Everyone says they want to be their own boss, but very few people know how. This book will help you learn how to think properly about owning a business. It gives you guidelines in setting up your office (in or out of the house), setting your schedule, and establishing your priorities. Getting started properly will put your business on the road to success.
GETTING STARTED
A Freelancer’s Survival Guide Short Book
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Getting Started
Copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
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Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Table of Contents
So you want to work for yourself. You’ve quit your day job, or you’re about to. And suddenly, you’re overwhelmed. What do you do next? How do you make it through the day? Where do you work? Are you working? It certainly doesn’t feel like you’re working.
Most of us have never learned how to set our own schedule, or design our own workspace. Most of us have let others set our priorities from the day we were born. We moved from school to job, from our parents to our spouses, without a thought. We do what we’re told or what we should do.
And when we’re on our own, we suddenly don’t know how to behave.
This short book is more about how to think than how to act. Because you can’t act before you think things through. So figure out what you want to do, figure out where you’ll do it, and figure out what’s most important to you.
Once you have those things, you’re ready to begin.
This short book is three chapters of what will be a huge how-to book called The Freelancer’s Survival Guide. I’ve been writing this book in public, posting chapters on my blog every week since April of 2009. If you want to read what I’ve written so far, go to kristinekathrynrusch.com, click on the Freelancers’ Guide tab, and look at the table of contents.
You’ll soon realize that I wrote the chapters out of order, as the topics came up. I’ve decided, as I am putting the book in its proper order for print and electronic publication, to post short sections. If you’re like me, sometimes one section has all the answers you need. The rest of the book is superfluous.
This short book will get you started. The others will keep you on track. If you haven’t quite decided whether or not to go full time, check When To Quit Your Day Job, another Freelancer’s Survival Guide Short Book.
—Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Lincoln City, Oregon
July 14, 2010
Essay #1:
My title for this section of the Guide, Job Description, should be impossible to write about, given the task I assigned myself. I wanted to discuss various freelancing jobs, not just freelance writing. The jobs should be so different that I shouldn’t be able to describe them in a single article.
But they’re not.
Because at its core, all freelancing is the same.
When someone else hires you to work at their business, you do a specific job for them. The radio station I worked for years ago hired me to put out one-half hour newscast per weeknight, manage hourly news updates throughout the 3-hour morning show, and make certain that someone anchored the noon to one talk show. I also had to do wall-to-wall political coverage on election day, and handle any emergency situation that came up. My duties included maintaining the newsroom, handling the volunteer staff, and training new reporters.
I also had to attend radio station staff meetings, have a monthly meeting with the program director, and justify my budget with the station’s financial manager. I had a lot of skills—from anchoring to reporting to engineering—and I used them all, sometimes within the same day. I also did a lot of writing.
I had an assigned area (the news room), an assigned budget, and assigned timeslots for my various newscasts. I took my job very seriously. If I failed, we had a half an hour of nothing (dead air in radio terminology) from 7 to 7:30 at night. I can’t tell you how many times I scrambled to fill that half an hour because someone failed to show up for work. More than once, I wrote and engineered the entire newscast myself. A few times, I wrote, anchored, and engineered it.
I worked hard. However, when the newscast ended at 7:30, I had a half an hour of clean-up and prep for the morning show, then I could go home. The radio station continued broadcasting. Other people monitored the evening schedule. Someone else paid for the lights and the heat and the extreme cost of the transmitter. If station got knocked off the air by lightning, someone else dealt with that emergency. I had no responsibilities from eight in the evening until five in the morning. If no one showed up by then for the morning shift, the daytime DJ called me, and I had to come in for the updates. But if I didn’t get the call, I got to sleep in.
The structure of that job was so absolute, I can remember it twenty years later. I still dream about it—showing up at 5 a.m. to find the DJ gone, the transmitter off, and the station broadcasting dead air. In my dreams, I scramble to put together a newscast while sitting in the booth as the disk jockey, playing the music, and rebooting the station itself. (People who’ve worked in radio know that one person can’t do all those things by herself—which is why these dreams are nightmares.)
Whenever you’re an employee, someone else provides the structure. They give you an assigned area, people to work with, tasks to finish, and, in many cases, a budget. You work within those structures, and for your time, you receive a paycheck. If you’re lucky, you also receive some benefits—health insurance and paid time off.
When you become a full-time freelancer, you lose all of this structure.
This is one of the areas where first-time freelancers struggle. When they quit their day job (or in the case of this economy, got forced out and decided to go it alone), they imagined spending all day every day doing exactly what they love.
Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.
As Bob Cooper, who works as a freelance copyeditor and proofreader, wrote to me when I started this series, “Whatever someone chooses to do as a freelancer, a major component of that will be not doing the actual work that they enjoy, but rather the just-as-important work of keeping their business viable—which involves primarily self-marketing to keep the flow of new work coming in, but also the mundanities of timekeeping, bookkeeping, tax planning, etc. And if they’re not good at any or all of those things, what to do? Spend money to hire someone to do it for you? Spend time (and maybe money) learning how to do it properly yourself? Ignore it all and hope it goes away?”
Other chapters of the Guide deal with a lot of the individual items he mentions from bookkeeping to marketing to hiring employees, but for the purposes of this essay, his overall point is marvelous. A major component of the job will be things the freelancer never considered before she went full-time freelance.
Or as Lyn Worthen who runs a technical communications consulting firm, Information Designs, says, “Too many aspiring freelancers forget that they have to wear ALL the hats in their business (at least until they get to the point where they can hire additional hat-wearers).”
And once you’re at the point of hiring an additional hat-wearer, you may not want that person. Remember what you were like as an employee? Some days were good; some were bad, but the consequences of a mediocre performance were simple: If the boss didn’t like it, you got fired.
Remember this whenever you think of hiring anyone. No one cares about your business as much as you do. No one will work as hard as you will. And no one will be as vigilante as you are about mistakes. So caution, caution, caution about hiring anyone to take the burden off of you—particularly the burden of managing your money.
What is your job description as a full-time freelancer? Jack of All Trades. The Boss and the Minion. You have become Da Man. And to throw in one more cliché, the buck really and truly does stop with you. The day job had an invisible structure as well. If you worked in a corporation or an organization with more than two employees, you probably saw only a handful of the things it took to run that business. You had no idea how, for example, to pay employees (payroll taxes are a nightmare), how much it cost just to keep the doors open every day, and what kind of volume had to be done every month to keep the business viable.
At the radio station, I got to know my newsroom, my reporters, my news sources, and the schedule. I only worried about the budget when our long-distance phone bill got too big, usually during some big national news cycle. I had no idea what it took to maintain the station’s equipment or to monitor the seasonal ratings. I didn’t have to worry about the pledge drives (we were listener-sponsored) or the occasional problems with the FCC.
As a full-time freelancer, I have become an expert at tax law as it pertains to my business. I loathe accounting and bookkeeping because I’m dyslexic and numbers truly vex me. But Quicken has made that part of my life easier. I keep my own books, handle my own finances, and act as my own financial advisor. Do I consult others? Daily. But the final decisions are always mine.
I remain current with the news, not just the industry news, but economic trends, national stories, and—because my work sells all over the world—international events. I constantly monitor the web. I try to scan at least three newspapers per day, listen to several news sources, and look through as many industry websites as possible.
I also monitor what everyone else in my industry does. Some folks would say I’m keeping up with the competition, but I know that writers don’t compete with each other. However, I can learn from what books other writers are publishing, what deals they make, and the mistakes they make. I’m a fervent believer in learning from other people’s mistakes. I already make too many of my own—I made a few doozies at the turn of the century that cost me dearly—and I simply don’t want to reinvent every single wheel. It’s too painful, time-consuming, and difficult.
In the mistakes area, I take a leaf from Elvis Presley’s tough business manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Parker knew he would make mistakes, but he got angry when he made the same mistake twice. Parker had a lot of bad attitudes about business, but this is a good one: It acknowledges that you will make mistakes—a lot of them—but you should always make new mistakes, not keep repeating the old ones.
I market my own products, a task that sometimes takes hours per day. I do the design, packaging, and mailing. I try to keep up on new technology that makes these tasks easier, although I’m not quite as vigilant on that as I should be.
I maintain my own equipment—and I’m realistic about what I need. I need two computers—one for my internet work and one for my writing. The internet computer has to be able to process a lot of material rapidly. The writing computer can be little more than a glorified typewriter. I need a printer, a cell phone, and an internet connection. I need to see a lot of movies, read a lot of books, and watch a lot of television. I try to keep up with the recording, gaming, and comics industries as best I can. Why do I do this? Because I work in the entertainment industry, and I need to keep up on what’s going on within it.
I know what my actual product is. That may sound silly, but many first-time business owners often don’t realize what their business actually is. Writers, for example, are particularly bad about this. Many writers don’t know what they sell (and sales are the heart of this business). Writers don’t sell stories. They don’t sell manuscripts. They sell (or more accurately license) portions of their copyright. Most people in the entertainment industry work that way. So I monitor legal sites, reading articles on copyright, and am constantly reading about court cases and lawsuits involving copyright.
People who sell things like jewelry gain other areas of expertise. They learn about gems (how to tell real from fake) or the differences between gold and gold leaf. At our casual lunch one Sunday, two jewelry makers discussed various beads (while I snoozed) because one type was cheaper and worked better than another.
You have to become an expert in your field. Not just in the production of the material, but in all aspects of the business.
I probably spend twelve hours of my day (conservatively) doing the things I need to do to run my business. Of those twelve hours, I actually spend four to six—one third to one half—doing what I love. What I love to do is put new words on the page. (Or, as my husband says, make things up.) The rest of the time is about money management, marketing, research, and continuing education.
If your idea of fulltime freelancing means spending all your time doing exactly what you love, with a lot of time off and someone else to handle “the business” (whoever that someone else might be—from an accountant to a lawyer to an agent), then you should probably keep your day job.
Successful freelancers by necessity must understand how to run a business. They have to know how to manage money, time, and themselves. All of this can be learned, and most of us learned it while we freelanced—through a lot of trial and error.
However, if the very idea of handling everything from paying the light bill to shilling your own product gives you the willies, then don’t become a fulltime freelancer. Do what you love part time and keep your day job. You’ll be happier—much happier.
So how do I describe my job? I am my own boss—with all the ups and downs that entails. I am responsible for the good and the bad in my business, for the successes and the failures.
And, honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Essay #2:
When I started the Guide on my website, I promised myself that I would answer readers’ questions. The first question I got came from Dave Goodwin:
I’m about to move into a new home, my first place with enough space for a dedicated office. Since creating the proper setting is the first step of any project, would you mind starting with your advice on setting up a proper workspace? I could be the first real world test for your theories.
This is a tougher question than it initially seems to be. I want this Guide to work for all types of freelancers from plumbers to writers. Since I’ve owned or been a part of four retail businesses, and started two other businesses (not counting my own professional writing), I can help with more traditional businesses as well.
Workspace Outside of the Home
Recently, I met a contractor who now buys and sells distressed properties. He sat at a booth in our local Thai restaurant, phone in one hand, printouts of retail listings spread across the table, and a legal pad at his side. His laptop, closed, rested on the booth beside him.
He had stopped for lunch in the middle of a very busy day. He made calls, talked to potential clients, and scanned properties while waiting for his Pad Thai. After the food arrived, the restaurant’s owner asked about the value of some property he had seen.
This question led to more questions, which led to a discussion involving me and my husband Dean. We learned a lot about the contractor’s new business. He spent his days examining properties on 100-mile stretch of the Oregon Coast.
He had three workspaces: his car, his home office, and wherever he found himself. Fortunately, in the 21st century, we can take the important parts of our office with us. The contractor illustrates my hesitation in tackling this topic. Workspace is what you need, when and where you need it. Workspace varies from profession to profession.
Pam, a housecleaner who recently retired, came to her clients. She carried her equipment in her truck and billed the clients who required a formal written statement from her dining room table.
Thomas, a gardener, also comes to his clients. He has two trucks, an equipment shed, and a room in his house for the bookwork. Last month, he informed me that he had just learned how to operate a computer. Now his statements, which had been typewritten and minimal (Thomas does not like being indoors), have a modern structure, with a place for the current amount, past due amounts, and balance forwards. His estimate form can be customized. The new computer also enabled him to get rid of his fax machine because he has finally learned the joys of e-mail.
Sue, who owns a collectibles store, works at the shop from 10 to 6. While the entire store is her workspace, she now has a dedicated area for eBay. On one desk, she has a computer and printer. Behind that, she has a flat table so that she can ship items without bending over too much or reaching up too high.
Unlike most workspaces of the self-employed, Sue’s workspace provides no real privacy. She doesn’t dare hide from the walk-in customers who might buy something from her shop. Her computer setup also houses a security monitor system so that she can watch customers even if she is momentarily unable to leave her desk.
These outside-the-home workspaces have some similarities and many differences. The main similarity is that they suit the owner’s business. Pam, who rarely billed her clients since she got paid as she finished the day’s work, didn’t have a computer or a home office. She didn’t need one.
Thomas needs the home office to keep track of all of his (hated) paperwork. Eventually, he hopes to hire an assistant to help him with that part of his job, so he has designed the workspace with the future assistant in mind.
Sue doesn’t work at home. Her business has retail customers who walk through the brick-and-mortar store and retail customers who buy from her on-line. She has to accommodate both—and keep an eye on the inventory during business hours.