The Skills Necessary to Administer a Freelance Business

Photo credit: Kumar Appaiah/Flickr

When you first start out as a freelancer, your most important skills are those creative abilities that you can directly transform in paid work. Nothing else is as important as landing work and completing it, unless you don’t happen to need food and a place to live. But there is a point for every freelancer where business skills become more important. You’re a freelancer. That means you’re a business owner (at least according to the laws of most countries). That means that you need to keep your books up to date and pay your taxes. It also means that having some decent business skills are necessary if you want to grow your business over time. Not only does a good freelancer have better-than-average creative skills, she needs a bit of accounting, a smattering of contract law, a dash of operations and plenty of marketing.

What Great Business Skills Mean for a Freelance Business

The difference between a new freelancer and one who’s been at the game for a little while is whether the business runs smoothly. Can you get your invoices out on time? Do you have an established contract — and know what problems to look for if a client wants to use his own contract? Those sorts of details are signs that your business is humming along smoothly. They are also a sign that you can keep the time you spend on administering your business to a minimum and focus on getting bigger and better client projects. But knowing your business means that you’re able to look at the big picture when you want to grow. If you have great records about your business, you can analyze what types of projects earn you the most money, decide where sub-contracting can help you out, decide if taking on a partner makes sense or even branch out into other types of work. There are plenty of opportunities for freelancers to earn great incomes, but grabbing those opportunities requires some business savvy.

Getting Those Business Skills

Unfortunately, the way that many freelancers pick up the necessary business skills is by learning through less-than-pleasant experiences. Think about how many freelancers work without a contract — until a client stiffs them and they have no recourse. While a bad experience tends to make knowledge stick, there are better ways to acquire the business skills that will help you move forward.

• Find a mentor: Find a freelancer who has a thriving business and seems to have everything together. Just ask to follow that person through their business administration a couple of times — watch how they send out invoices, look at when they buy new equipment and so on — and ask a lot of questions. For some freelancers, that’s enough to get your business in gear.
• Take some classes: If you learn best in a classroom environment, head over to your local community college. Such schools generally offer inexpensive business classes and will let you easily take the occasional class without pursuing a full degree. Some even offer a few business courses as part of their adult education system.
• Read up on business: The fact that you’re reading this blog is a good sign — you can get a ton of information about running your freelance business online. I’d recommend picking up a couple of more in-depth resources as your business evolves. Bookkeeping has always been a tough point for me, but I bought a book on it and got myself up to speed.
• Hire help: If you’ve got enough work to keep you busy around the clock and a level of income where you can afford it, you can hire someone to take care of the business stuff for you. A good bookkeeper can do a large portion of your business administration tasks (although it’s a good idea to know what’s going on so that you don’t wind up with a bad bookkeeper).

The important thing is getting your skills up to speed. Without them, you may find yourself on the tough end of a conversation with the IRS or simply unable to take on bigger projects for your client. Neither will make it easy to keep increasing your rates as a freelancer. Photo credit: Kumar Appaiah on Flickr