I don’t know how others do it – most of successful contractors won’t tell you the truth, they’ll tell you a story that goes along with a public idea of how “it should be”. Those who didn’t succeed won’t tell you the truth either – mostly because they don’t talk about the freelancing past or can’t face the truth of their failings and blame superior forces. All I can tell you is how I did it.
As a child I had an inclination for giving things a go. My first entrepreneurial experience was at the age of four. I was selling a leave that felt off the tree to people passing by the block of flats where we lived in Moscow. My price was one rouble and a neighbour’s kid offered to pay 50 kopeikas (half the price) I agreed and took the money. Well, nearly – my mother stopped me at the last moment – private business was not allowed in the 70s Moscow… We will never know what a retail empire died there on the spot.
I didn’t know what was going on until I was deep in it. Four month into my first project I realised that what I was doing was that self-employed freelancing contract thing… And looking back I’ve done pretty well, though most of the time in a completely reversed way to the common sense advice of freelancing sites!
It started in tears…in a lot of tears – I was quitting my job at a world-known bank because I could not get along with my manager and it felt like I will never ever, ever get another job… ever! I didn’t have a new job lined up; the only one I’ve applied for after handing in my notice was given to an internal candidate.
Yes, it was a very pleasant sunny April month that year but a vacation is only a vacation if it has a pre-determined end date. Anything else is not relaxing at all… not for me at least.
I was three days unemployed by the time I decided to check my e-mail box. There was an email from one of the job boards I’ve subscribed to. I never saw anything of any use for me there before as it was quite a “techie” site and I refused to go back to my SAP past! This time around there was an agency looking for a contractor to write a training strategy for an implementation in one of the Big 4s for three months. I’ve submitted my CV and went shopping. Within ten minutes my telephone rung and an agent on the other end wanted to know how much I would charge per day.
Now, when you are preparing to become a freelancer you probably will visit all the clever websites and use calculators to estimate how much you should charge, you may read all sorts of advice on how to determine your rate – good on you! I’ve had no clue!
All I could say was “I don’t know – it’s your lucky day – you tell me how much you want to earn selling me to your client”. Five minutes later I new my market rate, and it was good… very good indeed.
The rest was easy and exciting! I was told to set up my own company so I spent a day contemplating about the name and remembering my inclination to branch out into different areas decided to give it a nothing meaning name, so I “can sell onions under the same name if I wish” was my justification.
I had one really big advantage that made all the difference – my management consulting past with one of the Big 4s. The client interview, my settling in into a project team full of strangers with a strong corporate culture was nothing unusual, it actually felt quite familiar and reassuring.
The biggest drawback I’ve experienced from the very beginning was my professional loneliness … No trusted colleagues in the back office, no data base full of someone else’s knowledge to fall back onto… Whatever the client asked for had to come from my own experience, from my own hard drive and it had to be fast.
I spent some time creating my own web presence (that never has seen the world though) because I did not want to be a “contractor” – I did not want to be a body that is being passed on from client to client, someone who gets exploited to the maximum for the knowledge one has without any re-investment to build up more skills (it took a while to understand that part of my daily rate was to cover any courses I would’ve chosen to take).
Slowly I’ve learned to enjoy being a contractor with an agency. It felt so familiar to my consulting past, just with more money and less supervision. All I had to do was to issue an invoice on a weekly base – believe you me, it’s still the best part of the week, those sweet minutes of printing and signing!
Well, everything must come to an end, and so I am finishing my first contract in a week’s time. After nearly two years I am leaving my client for good … I am about to become a mom.
And you know what’s the best thing is? I’ve earned enough money to keep me home for the next ten months so that I can come up and implement a new idea that will earn enough for me and my little family; a smart enough idea to allow me working from home and enjoying the undivided responsibility that comes with any form of self-employment…
Worldwide freelance projects (from IT to transalation)
UK Contractor’s site that I used
UK Contractor’s market trends
Wealth of information for new contractors in UK
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