What The Future Holds for Freelancers and What To Do About it!

We live in a wonderful era. Never has it been more accepted or as easy to become a work-for-yourself, freelancing, creative individual. We have opportunities that our parents and grandparents never had… to be able to work on some little machine from the comfort of our own homes and make as much or as little money as we are willing to work for. We don’t all wake up at 6:00AM, put on a suit or uniform and run out the door to meet the treacherous mundane tasks of the day. We are responsible for our own growth, our own wealth, and our own schedules. We run our own small businesses and we take greater care of our own personal lives (or at least we try to!). We are the no-boss, no-management, work at home generation… but will what we do today still be around tomorrow?

Remember when desktop publishing took more talent then just illustration? Remember the times before CSS/XHTML when we were limited to tables and had to be concerned about dial up modems? Remember when learning to program anything worth while took an entire library of books? Things are getting easier as new technologies, new programs, and new languages arrive. How long will it be until the average joe can create his own website that rivals those of top design agencies today? The future is coming… what do you plan to do about it?

Quit Freelancing!!!

No, I don’t mean right now… what I do mean is plan to quit freelancing in the future. In fact, make it a goal of yours to be able to quit freelancing all together and when you finally get there, consider yourself successful! What I’m getting it here is to not accept freelancing as your last career. Don’t expect to be making websites or logos when your 55 basically. Instead use freelancing as a stepping stone into something greater. Even if you become to most successful freelancer in the world, you don’t compare to the most successful business owner in the world. That’s right, use freelancing as a learning experience into the wide world of business ownership.

What freelancing teaches us is how to manage our time, ourselves, and our clients. These are all things that don’t get taught in business school and only come with experience. Freelancing is actually one of the greatest teachers of these subjects and as we progress in learning them, we can take them into bigger arenas. The greatest lesson we learn as designers, writers, and programmers is problem solving. And guess what? Problem solving is portable.

Dump Your Clients!!!

Who needs ‘em?! To be able to move from freelancing into business ownership, skip the client process! Instead create a product or service! Many freelancers know how to do this for their clients but we rarely seem to realize that we should be doing this for ourselves as well. How does automated income sound? No more client e-mails, phone calls, and deadlines! Sounds like a dream doesn’t it?

The easiest route to business ownership and abandoning our clients ball and chain is to use your skills to create your own product, service, and/or business. If you have absolutely no ideas on what this may be… do something your already experienced in, freelancing!!!

You know the process by now so why do all the work yourself? Create your own design agency or what-have-you. Contract out all the jobs and stay behind the scenes, gathering work, splitting it up, sending it out, and taking your check to the bank. Don’t worry about staying up all night working your butt off to meet that deadline, hire someone else to do it for you! You handle bringing in the work and managing the workers/contractors and they handle the hard stuff. It can be a win-win situation and a great chance to grow a real business and leave freelancing behind!

Get Educated!

If you’re going to take on the world of business, why not get educated? You don’t have to have an MBA or even graduate college (look at Bill or Steve) but you do have to have some knowledge in the area. A great place to start is the personal MBA website. While it isn’t going to get you that diploma, it is going to help you become well rounded and give you a lot of insight into the world of business and what you may be able to accomplish.

Here’s a litle hint: Buy all the books used and as cheaply as possible. Instead of spending $1,200 on the whole set, I got most of the books for under $3 by going used.

Jump Off a Cliff…

If you feel you’re ready to advance from freelancing into real world business ownership… go a head and take that leap. It’s true that most start ups and most new businesses fail… but they don’t tell you that after you’ve failed once or twice, that the rate of success is greatly increased. Bad experiences teaches us more than good ones do so don’t take failure as the end of the road. You can also (if you have the time) do it on the side… and if all else somehow fails you can always go back to freelancing! It’s certainly not a bad way to live