When people go freelance they often worry about not getting enough work, clients or students. But the problem I see far more often isn’t difficulty getting freelance clients, but being completely overloaded and under-charging for your time. Instead, you really want to aim to work less and earn more.
The problem of exchanging time for money
Not getting freelance clients is a legitimate concern. It can certainly happen, especially at the beginning. But, honestly, what I see far more often is that people have too many students or too much work, but still don’t have enough money.
They’re working long hours and, while they may be getting great results, it feels exhausting and unsustainable. The longer you do this for, the more you start to wonder if you can really do this forever, or if you want to. It may leave you feeling resentful and unappreciated. And, in worst case scenarios, it’s a fast track to burnout.
This can be a hard situation to escape. You might feel, ‘If I put my prices up, I’ll lose all my clients.’ Or you might be working for different agencies who offer an hourly rate – take it or leave it.
This was the case with a client I spoke to recently. But one of the things the troll does is to wrap everything up into a big ball, and say, ‘this won’t work for me’. You can think of it as an ‘all or nothing’ mentality.
The solution
In the case of my client who felt she couldn’t put her prices up, when we broke it down, the situation started to look a bit different.
It turned out that there were a few clients where she actually could raise her prices. And, given that she hadn’t raised them for 8 years, it was well past time. Just doing this allowed her to free up some time to start focusing on marketing to get more better paying clients.
You can raise prices in a gentle staged way and give people plenty of notice. But it is something you should be doing where you can.
Switch your focus from getting more clients
Getting more clients at lower rates isn’t really a good thing. Instead of always thinking in terms of your number of clients, start looking at two slightly different things:
- how you’re getting your students
- whether you could be charging more from the outset
What you really want is fewer students – or less work – at a higher rate.
The secret to working less and earning more
The only way you’re going to achieve that is by getting known as a specialist**. Then people will be willing to invest more in working with you because they trust that you’re the right person to help them.
Becoming known as a specialist takes time and effort to work out just who you can best help, and how and why. And you’ve also got to get that message out there, and give people the opportunity to check you out and build up trust and rapport.
The challenge is that, if you’re too busy to do any of that then you’re going to stay stuck working all the hours for peanuts.
Again, going back to the troll and its all or nothing mindset, I don’t mean you should immediately drop all your low-paying clients and start marketing yourself as only working with CEOs for £100 an hour.
You could do that, of course. But it’s quite a risky strategy because it might take a while to build up the know, like, trust. And that’s assuming that’s what you really want to do and are suited to doing!
But what you can start doing right now is to plan two things:
- an exit strategy from the low-paid clients
- a strategy to start attracting better and better paying clients
Key steps to work less and earn more
You’ll definitely need to work on your niche, but also on a lot of other things:
Developing a sustainable business model
You need to develop a business model and an offer, or set of offers, which are just right for your ideal clients and for you. Sustainable in this case means one that will enable you to work less and earn more so you don’t burnout from working all hours with too many clients..
Getting your message clear
You need to get really clear about the core messages you want to get across to your potential clients. A clear message is one that helps them to understand how you can help them and why they should choose you.
Developing a strategy
You need a strategy for how you are going to encourage potential clients along the buyer journey. So plan how to get them from the point where they first come across you to when they are ready to sign on the dotted line.
The payoff is worth it
All of that does take time. And learning the business skills you need will probably mean investing some money.
But it’s essential if you want to get out of that time/money trap and into a new business where you work less and earn more. And, of course, all of this is exactly what I can help you with on my group programme.
** I know people sometimes resist the word specialist. I don’t mean you’re the best person in the world at teaching English, but that it’s clear why someone should pick you rather than just go for the cheapest teacher they can find on Preply.