Business Intelligence

That old warning against putting all your eggs in one basket is still good advise. As freelancers, it’s important to spread your interests out: you’ll prevent burnout, and you’ll be less affected by peaks and lulls. Teaching is a perfect compliment to any freelance lifestyle. It’s a good way to offset the typical solitary days

Certain types of clients want to see references, sometimes very early in the process of deciding who to hire for a particular project. By preference, these references are probably past clients of yours who can speak to your abilities in handling whatever type of project you’re currently trying to land. But do you know, off

Pay-what-you-can sales have been popping up on the websites of freelancers and consultants I follow lately, almost as if there is a trend pushing this sort of promotion. The sales follow a fairly set format: there’s a specific product, rather than an open-ended service. Depending on the freelancer in question, the product might be an

In the course of your freelance business you may be asked to do a concept presentation for your more complex projects. A concept presentation is a pre-development or planning phase where you show your client a prototype or draft of what you’re going to deliver. If you’re a freelance web designer, a design concept presentation is often

Last week a picture of a defaced Go Compare billboard was doing the rounds on Twitter. I thought it was funny and thought it was real. This was until yesterday when I was driving through Sheffield and saw two billboards with similar ‘graffiti’ a couple of streets away from each other. It was too much of

As freelancers in creative fields we’re faced with a unique situation. That is, the combination of art (or creativity) and business. We need to use our left and right brains to the maximum, each with the same amount of effort and dedication every day. There’s not a lot of average jobs in the world that

Have you ever said yes to a referral without qualifying the lead? I did that many years ago, and what should have been a 2-3 week project dragged on for 6 stressful months. I didn’t know then that I could turn down any client, even a referral. If I had qualified the lead, I would

Here’s a basic difference between products and services. The level of satisfaction of a product often has a direct correlation to sales: you offer a good product that’s well-liked, and most likely sales will go up; for bad products, sales dip. That relationship is less transparent with services like the kind usually offered by freelancers.

Creating a business plan for your freelance business might sound like the most boring task in the world, but just because you’re not keen on creating one doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. If you are a passionate, creative person, creating a business plan might be just the thing you need to be sure you dot your

Every five weeks or so, our team finishes up another issue of our magazine. The last week of production is always the most stressful. We send our issues to our printer on a Tuesday, and then we all sit back and collectively sigh with relief. Those Tuesdays always feel like Fridays to me due to