 4
Develop any skills you need in order to perform well at the focus you have chosen. If you want to be a freelance video editor and you don’t yet know how to edit videos, then start practicing. Chances are, you already have a skill that you can leverage for your freelancing to start. But if you don’t, you’ll need more time to develop that skill first. You don’t need to become the best expert at the skill to start freelancing because you’ll keep developing your craft as you do work for clients, which is why your rate will go up over time. But develop it to the point where you can sell your skill for money and not feel guilty about it.
Some skills may require education at an actual school or through online courses and books. So again, I recommend trying to leverage any skills you already have developed to shorten the timeline before you can get your first paying client.
Step 5
Figure out your ideal client. Who are you going to sell your services to? Businesses or individuals? What types of businesses? At first, you might already know because your skill could be relevant to a lot of different people or businesses. I recommend picking businesses as your target market to start because very few individuals are hiring freelancers for something unless you are a coach or mentor. You’ll make more money usually with business clients.
You may think that your skill is relevant to most businesses. All businesses need a website right? So, “I’m a website designer for all businesses.” You’re going to struggle to find clients if you aren’t niche enough. If you promote yourself as a website designer for clothing and fashion brands, then fashion brands will see you as an expert in their industry. A website for a clothing company will have very different functionality, style, and features than a website for a real estate agent or business coach.
Specializing in a specific target audience is what got my freelance business moving. I was hardly finding any clients selling video marketing services to everyone. But when I decided to focus on YouTube for online education companies, the clients started to line up. Over time, I was able to expand my target audience into other industries, but I needed to start very focused. I still keep my services focused on a specific type of video production so that I can remain experts in a few things, rather than a basic performer of many things. But I’ve expanded the types of businesses I serve and it happened gradually over time. I still don’t serve every type of business, and never will. I still have a core ideal client that is the best fit, and then I have outer layers of clients that I’m willing to work with, but they’re not the core of the core.
Step 6
Start building a portfolio of work as samples to prove your skill set. This portfolio does not have to include work you’ve done for paying clients. You can just do practice projects to show what you can do. This is obviously much easier if your skill is something visual like video editing, graphic design, or writing. But if your service is focused on some type of consulting or helping your clients achieve a certain result, then you’ll need testimonials from people. Work with friends and family, or offer your services to local businesses for free or on a discount. Tell them that you’re just wanting to get experience and that you would love to try out a few things on them.
The alternative to doing free work is to pay for an expert in your field to train you on how they achieve those results for their clients. And even if you’ve never done it before yourself, you’re using strategies that someone else has proved work, so you can go off of their credibility to give yourself credibility. And you can say things like, “I know how to…” because that is true. You won’t be telling them what you’ve achieved for past clients because you have none.
That’s how I started my business. I spent $2,000 on a comprehensive online course that trained me how to build YouTube channels. The guy teaching it has a lot of experience building YouTube channels. I then used the certification I got from his course as proof that I had the knowledge to help other people build their YouTube channels. I didn’t have the experience yet, but I had the knowledge. So, I didn’t have to offer my services for free. I charged money because I knew if I just used the strategies that I learned from my course that I would produce results for my clients. And I did produce results for my first clients, but along the way I gained experience that gave me even deeper knowledge and skills than what I had obtained in that course. This allowed me to keep raising my rate.
In short, there are many ways to start building that portfolio so you can prove to those first few clients that you have the skill you say you have.
Step 7
Start networking. This can happen in-person and online. Optimize your LinkedIn profile. Set up accounts on apps like Shapr and start making connections with people, telling them what you do. Come up with a 15 second phrase that sums up the main service you’re selling. Also, I recommend opening up an Upwork account or one on a similar freelancer platform, where you can start applying to jobs and practice submitting proposals.
Building connections is definitely a long-game, so don’t procrastinate starting this. If you spent 6 months networking before quitting your job, you’ll be off to a much better start.
This step also gives you an opportunity to start validating your business idea. You’ll get both positive and sometimes negative feedback. You’ll get a sense for what the demand is for your service and it’ll help you adjust it if needed.
Step 8
The transition. You’ve gone through the steps above and you have found your first paying client. Should you quit your job? It depends. Are they just paying you for one small project? Then no. If they are giving you 10 hours per week of work and working for them will compromise your ability to do your full-time employee job, then you might have to quit. This is when following Dave Ramsey’s financial principles becomes helpful.
If you’re out of debt and have emergency savings, then you’ll have an easier time during this transition. There will always be a jump from your current job to freelancing where you don’t yet have the freelancing income to fully replace your employee income. You simply can’t put enough time into your business to fully replace your income before quitting your job, so be ready for that jump. It will take a leap of faith, and the more financially prepared you are, the better.
That’s it for now! Stay tuned for my training on how to become a successful freelancing dad.