How to freelance as a web designer

Key Takeaways

if you're looking to freelance as a web designer this video has everything that you need over 20 years of experience combined into a single video my name is Ron Sega and I've been freelancing as a designer over the last nine years I've been sharing and documenting my process as I've built my freelance business to over $300,000 a year and sharing thousands of videos with all of my insights in terms of how to find clients how to raise your prices how to negotiate how to create a competitive Advantage everything that you need to succeed as a freelance designer we took the best beats and put them in this video you can go ahead and check out the title chapters and skim around if you want to jump into the chapter that's most appropriate for you right now but I'm sure that if you watch everything and you'll take advice on what you see in this video you will see results with that said let's get started I want to share with you what I would do if I was just starting out has zero experience portfolio nothing no connection nothing and I want to get my first paying client this weekend here's what I'm going to do so first step you're going to need a little bit of work examples no look note I'm not saying you need a portfolio website and you need this and you need this you just need a few maybe four to five goodlooking images of designs that you can that you have created to entice people to show them that you can actually create something so take a few hours this weekend and just do some design exercises you know take like a a website and do a redesign for the hero section or design a book cover that you love or design an album cover for an artist that you like just do like four to five good-look images ideally in kind of subjects that you would like to design for but just create a bunch of nice looking images that is Step number one now take the here's step number two take these four to five good-look images that you have created and post them on Facebook this is exactly what I would do I would post them on Facebook and I would create something like this I would write this weekend only I'm doing a raffle or a lottery and I am suggesting my Design Services for one client for free of charge and I'm willing to design anything that you do I'm donating my time back to the community to the people that I love and I want to donate my time I will redesign your website or your logo or something like this the only thing I am asking for is something like let's say $200 just to show that you are uh invested and interested in this this kind of like uh you know uh seriousness feed just to show that you're actually committed to doing the work together I'm doing work that is valued by you know any other company that you would work with would probably charge you thousands of dollars for this kind of work I will do it for $200 because I am volunteering my time here now this does few things first of all the context is this goes out if you're posting this on your Facebook or something like this to your network of people who already know you and like you and trust you so this is your family people who you went to school with people within your community so these are people who already know who you are now you've enticed them with both some nice looking images so you have proven that you can create some good-look stuff and then you're also giving them an opportunity a once in a-lifetime Opportunity because they feel like they're getting a chance to win something for a huge huge discount now this will do two things this will give you a first working experience with a client who is paying you yes they're only paying $200 $300 but that is still great because it will still create the relationship of a client who is paying something even if they're hugely undervaluing you know your work but they're still paying you and you still have this client designer relationship you will hopefully do work for them and they will hopefully be very happy with it now for you as a designer if even if this is your first client it's going to be rather easy to overd deliver on work valued $200 $300 so that means you're going to provide them with more value than what they paid for which means they're hopefully going to be happy with your work and that's going to create a virtuous cycle because they're going to show this work to other people and they say I I had a really great time working with this person I had a great experience here's what I got in return you in return got the confidence that you can actually do work for people and get paid for it so you will now have the confidence to try to get the next client to even charge more money and deliver better work so a lot of designers don't have a portfolio up and if you don't have a portfolio up that's basically one there's probably one of two reasons that's happening one you've got some works but you're just like you're not sure how to design your portfolio you're not sure about the platform you're you're just you never got to it if that's the case there's just no excuse look there's so many templates today platforms free stuff paid stuff and even though if you've been watching my channel I always talk about you know webflow and doing custom stuff but come on if you don't have anything let not web flow the fact that you don't know web flow or you don't know development be an excuse just go and do something with a template you can always improve it later on so just no excuses go and do something if you don't have works that's where you have to actually do some work before you can put it in a portfolio right if you don't have a work that's where you need to focus on you need to do some work and that work can be for yourself for pro bono what I would do today there's a lot of ways to approach this right you want to demonstrate and you want to demonstrate that you can solve problems using design one way to do this is you can go into websites that would give you kind of fake client briefs and we'll link a few of them in the description below that kind of gives you the experience of working on a real brief and not just doing kind of a a Spotify redesign which is I feel like it doesn't really demonstrate how you would solve a problem from scratch right so one thing is you can go and do these kind of demos uh project for fake clients that being said if I would have to do it today I would probably not just make a fake project I would actually try to help someone already with working and even if they don't pay me even the if this is um pro bono I would frame it as if I want to help you I believe in you I'm excited about what you're doing right now so that can be a local business where you're working that's struggling right now because of yeah it's 2020 everybody's struggling that can be a nonprofit that you look up to and you you're you can tell them hey I'm looking to volunteer I'm looking to do some project and help you um by by doing this project for you or you can just do something and then gift it for somebody but I feel like by doing this for an actual client you would not only benefit from working on a real problem but you also get this relationship that's build up by actually showing people that you can do something without taking their money um that those people might either hire you later on or maybe recommend you all check out this great designer he did this for me for free and not for free in terms of he's cheap or he's willing to work for free but just because he's passionate and he chose to do it for free there's few different different kinds of free there's free where your clients doesn't want to pay you that's because of them and they don't value design and there's free because you're passionate and you want to do something for other people and that's why you're not charging them this is your decision versus their decision and if you do that kind of free work I think you can get design experience and build a relationship and improve the World by helping businesses with your skills so I think that's the Fantastic way do one two three you don't need more than one two three for Max and then you can put up your portfolio and then you're set up to finding really starting finding clients charging for it and kickstarting your freelance career the way that I found clients usually by creating relationships getting referrals you know going to events but I came to understand after people asking me this over and over again even after I've shared what worked for me that sometimes what works for people is different for different people and so to I want to give you a different perspective on all the different possibilities for you to find clients and help you find the relevant one for yourself so as I've said what worked for me personally is creating relationship with people and referrals and that's why in this channel I talked a lot about creating relationship networking making friends that kind of stuff however from my experience and meeting with other successful designers I know that for other people they have been able to find amazing amazing clients and build a very successful career in completely different channels so the first thing I want to do here with you is cover all the different possibilities that you have and then we'll talk about how to understand what will work for you so let's just cover them pretty quickly what are all the possible channels for you to find clients so the first one as I said is getting referral from people that you know from past clients from friends family and so forth the second one is that you'll be able to if you create content on blogs people might search for for that content specifically and through creating content and SEO people will come to know you and understand you and then maybe they want to work with you so for example if you're looking to work with people in the music industry if you will work a lot of articles about let's say um reviews of Music covered designs if you'll write a lot of articles about this and some musician might Google how to best design my new album they might reach your content learn to like you learn to trust you and then reach out for you for a project so that creating content in a blog form and then using search as a way for people to find you is something that can work YouTube you're on YouTube right now watching my video you might be a potential client you will see how I work how I think the kind of work that um I'm doing and you might reach out to me from my experience I did get a lot of um proposals or relevant clients come to me ex actually not super relevant clients reach out to me because of my YouTube channel but honestly I didn't start my YouTube channel to find clients just to share my learnings with other designers so my specific YouTube Journey has not been able to uh I mean wasn't oriented at finding clients but my friends AJ and smart who runs you know a design agency they've opened up their YouTube channel strategically for attracting clients they're talking a lot about the design Sprints and then everybody who end up looking clients who are looking to work with somebody to facilitate a design Sprint found them on YouTube and they got as far as I know a lot of their clients from YouTube so YouTube might work for different people dribble you know a lot of people open up dribble accounts and dribble has a search function so somebody might look for I'm I'm based in Boston so I'm looking for another designer who is based in Boston let's see who's trending let's see who's the best in Boston they might search for you know the specific topics uax web design whatever they might find you and off dribble and they might even hire you through dribble so dribble and actually behance which is pretty similar because behance also has some kind of a search mechanism those can be channels for you by opening up a website there a portfolio there you can find clients LinkedIn LinkedIn is now at the moment 2019 super super hot I mean I know a lot of people who are finding most of their clients off LinkedIn Again by creating content by creating relationship by being uh in inside groups they might find clients so again this is a focused on this is a social network that is focused on creating business relationship so obviously most of your clients are there if they are business owners or that kind of stuff they might be on LinkedIn another one going to events that's kind of similar to referrals but it's also a way to go and meet potential clients um at you know conferences that are relevant to their topic so if I'm working in with clients in the startup industry I go to Startup events and I meet people you know we have a drink we talk what do you do what do I do create relationship they ended up hiring me so events is another way of meeting clients C emails you know you might do a research if I want to work with a restaurant I'll look at a restaurant that I want to build their website I might reach out to them send them some kind of a case study about how I can improve their website create a relationship and demonstrate my expertise that way and then that might lead into a paying project I know I'm going super super fast on this but I just want to cover give you kind of an overview of what's possible the third the next one is side project so a lot of designers um in particular do things that they enjoy on themsel for themselves and they share it perhaps on social media and then potential clients might look for that so I've met this amazing um Australian girl honestly I forgot her name but she's amazing with typography um and she just did typography graphy back home like this crazy illustration with type shared it on social media on Instagram a lot of people like this now she's like all over the world painting walls and doing like work for high-profile clients just because she did what she's passionate about and shared it not as client work but just as side project on her own social network so that's also a thing by the way I did not mention social networks here actually such as Instagram but Instagram you might say that it's another Channel kind of like dri or behs where you might put your um portfolio on there and people might find you through there and DM you and and create a relationship with you um another one is using paid ads so another thing that you might want to do is create paid ads let's say on Facebook where you're targeting the specific client that you want to address and you can create I've seen some people that are creating some kind of a case study funnels where you the client will actually see an ad for a case study let's say you're designing website so again restaurant's owner you're targeting restaurant's owner and then they're going to click on a video that showcases how you have designed a website or a brand for a different restaurant's owner a restaurant owner that will build a trust and that will lead for them to contact you at the end so kind of a funnel like this where you're reaching them through ads and the last one I feel like I'm really running them really fast and though but but it's still worth 7 Minutes in so there's a lot to cover here the last one is freelancing website such as upwork freelancer.com or all those type of stuff I know they're they're being kind of bashed down as not a good place to find clients but I do know personally people who are very very successful on using those um channels and they're still managing to be kind of Premium sellers on these platforms so if you're really really good and you've kind of won this channel if you're on upw work and you've got gazillions of good reviews you can put your prices higher and you can make a very very nice you know pay and compensation if you've kind of won this specific Channel okay now that we know it's kind of overwhelming oh my god do I need to actually do all of these things which one is the right one for me so the truth is you're probably if you're just starting out you're probably not going to be able to tell okay and I know that again I'm sharing all the time what I'm doing and what works for me but you have to be careful when you listen to me in general when you're listening to people giving advice you always have to be careful because the people who are giving advice me included are always biased to share what worked for them and that's not what works for everybody else you really need to understand yourself so my advice for you would be to if you're just starting out you need to dabble into few things and see what works for you because each each one of these Channel requires different skills requires different mentality so for example if you want to succeed at referrals and going to events for example you need to be kind of a a people person right you need to love to to network and to meet with people and step outside what a lot of people have kind of a outside their comfort zone because they don't like going and socializing with other people but that's what it takes to win that specific game if you want to succeed on dribble for example and you can you have to know the platform because dribble is a totally different play you have to learn how to gain followers how to get in interact with the community and that's how you kind of build build your your yourself on that platform it requires totally different skills so here's what I suggest I suggest before you get started you ask yourself a few question that will help you understand where you should focus yourself okay so the first thing that you want to ask yourself is what does it take to win with this specific Channel and as I've mentioned each of them has kind of a different skills each of them is a different play and you have to ask yourself do I want to keep doing that thing long term will I actually enjoy doing this because you know to to win with ads for example you have to be really in a way pushy and salesy and gain attention be kind of dramatic and and maybe you're not the kind of person that wants to be that way right maybe it's just not for you so you have to understand first of all what works in this channel you can't say Okay I want to win at a dribble right but you don't know how to do these maybe beautiful composition you don't know how to interact with the community you don't know how to gain followers because by gaining followers you gain kind of trust within the platform and that's probably what people are going to look for so you really need to digest do your research in a way um and actually I think that you can actually Google something like what does it take to to grow on dball for example um or how to do successful ads you need to do kind of a research and understand the the core skills of each of these channels and then to understand if you think you're going to enjoy doing it long term some of those things to be honest you probably can't just know without doing right you have to experiment a little bit and it's possible that you'll experiment with different channels in the beginning to see what works um but you also have to consider when you ask yourself am I going to have an edge or because each one of these channels is a competitive channel right A lot of people there's a lot of people who are trying to win on dribble on Instagram on beain there's a huge competition there and you have to think do I have what it takes to win on that platform so I'll go back to my example just because that's how I'm thinking about this this so in terms of referrals and building Network and going to events I have an edge because I live specifically in Tel Aviv Israel where there is a very big tech industry and startup communities and so I'm very close by I can just walk 10 minutes to an event right now where most of the people in the world don't have access because it's not walking distance for them right so I only have to compete in terms of events and and networking I only have to compete with the people who are around me in t Aviv area and I know that most people feel uncomfortable uh going to events it's out of out of their comfort zone as I said so actually by me being able to do that and loving actually to go outside and meet people I have kind of beat a lot of the competition if I would want to win on dribble that's a completely different game for me okay because I now now I'm competing with designers all over the world so it's a different game however depending on where you are because I know a lot of you are writing to me I don't live in a big city there's no clients nearby or events nearby so that means that you don't have an edge on referrals you might have an edge on something else you know that and you have to think about this and your Edge could be your ability your skill where you are how much you charge all of these things can be an edge for you to win on a specific platform so that's what I want to encourage you to do I want you to encourage you to experiment with multiple things and see what you enjoy doing and what you're starting to gain traction with and obviously all of this to win on a certain Channel takes time takes time to build yourself and so one of the things that after you experiment and you see what you're good at or you're what's working for you I want to encourage you to focus okay and select the one that works and then leave all the rest and double down on that because the way that this channel works is once somebody's the ones who are at the top get most of the work right so the people who are on upw work and have the amazing reviews okay they can charge $200 an hour you know the the 1% of Freelancers on upwork that have all these good reviews Amazing reviews they can have they can char $200 an hour where while the rest of the people on upwork are charging whatever $15 an hour so the the people who win take the most of the pot the people who have you know 40,000 followers on dribble are going to get most of the offers on dribble so you and if you try to do everything if you're trying to be everywhere try to be on LinkedIn and on Instagram and maintain this and this and that and a Blog and a YouTube you're just going to overwhelm yourself and you're going to be stay very small on all channels and most probably you're not going to get amazing leads cuz you're not going to win any specific channel so what I encourage you is experiment at the beginning because you're not going to know what's working you're not going to know what you enjoy doing and what it takes to win so you need to explore a little bit when you're starting out but when something is working don't dilute your efforts by trying to win everywhere and be everywhere I you know I don't have a a LinkedIn profile my portfolio has been very much neglected over the past two years I basically don't do anything besides develop relationship because that's what's working for me and all the rest of the things are you know kind of a waste of time for me just quick note that everything that you're seeing right now is just the tip of the iceberg and we have fullon courses to help you build your career as a freelance web designer so please check the links below this video if you want to go in depth if you want to work with our mentors and take your freelance business seriously now let's get back to it first thing I want to cover here is understanding the actual framework you know the high level of what we're trying to do so that we can put the Practical things actually in context so the first thing you know when people hire other people or buy stuff they usually do it because there's three things that are going right and those three things is they know these thing they they know that this product or service or person exists otherwise obviously they can't hire if they don't know that that they can hire this person um they like this person right they they think it's going to be great to work with them and then they trust that this person is actually capable of doing the work and solving their problems so everything that we're going to say here we're going to think about these three things no like trust and how to build how to build a situation where a lot of people know about us or at least the right people know about us us they like us and they actually trust us and again assuming that you're just starting out you probably don't have too much going on in these areas right no you don't have a big brand yet not a lot of people know about you so this is your situation now another kind of thing that I want you to think about is you need to have some kind of an advantage some kind of a competitive advantage and you might say yeah I'm just starting out I have zero competitive Advantage right I don't have a big portfolio I'm not that amazing yet like why would anybody hire me and I I get it um and you're probably somewhat right you don't have a huge Advantage however everybody has somewhat of an advantage and that's what I want to talk about in this episode what is your advantage when you're just starting out and how you can carve out that Advantage now the first thing that is Advantage is I would try to think about it this way where can I play that I in a situation where I have almost zero competition right and that is just framing the question that way can lead up to a lot of interesting ideas so the first place where you have a big Advantage is your friends and family why because you know they know you right and they probably know that you've now gotten into design and you want to do this freelancing thing and these people like you obviously because they are your friends and family and they trust you because you've already spent years on related to design or freelancing building a relationship with them and they trust you so with these people with this very very small circle of people you already have those three things no like and trust and that's why you will find out that most people who have started out me included but almost everybody around started out doing freelance or projects or actually getting paid by the closest circle of friends and family because there they have an advantage right even if imagine let's take a radical example right but my mother right if my mother would have to choose between me doing a project for her or somebody else who might be very famous might be very very good um she would probably still give the project to me just because she likes me so much and trust me she wants to see me succeed now this is a radical example but it is the way that it works some people within your very very closed circle of network and that can be friends and family that can be people that went to school with you that can be people within your community your church whatever those people like you and trust you so much and want to see you succeed that they would give you an advantage even over somebody with a better portfolio more famous more capable or something like that so with this small circle you have an advantage that's why I do suggest you start off looking for projects over there and you do that by first just letting people know that you are looking for doing these kinds of projects I want to help you build a website I want to help you design this logo you let them know that this is what you're doing and those people are going to have your back and try to give you uh project now if you get this bowl rolling that will help you build a portfolio build the confidence build an expertise if you if they have a good you know experience with you they're going to recommend you to other friends and then through this recommendation the trust is going to roll over to people in in in an extended Circle and that's going to grow your network and for most people that's actually how they get the ball rolling okay so that is kind of like the first super super basic which is what again a lot of people maybe even most people do to get started now I would still try to think about what other things can I have an advantage on and the next thing that I want to share with you is try to be as local as possible and what do I mean by that a lot of people today especially if they're not coming from a hot market like I'm living on you know in the US in a big city uh if they're living in a rural area they they one of the most common things I will hear is I want to work for Global International clients around the world because perhaps I'll be better paid and so forth um and it's more interesting that being said everybody is competing for these cool hyping amazing projects and as I said if you're just starting out you want to look for the things where you have some competitive advantage and when you look in your local market and a local market can be your city your town again your community or something like that that's when you have an advantage why because you are actually there you can actually go down the street to this restaurant or this local business meet these people face to face shake their hand and offer to help them and in that local area there's way way way way less competition than if you just go on the internet and you know there's everybody's on there right so the easy thing would be just like oh I you know let me just email a random person from the other side of the world but you can assume that if you can email that random person around the world gazillion of other people are going to do that as well but if you're the only one who can walk down the street and shake the hand of somebody even though it might feel a little less comfortable to you you have a huge Advantage because there's literally not that many people who can watch walk down the streets and do that now of course it doesn't have to be going down the streets uh and shaking hands but what I have been seeing for example we you know we teach a lot of people how to use web flow and what I have been seeing is that people who try to do Local web flow services within their region uh just because right now there's not too many people who can offer building websites with web flow so the market is already limited and if you're trying to um you know limit I'm based let's say in Tel Israel so if I offer uh webflow services to clients within Tel there's the market or the competition that I have within this city or region is way way way less uh smaller and you can be you can assume and that's I think it's an accurate assumption that most clients would rather work with people who are in within their vinity who can perhaps come into their office and right this is preco let's say right now Every Body Works remotely anyway but it's still worthwhile that you are in the same city or in the same time zone speaking the same language and have the same cultural understanding of what's going on so when you try to focus on a very small or at least uh contained local market you again create yourself a big big Advantage so I'm saying this again because there the the obvious thing or the thing that most people are trying to do is hit up on these huge global Market let me get this San Francisco startup or something like that and I'm just saying yes it's okay you can do that but there's tons and tons and comp of competition there try to think about where can you compete with an advantage and I think that within your local market you'll have a huge Advantage the last thing that I can say about again creating some kind of advantage for you is how can you be part of small groups that are also contained right that there's uh kind of a again limited number of people competing within that uh a great example that I have been seeing again with with people who are doing webflow right now is the uh webflow experts program because the program is very very limited people who apply not a lot of people get in but the people who are um in this program because it's you know it's kind of a database of of of pretty small number of people who are in this database um everybody who's on there basically Al you know there's more demand than Supply within this group and most people are getting tons and tons of lead but this is just one example and you can again do that either locally but again joining groups like um local designer chapters um or or even communities such as churches being part of a small group where you know that this group is not going to extend anymore and everybody within this closed group knows that this is the service that you're doing again gives you an advantage all right so to sum up what we've been talking about here the overarching strategy of what you're trying to do is you're trying to get people to know you like you and trust you and you want to think about at the first a how can I create an advantage for myself by limiting the number of people that I am competing with when trying to find clients I've been talking about this in a lot of other videos you might have heard me talking about the fact that you should never try to sell websites to your clients because nobody really cares about buying a website all your clients care about is solving their own problems however I don't think I've had the proper framework to explain to you how to talk and how to become expert on these problems but I've just finished reading a book that was actually a very good book it's called a gap selling it's a book about sales I'll put the link in the description below and I highly recommend you read it if you want to become expert on sales however basically the the bottom line in this book is that you know if you want you have to sell uh about solving the problem and talk about the problems but it offered a really interesting framework for understanding the impact of these problems and how to communicate them so I want to share that with you and how I think about web design problems based on that framework and what you'll get in this video is understanding kind of the road map of what the problems are that you need to be become experts on and what are the topics that you need to learn in in order to become experts on and then also how to communicate and talk about these problems with your clients so without further Ado let's jump right into it here's what I'm going to do I'm going to run through all of the problems and then we'll we'll start diving deeper into some of them to give you a framework into how to think about them all right so let's get started here are a lot of the problems that web designer solve for businesses so number one customers can find us online um number two customers don't understand what we do or how we're different number three customers don't trust us number four customers can't buy online from us customers can't book services online customers can't find the right information we don't show up on Google we don't cture enough leads not enough visitors are converting we need to impress potential employees or investors that the website looks bad on mobile we look outdated our website is hard to maintain our website is not compliant with regulation our competitors have better websites we don't look premium enough we're big enough we're innovating enough um our marketing manager need to make an impact our clients feel ashamed when they're showing their their websites to clients prospects and friends so this is quite a big list perhaps it's not exhaustive and different clients in different niches might have other problems that you'll need to discover and definitely not all businesses or not all clients are going to have all all of these problems but this is a pretty big set of problems that most of the people you'll talk about will have them now here's what I want you to do I want you to understand what these problems are what are the causes for these problems how do you solve these problems with design with web design and then how to talk about the problems and their impacts and their root causes with your client so let's let's dive into some of them and and understand basically the framework that um Keenan suggested in the book Gap selling is when you understand these problems you list them up and you create a table that he calls the problem identification Matrix and basically what you have is in row number one you have the problem and then you have the impact on the business and then you have the what I know about the problem here's how the table should look like problem impact on business and then what I know about the problem all right so let's go back into the problems we have and try to work work through some of uh these things and and dissect them in this way so let's go with customers don't trust us why is this actually a problem for the business what's the impact on this business um all right so when customers don't trust you let's say your customer visit your website and then they don't trust you what is the impact why does this matter well it matters because if they're not trusting you they're probably not going to do business with you so the impact on the business is they're not buying from you or they're not contacting you or they're not doing business with you basically means you are either losing money or definitely not making as much money as you'd like to and by the way most of these things most of the problems that I showed you on the list when it's going to be translated into impact on the business just because the goal of businesses is usually to make money then a lot of the impact is going to be these things make you may cause the fact that are impacting your ability to make money or they're making you lose money or they're creating a headache for the owner or whoever is managing the process so when customers don't trust us you're losing money now what do I know about this problem this is where you become an expert on this problem and I'm just going to share with you some of my knowledge about what creates trust in a website right so there's a lot of things first of all how it looks and feel right so we as human being we have a bias right in our mind this is a very well-known psychology effect which in which case we are biased to think that beautiful things are just better right this is how we are wired and this is a very well-known psychology effect and so when we see something that is ugly or not aligned not a good color combination bad fonts all of these things immediately our brain is wired to think this is not trustworthy right because this is bad and the other way around right right if everything is aligned if everything is well taken care of if the images are high quality if the font is high quality if everything is uh set up correctly then we we immediately psychologically even if our customers or your customers your client's CL customers don't understand anything about design they are wired that their brain is wired um to understand that so here it is I'm sharing with you meon the web design expert I'm now sharing with the potential clients my knowled about this problem and I can share with them and I can educate them about the fact that because of this psychological effect um the current website that they have hurt their sale and hurt their trustworthiness and I can back that up with data with research now I can keep talking about the problem of you know trust I can also say that one of the things that causes trust in in general right is what's called social proof meaning if you see other people are have trusted and have used this business as service in the past before that's going to create trust that's why reviews and testimonials and that kind of things help create trust and they're being used all over the place not only in website in sales in general and so I can come up and make the recommendation if we want to increase the trust in your website we can add one of these things like uh you know reviews numbers testimonials all these kind of things so the fact that I am an expert on this specific particular problem of creating trust helps me to educate the client about the problem that they have right now in their business how it's impacting their business they're losing money over it and also what needs to be done in order to solve this problem now when I talk about this even if you know you are now the client and I'm just explaining this to you first of all I'm providing value to you right now by educating you on the problem you might not even know that you have this problem and that you're business might be losing money because it's badly designed because it lacks social proof and so forth and so forth and so just by helping them in educating them I show them that I am an expert and immediately they will say wow this person is smart this person knows about this problem this person knows how to solve this problem I want to work with this uh person to help me solve my problem and we can keep going um let's let's tackle another um another problem customers can't find the right information all right so we can talk about this what is the impact of customers can find the right information well they might be frustrated they might leave the website they might have a bad user experience they might leave a negative review they might be angry they might not purchase from you so the impact on that is as well probably translates into you're going to lose sale you're going to lose your customers you're going to annoy them um and you're missing out what do I know about the problem of can't find the right information well now we can talk about information architecture and how to structure information correctly and the the flow of user experience and how to start and how to tell a story correctly and how to set up proper navigation and how to set up a footer so that all the information is exactly where the user expects it and how we how we can solve that problem of not being able to find the right information so I think you you can start to understand how we become expert how we communicate these problems to the clients and what needs to be done in order to solve these problems now as you can see in just from just the example that I've shared with you already you can see that actually as a web designer you need to become an expert on quite a lot of things right you need to be expert on the visual design right if you understand that choosing the right fonts and colors and stuff like that is going to help build trust you need to become an expert on that if you understand that psychology and how you structure and understanding principles like social proof and things like that are going to help build trust then you need to become an expert on these psychological effects if you understand that structuring the information in the right way is going to make it easier for people to find the right information then you need to become an expert on information architecture so in web design it's actually a very broad field where you need to become an expert on these various different topics um in order to become an expert on solving all of these different problems that we talked about um that we can help our clients solve and this is what I want to encourage you to do first of all that's what we try to do here on flux YouTube channel and in our courses we try to be help you become an expert on solving all of these different problems but I want to encourage you to dive deep into each one of these topics so that you can develop really the expertise that you'll know what you're talking about when you're talking to your clients and helping them solve the problems that they we have I want to share kind of an Insight that I had with a conversation of one of our students who we were talking and and she mentioned that she's working on a project with her client but she calculated her hourly rate for the project that she was working on and she understood that actually at the end of the day she's not making a lot or even enough money per hour um to make this project worthwhile so U let me share the numbers just so that you you can wrap your head around it so basically she was making a website project and she was charging $4,000 for it but she was calculating how long she has been working and about to work on this project and realized this project is about 200 hours of work all included and so that came out mathematically pretty simple you divide this by this to understanding that she's making $20 per hour and uh that wasn't that wasn't really what she was looking for that wasn't really enough for her so looking at this looking at the plan and looking at her past kind of like performance or how long things took her to create this type of website she came to me and she said Ron I have to work faster I mean I have to I have to like increase my speed at least two times because if I'll work 100 hours then that will make my effective hourly rate at around 400 uh $40 and that's more like where I'd like to be so how do I work faster how do I you know what can we remove here or what can we do to work faster and I was looking at her plan and to be honest that plan was pretty solid that was actually a really nice plan that included strategy included a story brand Workshop including all of the wireframes and everything that is required to make a really nice website now I always encourage people to work faster and I'm telling you people here how working with web flow can make your process faster and I'm always into uh helping you work faster because at the end of the day just like she understood if you work faster that translates into more money per hour but looking at her like what she showed me I was like I think this is a really good Pace I think for what you're trying to deliver this is actually pretty good um so she was like okay so what do I do I'm stuck this is not good enough and I told her no that's actually not true and you actually have two more levers that you can actually use when you know negotiating your price for the project to make sure that you're making the hourly rate that you want so let's talk about them there's actually three solutions to solve this the first one which she recognized off the bat is working less hours by working faster and this is ideally you want to do this however at at a certain point you're reaching a point where if you'll work faster you'll probably reduce the quality of the work that you're doing so you can't cut corners or you can't work faster forever there's a limit to that so what are the other two options well the other two option is one you can work Less hours by actually reducing the scope of the project so assuming that the client only has this budget and they're going to pay four uh $4,000 for this website now you can say okay with this price to be honest we can't do everything that we wanted off the bet so let's make decisions about how to simplify this project there are some things that we can remove perhaps we can remove this story brand work shop to to develop your story perhaps we can move this uh page with tons of interactivity or perhaps we can remove all of ideas for animations or something like this to to simplify uh the project or some some other complexity through the website uh perhaps we can turn this into a onepage or instead of a 10 page website still reach the same you know the same business goals that you have but it's going to be easier to maintain so one thing that you can do is negotiate the scope of the project the other thing that you can do and it sounds obvious but it's not obvious to a lot of people is you can just charge more money for the same project obviously if she would charge double and still work 200 hours on it her hourly rate would um would double as well now this is this is where a lot of people kind of like they have this frame of reference where no they will probably only pay this much but I'm telling you I looked at her kind of like her process and what she was about to do for them and on honestly that's exactly what I would do and I would charge at least $110,000 for the same kind of work so it's just kind of your frame of mind and understanding as we said the let's let's call it the quality that people get for 200 hours of a professional designers that's the standard that she wanted to provide that's her quality standard and I know that for this quality standard people can charge a lot more money so and you are the one who puts the the quality in place right you can make you can make the decision of I can do the same you know everything uh that I've promised to them all of the different pages all of the different uh possibilities interactions all of the different things and I'll do this only for $100 because I'll work super super fast and the quality probably is going to be different so you are the one who's choosing what kind of quality um you want to provide how long it's going to take you to provide this and then how much are you going to charge for this so these are are in general the three levers that you can use when negotiating a project and I always want you to remember that when you have a discussion with a client about a project it's not just one project in one price there are multiple element and multiple levers that you can negotiate you can negotiate the price you can negotiate the scope you can negotiate the timeline you can negotiate the payment terms you can negotiate all kinds of you know other help that you're going to get from them maybe they're going to write the content Maybe they're going to do the development there are tons and tons of different leverages or Le levers that you can pull through and you can um it's a creative process honestly pricing a project and coming uh into an agreement that will make your hourly rate effective hourly rate at the end of you working on this project and the client happy is a creative process and I do want you to think about all the different possibilities that you can do and also remember do what my student did and make this estimate of how long are you going to work on the project to understand at the end of the day what's your effective hourly rate is going to be to make sure that you're making as much money as you know you should be doing so I'm currently reading a book really good book by Charlie Munger he's the partner of Warren Buffett but mostly nobody talks about him anyway he said something really interesting in the book which is he's kind of has he has a favorite quote which is basically I wish you would tell me where I'm I'm going to die so that I can not go there ever and basically what he was trying to say with that quote is that a lot of time people are really trying to understand or learn something um like how to succeed but it's sometimes much more easier if you try to learn the opposite of it so how do people fail and then just try to not do the mistakes that everybody else is doing and he says there's nothing more common than people you know losing their business because of very stupid mistakes that tons of people did before them but because they never bothered to learn history or why other people are failing they're doing the same mistake that everybody else is doing so it's very unoriginal and very kind of lazy not to see why other people are failing and try to learn it by yourself and then doing the same mistakes over again so I took some time to think and see around me you know how a lot of my friends a lot of my friends started freelancing and then burned out and closed their business and went back to working fulltime for somebody else and try to realize why that happened so I can share these mistakes with you so that you can avoid them and be successful with your freelance business so let's get started with the five things that you need to do if you want to be a failure as a freelance designer so keep that in mind let's start with number one the number one thing you need to do if you want to fail as a Freelancers is do not have a systematic way to attract client just wait there um and you know trust that somebody might recommend you or a client might call you one day and um everything is going to be all right now even though it might sound funny to you that's basically how most Freelancers work right they they have people coming into them and usually it works so sometimes they have better months sometimes they have weaker months but overall things are okay now they might be nervous on time to time especially in times like right now where with pandemic and recession they might not know what's going to happen next um but the thing is that for most of their history as Freelancers they basically relied on luck and the fact that they had good luck up until now make them confidence that things are going to be okay but as we can see right now not necessarily everything is going to be okay and not necessar as they say in investment past performance does not guarantee you know future performance just the fact that people were reaching out to you previously does not promise that you know you're going to be lucky in the future so what can you do about this how can you avoid this mistake you can start working on channels that can systematically bring in leads for your business as a Freelancers when you're doing active marketing such as producing content or going to events or doing ads or one of the there's actually multiple of different marketing channels that you can do do you know that if you take specific actions you're going to see specific results and that is predictable versus just waiting for things to happen so if you want to fail again just wait for everything to be okay and wait for yourself to be lucky number thing that you can do to fail as a freelancer is don't charge enough for your work and this is another classic mistake that everybody's doing you know I don't want to raise my prices maybe my clients are going to run away and actually you know what I don't even really know what is it what does it mean to charge enough because the thing is most Freelancers never went down and did the calculation of their Break Even rate like how much do I actually need to earn for every hour that I work on every day so that at the end of the month or at the end of the year I'll be able to pay myself to pay for rent to pay for food to pay for all of my debts um they never go down and do this calculation why because it's boring and it's not creative and it's not what I thought freelancing is going to be about so if you want to fail as a freelancer you can keep that ignorant State of Mind where if it's not creative it's not your job to do don't worry about finances and just price whatever you want because you've heard other people might be pricing that or because that's what your clients are willing to pay and well just you'll find out at the end of the month if you're broke or not but this is a sure way of making sure that you'll fail as a freelancer if you want to avoid that as I've mentioned take the time to sit down understand your finances learn how to calculate your break even rate learn how to estimate how much to charge for each project and raise your prices to make sure that at the end of the month you'll have enough to pay yourself now the third thing that you can do if you want to be a failure as as a freelancer is you can treat your clients like like they are your enemies and this is a very very common almost a lot of the Freelancers that I know are doing this and this is very popular you can even see this in all the humor accounts where you know the client is always the evil one and they're always treating the freelancer like crap and so if if you want to fail you can keep that attitude and you can always blame them for everything that goes wrong and you can hate you know going on calls with them or going to their office or doing what they're asking you to do um because at the end of the day you know you're you're in the service business and so they expect for you to give them good service so if you want to fail make sure you're giving them crappy service by not loving to serve them right if you want to avoid that failure change your mindset understand that you are in the service business and so that you need to actually enjoy giving them good service and treating them like kings and queens versus treating them like they are your enemies the fourth thing that you can do if you want to you know fail as a freelancer is never to invest in learning new skills because you know what has been working up until now might keep working and you love doing this and you can see all the great examples like me for example where I invested a lot of time in learning um how to how to develop and build websites using Flash and some of my colleagues stuck to it even when flesh died and they have become um truly irrelevant today so if you want to make sure that you're failing never learn new skills like web flow or new technologies that are coming up stick with what you know stick with freehand stick with quartz Express stick with uh Flash and freehand and what's going on you know 10 years ago what worked for you 10 years ago and don't bother learning what's going on today because you know who loves learning new software right it's it sucks it's not really fun so don't bother with that just keep doing what you did 10 years ago and the last thing that you can do to for sure fail as a freelancer is just don't take care of yourself right keep working 12 hours or 15 hours per day 7 days a week work nights work weekends don't take care of yourself because at the end of the day you know you are your your freelance business biggest asset so if you want to make sure that you burn out and that you can't keep working anymore make sure you work yourself down to the ground and uh yeah you'll you'll burn out for sure there's this is a sure way if you want to burn yourself down as a freelancer just make sure that you work all the time that you work alone that you don't interact with other people and that you basically suffer all day long and of course if you want to avoid that take care of yourself eat properly work out sleep and uh be reasonable assuming the first meeting went well and they wanted to proceed with you you've probably sent a proposal with your price by now now we're not talking about proposals this week just because I want to stay in the context of sales and we're going to talk about proposals later on when we're talking about the whole operations but let's say that you've sent them a proposal now they're probably in most cases negotiate sometimes they're just going to say yes and sign it and that's amazing but in most cases they're going to negotiate so let's talk about how are you going to do that success sucessfully first of all it's important to have the right mindset when negotiating and the mindset is that everybody needs to win okay it because the reason that I say this is when I was starting out I thought that I need to get what I wanted I had the notion of I gave them a good price and I wrote a fair proposals and if they're going to negotiate with me they're kind of disrespecting me and they are not giving me what I want and I needed to win meaning get what I want and I wasn't willing to give them anything back and that kind of creates a situation where they can't feel like they won they got what they wanted and so you need to be in the State of Mind of how are we're going to find a way where both of us can win and I want to help you think about that so the basically here's how you think about it of course for every project there is kind of an acceptable range that you're willing to work with so let's assume from a very cheap price to a very high price you have a range right obviously you'd like to make as much money as possible but you probably have some kind of a minimum uh for the project where if you get less than that it's probably not worth your time you can either probably get another project or do something else but you're not going to do that project for so much um for so little money because it's just unprofitable for you so you have kind of a range to work with now the client themselves also have kind of a range now obviously every client would like to get the work done for a cheaper price because they're a business and they're trying to save money but they have kind of a maximum uh point where that they're willing to spend okay they so you have a minimum price point and they have a maximum price point and you never really know that however everything that's in between everything that's overlapping is where a deal can happen and both of you will be happy okay so even if you don't get what you initially wanted if you're not asking for if you're not starting with your minimum point then you can still lower your price and find something that is acceptable for you and the same is true for them even if they're going to pay a little bit more than what they expected so there's a wiggle room here okay and the point here obviously you'll try to maximum you'll try to get to the higher end end of the deal range try to get to the lower end of the deal range and that's kind of the wiggle room of the negotiation that's what's happening right now however both of you want to make sure that there's a deal otherwise you both you know just spent a lot of time um and wasted time and energy and nobody really wants that so you need to assume that they do want to have a deal and that you both want to win and need to win and there's actually probably a lot of wiggle room in between okay so the first key takeaway from from this is that you need to ask for more than you actually want to get or at least a lot more than your minimum price point and again I struggled a lot with this because I thought that the honest thing to do was to start with my minimum price range but that did not allow me to have any Weagle room and the truth is clients do expect to have this game of negotiation because just just how business runs okay it's not because they're disrespecting me it's because they have the assumptions which is most of the time correct that people are actually charging more than their minimum price okay so then we have this dance of negotiation but if you don't play this game if you start out by pricing your minimum right price range you don't have the range to play but you can't really tell them that right because you can't say oh I've started with my they won't believe you because assume that you act like everybody else and so you do need to um play this game and I'm going to share some tactics about how you can play this game better so that you can win and get more out of that wiggle room so the first thing is to use odd numbers and by using odd numbers I mean never price your project $1,000 $2,000 $5,000 the reason is when the number is is round and perfect it looks like you know it was just made up okay versus when you say that your price is $ 4,753 that number looks more calculated it looks like you went through some kind of a process and calculated the hours and the materials and everything that goes into it and so it looks like you've put in a lot of effort and you didn't just pull out the number from your whatever you know and came up with a number of 5,000 it looks like you put in a lot of work into it and so their clients will be less likely to negotiate hard because they will assume that you've already did some of the calculation yourself and the number is probably reasonable note this is psychological okay so even if you decided that you want to price the project $5,000 it's better if you write $ 4,953 which is you know only like a $50 difference but it will look like you already did they will be less likely to negotiate uh a lower price because it looks like you did a hard work and you didn't just come up with the number of 5,000 the second thing is always you need to show Goodwill and showing Goodwill is me meaning that you want the deal to happen right and you tell them this out front you tell them look I'm excited to work with you I want to make this work let's figure out a way to make both sides happy they need to know that your agenda here is that both sides will win and that's you're not trying to screw them you're not trying to win them over you're not trying to trick them you're here to work together with them even if it takes some work okay you're not avoiding you're not running away you're not lazy you want to work together with them okay because this negotiation takes some time and takes some effort and you need to understand what they want and you need to rethink and maybe you need to change your proposal a little but if you tell them look I'm here because I want to work with you and we'll we'll find a way that gives them confidence that you're in there with them again goes back to what we talked previously on sales you want to help them and you want to be helpful and find a way to make this happen of course you have to find a way that is that works for them but it's also works for your business but it shows that you care and you want to work with them and it gives them um the confidence to keep working with you now when they will ask for a discount and they will a lot of time ask for a discounts you need to Flinch what does it mean flinching okay it means that you need to show them and that's a little bit of a an acting but it's important you need to show that it's painful for you okay so for example let's take an example um let's say I've priced the project at $5,000 okay but actually I can go down into $44,000 and still you know make make a profit so let's say they say you know give us a discount and I can say ah you know that's that's really tough I'm not really sure how I can do this let me think about this you know what I really want to work with you so you know let's find a way to make this happen so at the end of the day I might give them you know what they want but because I Flinch because I show them how painful it is for me that's giving them the psychological feeling that first they did something painful to me and the second is that they're they're winning right because they they want to have the feeling that they they squeezed you to to the end all right that's just business practice not because they're bad people again so you need to show them that it's painful and that that will decrease the likelihood of them keeping to pushing you because they already saw that it's painful so so they don't want to inflict too much pain on you okay they hopefully at this point they like you and they do want to work with you now one thing that is a little bit technical is trying to avoid saying the word no just because it puts you in kind of a negative you know if you're negative they're going to try to be negative and so let's try to have the conversation in a positive way so instead of saying no you can say you know just I don't see how we can make this happen or let's try to think about this um but just trying to work around instead of saying No this is just a little bit technical instead of saying no you can try to think about how to be positive so let's think how can we make this happen Okay let's work together okay so you need a discount so how can we make this discount happen well maybe we can reduce the scope maybe you can give me something in return maybe a uh you know a better payment terms a longer deadline maybe we can remove something from the project so let's work with you you know if you need a discount all right sure we can work this out but how can I still make this and run a profitable business something needs needs to change okay so when you do this you show them again you show them Goodwill and you show them that you want to make this happen and you're basically a little bit moving the responsibility to them now they need to tell you you know what they're giving you in return for you giving them what you want and again we're talking about money but sometimes it's the negotiation is going to be about other things as well such as payment terms and deadlines and um support and number of iterations so all these things are things there are things besides money here that are on the table so again you can say okay I'll give you a discount but instead of three rounds of iterations you're only getting one so everything is you know is a trade-off and you can use these things when you're negotiating now there's a tactic that's called the acquisition audit um I took it from the book I think um never split the difference he's the guy that mentioned the acquisition audit and the acquisition audit the way that it works is basically you start off by saying everything that's that's bad about the situation okay so everything that you know that they're going to say you're going to tell them so look I know that you think that I don't have experience I know that you think that this is very expensive I know that you think that I won't be able to do it on time now you say exactly what you know their fears and concerns are and by doing that they feel like you understand them and that kind of uh dissolve these accusations so I don't know if you remember if you ever saw that Eight Mile movie with Eminem where he has kind of a battle rap with another rapper and you should watch that scene there's kind of a dual of rap and he starts off by the way that he wins is he starts off with I know everything that you're about to say to me you know going to say that I'm whatever that I'm white trash that I'm this and this and that so he started off by saying everything that the other person was about to accuse him with and by doing that he kind of took away their ammunition so you can use this tactic to take away everything that they were about to negotiate around you you say look I do understand that now here's you know here's how we're going to work through this the second thing is if you if you get to an agreement you need to get some kind of a commitment so let's say that they ask you for some discount and let's say a 10% discount and you worked around this so before you say yes to this you should say well if we do this if I give you the 10% discount do we have a deal and you want to hear them say yes because that's basically a commitment and you know that by having getting that commitment that's the last thing that they're going to negotiate for so make sure that you ask them do we have a deal if I do what you're asking me to do now sometimes in the middle of negotiation they will disappear okay you know you sent this they've replied on email maybe you got on a call maybe you need to revise your proposal and sometimes they will disappear and that that stuff happens specifically if they're getting other proposals or if they have other things on their mind or if they need to consult with different people in their business that stuff happens doesn't mean that they don't want to work with you um always assume good intentions but you need to follow up um that kind of is similar to following up if you're reaching out on email so just don't don't feel bad writing them you know not five times a day but if they didn't answer for two more days or something like that you can follow up and say I want to know if we're progressing now as last or if they didn't come back to you what I'm usually saying is I'm saying look I'm right now I'm closing my booking for the upcoming months and I'm not sure whether I should save availability for you that kind of flips the script and they're now feeling like they're about to miss out on something that is scarce I don't have a lot of time and if they're not going to make a decision soon um they're going to miss out on the opportunity of working with me okay so that's kind of The Last Resort if they didn't follow up or if they didn't make a decision now here's the thing and I've mentioned this at the beginning of the whole uh you know videos on sales most designers hate doing this hate this process because it's a process that brings up a little bit of tension and we especially I I know that it's true about me I like to avoid confrontations okay so that's really painful and uncomfortable for me to do this the negotiation and the sales and all of that but because most people are like that because most people feel like you do and I do that means that if you grow this muscle and if you stay with it you're going to win where most people are not going to win most people are not going to do the negotiation most people or they're going to do it by just giving them what whatever they want or they're not going to follow up but if you stay with it even though it's uncomfortable even though it's a little bit painful sometimes you're going to win and that's super important to keep in mind now the last thing is you have to ask for the close Okay and by doing doing that I I mean you need to tell them look you need to sign the proposal and you need to deposit the down payment just sending this to them they need some kind of a call to action okay it's not it's it's nice while you're talking yeah this project here's the price and so forth but then you need to close you need to make sure that we're progressing and you do that with a with a strong call to action you need to tell them what to do next that's also I'm going to show you when we're talking about proposal it needs to be part of the proposal but you need to tell them you need to give them this call to action please sign the proposal and then deposit the down payment and then we can get started and always always always make sure they agree in writing this really helps besides kind of the legal side of things this helps to get the commitment done so whatever they said on the phone just you know make sure that you either have have a signed contract or proposal or at least you have a reply in the email if you send them like so I'm summing up what we talked on the phone the project will go for this and those are the terms and they say yes I agree always get the agreement in writing you can read gazillion books about negotiation and raising your price you can learn how to negotiate with terrorists like the FBI or you can watch gazillion YouTube videos about how to deal with objections and raise your prices but here's the truth when it comes down to the money time when talking to the client none of that is going to work it's all and let me explain why how do I know because it actually happened to me I read all these books I watched all these you know YouTube videos and none of that works let me start off by sharing actually a personal story of how none of that worked for me so very recently uh we're living in this really nice house and we were renting it and a couple of months ago the the homeowner told us that he's not going to renew the list he actually wants to sell the house so we had to come up with uh either we you know buy this house or we you know leave to another house and the truth is we were looking at Alternatives and there's nothing where we live here to to rent or to house there's actually not a lot of Alternatives also we don't want to move into a completely different neighborhoods we have the kids at school so we didn't have a lot of options so we started negotiating and I was trying to play out all the tactics that I learned in all of the books and I read a lot of books about negotiation I've talked a lot about negotiation on this channel I tried to employed all of them I was doing my research I was coming out planned on how I'm going to you know manage the calls and everything and at the end of the day there was a really huge gap between what we wanted to pay and what you know he wanted for the house and I try to you know explain well but other people charge different prices and and this and that and I try all the tactics but at the end of the day he didn't budge and I had zero Alternatives as I said I couldn't move to a different house I couldn't rent elsewhere and so I had zero Alternatives and I ended up paying way more than I was planning or budgeting to pay for the house so what does that mean for you it basically means that the less options that you have the more you are constrained in a negotiation so at the end of the day all you need to know about negot negotiation is the person who has more options wins that's it if you have three clients want to work with you and you have the options to pick between them and you can only take one clients because of that's your availability immediately you know with the rules of supply and demand you can raise your prices and you know you can choose between them so you have the options and that's exactly how you're going to raise your price the more options that you have you're going to have you know the confidence and the ability to just raise your price and if it's not good for one client maybe it's good for another client so the number one role or job that you have as a freelancer is how do I generate options for myself so that when at the end of the day I get to the negotiation table I can raise my price and they won't have an option they would have to say yes because they want to work with me and I have a lot of other options so how do you actually do this well there's a lot of ways to do that actually the first thing the number one thing that I think most Freelancers don't think about is that if you have money in the bank because you saved up money because you know you're you're still working parttime or something where you saved up kind of a buffer money you have now the option to say no now that's an option right you you don't have to close the project you don't have to you know agree on a on a lower price than what you want you can raise your price you can say that's my price take it or leave it because you now have a valid option not taking the work you'll be fine of course the the better alternative is have other clients as options and to do that you can do a lot of different things right you can talk to your friends family your network you can start meeting new people to create new options for yourself you can go out you can go out to event you can hang out with people online you can share your work online so all of these things all of these actions at the end of the day their main goal is to create options for you and this should be you know you can track this as a number you can call this option some people call it leads or whatever you need to track the number of options you have at any given point so that whenever you're talking to somebody you're always very confident it's okay if this doesn't work out I still have options and this will give you the confidence to go and raise your prices and then you don't need any tactic you don't need any negotiation you don't need anything you'll just know it's not a good fit that's what I want and if you're not cool with that that's good I have other options and that confidence will make them understand that oh my God there's only one of you that can do you but you have other Alternatives and so if they want to work with you they have to pay today clients that completely waste your time so I just got an email from a designer friend he was telling me a story about a client that approached him for a website and then they had the initial meeting and then after that the client sent an NDA and then disappeared for a week and then came back for another meeting and then initially after he got the proposal and the price he disappeared again and then wanted another meeting so it's become like already three or four meetings over multiple weeks and it just when do you say no when do you just cut it off because you understand they're just wasting too much of your time so first of all I want to start with setting the right expectations now you have to understand in general you know not every potential client that you're going to talk to is going to end up being a client so you don't want to just assume every conversation is a waste of time you're going to know that let's say on average not on average but maybe kind of a rough number would be my for five clients I talk to just one of them ends up being a client that doesn't mean that talking to the other four is wasting my time I just need to get those numbers running right so that is kind of the the the basic you need to understand you will be talking to people who don't end up that being said you need to you know understand what are some red flags and when do you cut the line and just to make sure that you're talking to relevant people versus non-relevant people so there's few things here first you need to have kind of a framework to understand what to expect right so I know that usually when a client would call me it would involve first initial call to understand if this is a good fit if that works well then we'll schedule kind of a longer session Discovery session maybe with some other parties from the client that would be another call after that I would usually send a proposal after that they would usually pay uh you know a down payment and only then we'll actually kickart the project and by the way that process in general usually takes around a month at least from my experience for bigger projects and so I go into it understanding that these are the frame the the time frames that being said if things are kind of like moving away from this pattern which I like to go through I understand that these might be some red flags so for example if I had a conversation with a client regarding a price and again I always talk to clients about the price before I go ahead and make a proposal for them because you want to set the expectation you never want to surprise them with the proposal that kind of reduces the risk that you're just wasting your time creating a proposal but assuming that I have talked to them about the price they said it sounds great I've sent them a proposal and now they've either disappeared or they're saying Hey I want another meeting beforehand then I would that would be kind of a flag wait you said okay but now it's not okay so before taking on that meeting I would probably ask what has changed do you have additional information that you need that you didn't know that you're going to need um are you not the actual decisionmaking so I would actually I'd probably go on this call to clarify but before going on that call I would want to make sure to understand that what is the information that you actually need to make a decision and I want to make sure that we cover all of this information on this call because obviously you can't have you know oh I just remember one more thing and one more thing and one more thing that is kind of a red flag that this is probably how the design process is going to look like oh another revision and another revision and another revision you want to make sure that the clients are well organized from their own their own side and know how to make make decision and know what information they need now it is your responsibility to manage that process you don't have to you know expect that they'll be just good right perhap they never did a big design project in the past and it's your role as a design professional to guide them through the process meaning this is what's going to happen we're going to have this meeting and then I'll send you the proposal and then you're going to pay the down payment you're going to guide them through this and if they have questions Beyond that which does happen from time to time then you know you you need to adjust or consider this a red flag having a client disappear you know after you send him a proposal and waiting for a down payment I say would be um considered a red flag and I would probably ping them to let them know and I also by the way one thing that I do when I send a proposal is I say look here's the proposal it's only valid for week or two 2 weeks because I need to know how to plan my upcoming weeks if this is not paid and signed in the upcoming two weeks then you know other clients want to work with me as well and I can't guarantee that if you come back in 3 weeks and say okay we've decided to work with you I might not be available and I'm just saying this because it is true I need to be able to plan my time I can't just have you know proposals out there in the open and then maybe three clients will sign them at the same time and I won't be able to handle all of them so I do need to make sure that I have the capacity to serve the people who I give proposals to and that's why I put a deadline on it so and this of course always puts pressure on them to make a decision within a time frame because if you don't have a time frame to make a decision then maybe people can assume that you know I'll just sit on it and then in a month or two when we actually whatever want to Kickstart the project I'll just sign it off and kick it off then they assume they might assume you'll be you know unlimitedly available but you to make sure that they understand whether you have clients or not this is just you want to position yourself you know as somebody who is busy who is doing other things and I'm not just here waiting for you to come whenever you want so I feel like these kinds of setting expectations in terms of what the process might look like um will help to decrease these kind of like time wasters that being said you do have to understand that nothing this is dealing with human beings right and no process is just going to follow along people are always going to have more questions things are not going to work out they're going to have un um you know um things that you didn't expect coming and some things might look a little bit different so I think my general guidelines would be as long as you set your expectations into what is acceptable and what is unacceptable you'll know when that line is crossed between they are treating you as somebody who they can waste your time or if you take your time seriously and if you consider your time valuable then you're not just giving it away at a whim um unless it's very well Justified then I think you will find out that clients treat you better and your time is more effectively um spent recently we have a lot of freelancing stories and this is another one based on a discussion I had with one of our students where he explained to me where he was working on a Lo logo project for a client he was giving them two different directions and they were all already approved one of them and were about to move forward with the project where at the in the middle of things they were like by the way we have another person who we show this to uh yeah we we didn't tell you about him but he's also important and he wants to try a completely different direction how about we do another Direction um and that's obviously so frustrating and annoying and we were having a discussion what is the best way to move forward when a client does something like this the first so here's my strategy for dealing with it the first thing is be prepared in advance for things like this to happen this is why when we budget and when we plan the project we add at least 20% buffer meaning if I think it's going to take 10 hours I'm actually planning and charging for 12 hours because these things that come out of the blue they're actually you can predict them they're always going to happen there's always going to be something that you didn't plan for which is why we budget for buffer so when I was talking with my student he said you know I did um budget for buffer right so I'm not going to lose money if I do this for them but how do I how do I react to them do I just tell them okay whatever I mean you can do whatever you want and then they're going to come up with another request eventually it's going to run over our budget and and what's going to happen then and so I said yes right so first of all you budget for it that's great now you can actually help them and not lose money but however here's what I would do one thing that you can do right is say no this is not what we agreed upon this is not part of the contract this is you didn't tell me before I'm not doing this and again legit if you look at the contract you're probably right however is this the best thing forward if you're really trying to help your clients and you really want the best thing for them then perhaps listening to them and collaborating with them and making sure that you're actually happy at the end of the process is also important so I wouldn't do that what I would do knowing that I have planned buffer for it so I'm not going to lose money I'm still going to be as profitable as I wanted by and and can I accommodate this re Quest what I would do is I would help them however I would Guilt Trip them and so here's what I would say I would say look obviously we didn't plan for this this is not what we agreed upon in the contract right you know you're asking me for something that is extra something that by any means I should be asking you for more money for right this is the right thing to do look at the contract this is completely I'm I'm I'm going to have to reschedule and change all of my schedule however I like you I really care about this project and I want this project to succeed and so I'm going to do this but I have to tell you this is the last time that this is going to happen right so we can accommodate any more extra changes like this now I want to explain why I'm behaving this way and why I think this is the right way to approach so here's what happened I mean and the the third solution is to just say yeah sure whatever you know you you you're the client I'll do it and this is what I think most people will do most people would just say okay but then they would hate the client and they will be resentful and so forth and they will feel like they've been pushed around and so forth now with the way I would deal with it I think I'm not resentful towards the client however I make them feel like I go above and beyond for them that turns me immediately from you know either I can be a person who doesn't want to collaborate who's annoying who only cares about the money this is not a really good place to be with on the other side if I immediately just say yes whatever I'll do whatever you want now you've got this designer who's this push around and you can just push him push him push him and he will do whatever you want and in the middle there's the professional High performer designer where although he can he knows he can say no to you he decided to overd deliver on their promises to you and basically do you a favor because they care about you and this is the place where you want to be because this is where they're like here they hate you right if you just say no they hate you here they're they don't respect you anymore because you're just this push around who is like who will do anything but here in the middle they love you they're thankful for you they know they've stepped over the line and they did something that they shouldn't do and that's why you kind of guilt trip them into it but then you've also went beyond and show them that you're not here for the money because you care about them and you're going the EXT extra mile and that really immediately turned you into a professional that overd delivers and this is where I think that you want to be in your relationship with your clients now again you're not lying them you're not tricking uh them or whatever you're saying things as they are and you just make them realize that they're asking you for an extra and that you are currently extra delivering and it's really important that they know this they recognize this and they they are thankful for you for going Beyond and they're not just going to take it for granted also this way of setting up the expectation makes it way more likely that this is not going to happen again because you've basically just told them this is the last time that this is going to happen if this happens again I am going to charge you extra so you're setting expectations although you could tell them immediately I'm going to charge you extra you went beyond this and you set the expectation for what's going to happen the next time so those are my suggestion again this is not like a random thing that might happen somewhere this happens all the time you should expect this to happen almost in any project so you want to have this answer prepared and you want to know how to deal with these situations when that happens today I want to talk about finding rich clients so a few days ago I've published my new course about web design the $10,000 website process and I've posted it on designer news now if you don't know designer news basically it's a great website where you kind of vote up on new things in the design world but it's also very famous for having a lot of cynicism and criticism in the comments and so Sasha grief actually commented on my post and Sasha is somebody that I really highly respect in the design world and he actually mentioned kind of a as a comment on one sentence in the website that says what really goes into designing the kind of website that clients happily pay high prices for he said finding rich clients it might seem obvious to some but freelancing successfully is much more about picking the right clients than anything else so I think this is kind of a controversial saying while I do agree with Sasha and I talk about this all the time that you cannot you cannot charge high prices from clients that doesn't have the money to pay for right but I do think that it's also very crucial to know how to deliver to this website so I think what Sasha meant with his comment is a lot of designers already know how to do great work and if they know how to do great work again they can't sell great work to people without money so it's much more important for them to um try to invest in finding great clients I mean they can't be successful without great clients so I think it is a combination of both I mean you have to know how to do good work and how to deliver good work but you also need to know and focus about finding the right client and yes rich clients I don't know that rich clients is the right definition but clients that has budget so for me in my case the way because I also started my career I was working for I would call this poor clients right clients that don't have smaller businesses that didn't have huge budgets and they were paying me low sums of money for my design I was very frustrated about this today I can easily say that it's obvious they were paying me a lot of money they didn't have a lot of money you can't charge $10,000 from a business that doesn't have even a marketing budget and they're not making $10,000 per month right it's obvious that they can't afford this and a lot of times we tend to be mad at our clients they're not willing to invest in design but you have to realize they don't have money for to to pay salary for themselves which is the situation with a lot of small businesses in the world they barely can pay the salary of the founders if they can't do this obviously they're not going to invest or pay high prices for design so you have to work with people um who has I would call it large problems right so if a business has a scale has a turnover of a lot of money their problems and your ability as a designer to solve their problems increases by a lot if they have something in their business an opportunity or something that doesn't work which costs them a lot of money cost them a million dollar in a year the fact that let's say their website sucks and doesn't convert a lot if they have this problem then you can very easily explain how having a high value and a great website that flows fast that converts that looks great that create trust you can really explain how that would create enormous value for them create you know tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions of dollars in sales and then making an investment of $10,000 for this website seems like a no-brainer so for me personally the way that I made this move and I have to be super honest that I made this move to reach clients unconsciously I didn't realize what's happening until after it happened so it's easy to say you know I I didn't plan for this but it's easy for me to see it now from you know behind so for me that transition was moving to work with early stage startups after they raise some money so in that specific stage in a startup's life after they raise money they're in a situation where they're a very small team like maybe three four Founders or a very core team and they just raised like a million dollar so now they're rich now they're thinking what is the thing that we can do with that money that we just raised that can create and really increase our chances of success in the marketplace and in that position it's really easy to explain to them why great brand great website great product design can really improve their chances of succeeding really can improve their chances of maybe raising the next round if you help them to to you know tell their story correctly and design you know the the deck for their next round of investing and so it for me understanding that specific time point for that specific client those were my rich clients so again as I said I didn't plan for this but now I realize that it's much easier for me to charge high prices from people that has the money if I'd have to do it all over again now I can really focus on understanding who are the people with money so you might be asking yourself okay so how do I find rich clients and it's for me it's obvious that there's no prescription because there's a lot of types of rich clients right there are let's say restaurant that has turnovers in the millions there are I work with tech startups so obviously there is big companies that has big turnaround there are small companies like startups they just raised a lot of money there other rich people in all kinds of of place a lot of businesses there's a lot of let's say you know just Rich per people that have very very rich families so even just I'm just throwing an example but just The Branding for their daughter's wedding is going to be they can invest tens of thousands of dollars and they're doing this people are doing like crazy event with crazy branding for their daughter's wedding because they have tons of money so how do you reach out how do you connect to those people that really depends on where you are in the world who's your social network work and who you can reach out to some of that might be you know just personal connections and people that you know how you can get into touch with people who have a lot of money other ways are kind of organization that you volunteer one of the things that I did when I just moved out as a freelancer um I started volunteering at a kind of a hackathon type of thing for social causes and I was working there for free just volunteering on social projects but the people that were working there were working in what you might called Rich startups so that was my technique to get into and create a social network of people who are with businesses that has money at the moment there's infinite ways because there's infinite types of rich people and rich clients you have to find what's really interesting for you because obviously you can like for me I'm not interested in doing branding for rich people's daughters right for somebody that might be the perfect uh work and they might go there from me that's not so you have to find kind of the you know the sweet spots of something that you really want to do with people that have the money that's how you'll find your perfect Niche and you'll be successful as a freelancer today I want to talk about habits a lot of time we're looking for kind of like the secret of success and all that kind of things but I think there's not really like a secret or one thing that if you do will make you successful but I do think that there are some habits and by habits I mean things that you do regularly and they become part of your life and if you behave that way if you develop these habits I think that your chances of success in whatever it is that you want to do um changes right but so if you have if you want to be a freelancer you need to develop habits that are contributing to the success of Freelancers so I'll share what I think have worked well for me and I think can work well for you as well well let's dive into them habit number one Never Eat Alone and here's what I mean by that freelance is basically at the end of the day a relationship business you're helping other people you're always working with other people you're giving service right it is a service business at the end of the day so it's all about relationship it's how well you work with your clients whether they want to recommend you to other clients after you know you after you finish working together but also the other people that you meet will they become your clients is really developed by the relationship that you have and I've created a habit for myself instead because we work alone most of the time as Freelancers to Never Eat Alone and by that I go out to lunch with either friends past clients or people that I think are interested um in develop relationship with them and by doing that some of them become clients some of them recommend other people who might need my services to become my clients and that's how you grow your kind of relationship Network whatever you want to call this but I found that that because this is a relationship building eating together with other people is really fundamental to building these relationships now even though right now we're in lockdown and you know I can't go out there is no restaurant as of as of recording this video here in Israel there's lockdown there's no restaurants there's nothing like that we still do this I still invest time in either doing kind of Zoom lunches so I just ordered food it by the way it just came here so I'm going to eat food and I'm going to have a zoom chat with a friend or somebody that I haven't seen in a while just to keep that relationship going so it is still possible even though even if you're working remotely even if you don't have people next to you it's still fun and highly highly valuable to develop that relationship of if you're working alone just don't eat alone find somebody to share your meal with whether it is physically or on Zoom so this is the first habit you need to develop second habit that I think is highly highly important is always leave time so carve out a little time to keep learning no matter where you are because as Freelancers there's two things one of them is you'll need multiple skills that you for sure can't master them all so hopefully you've mastered design which is if if that's what you're doing that that's you need to master that so hopefully you've mastered that but if not spend time learning that but after that you'll develop you'll figure out that you need to master negotiation business finance marketing all these other things that you need to take care of as a freelancer you need to spend time learning them and improving because you wear so many hats as a freelancer so always no matter and I'm still doing this to this day so right now I'm building a team here in flux Academy so I spend time I carve out time to learn how to be a better manager where to find Talent how to develop talent I still always carve out time to always make sure that I'm learning so make sure a piece of your day a piece of you know you're a week somewhere find and carve out some time for learning so that you can always grow that's basically skills on top of that there's software which is always changing learn new tools staying up to date with how to do your job the best that you can you always need to carve out time so make that habit of learning and keeping growth and and skills up to date the third habit that I think is crucial for Freelancers is tracking and by tracking meaning what where does your time go your biggest asset as a freelancer is your time how do you invest it how long are you working with clients versus how long are you talking with Pro Prospect clients how long are you working on proposals you need to keep track on that so you can really understand where your time goes is this project profitable is it not profitable should you spend more time on marketing should you stop this project because you've overrun it you have to keep track of your time I've recently made a video about how I do my daily tracking so we'll we'll link this here so you can check it out but starting this habit of really at the end of the day understanding what do we do today how long did things take keeping track of what's going on in your day and in your week and in your month that habit alone will give you amazing visibility into how your freelance business actually looks like and will make improving it much much easier so recently I've posted on my Instagram a bunch of these myth that that are in the discussion about freelancing and people went wild so first of all if you're not on my Instagram account be sure to follow CU I post awesome stuff there every day and I do want to expand on the topic here today because a lot of look all advice including mine is biased we all share what worked for us and what didn't work for us however there is you must understand that when you get advice from people including me you get some person's perspective and that's not definitely not like the truth um and I feel like a lot of people present their opinion as truth and that really limits what people think or understand and specifically about freelance I feel like there's a lot of incorrect advice so today I want to share my perspective but the point of this video is remember every every including what I say has two two sides to every story and you need to make sure that you hear both sides so that you can make an informed decision and the best uh you know Way Forward for you so let's start with lie number one calling yourself a freelancer is bad don't call yourself a freelancer be a consultant be you know because if you're a freelancer then your clients are going to treat you badly and they're they're thinking that you're only going to execute and they're not going to respect you and they're not going to pay you a lot of money this is from my experience completely not true now look I also want to sell strategic advice viice and I also want to be a highly paid consultant and I am however when my clients are looking for somebody to help them with branding or help them build a new website they are not looking for a consultant the reason is that they think in their you have to understand what they're thinking and what they think is that Consultants are people who only consult give advice whether they need somebody to actually execute and do the work and while I do give Strate IC advice and I do help them with strategy and I do help them with ideas I also end up doing the execution for them so if I call myself a consultant they're actually confused and they're thinking no no no this guy is not the right guy for me now it is your op your job when you're meeting a client to position yourself as somebody who's not just taking orders but somebody who asks question somebody who's trying to understand and trying to bring value on a strategic level so that you can price yourself but but you know accordingly but that has nothing to do with how you called yourself and when you're saying I'm a freelancer that really clearly just defines the way that you're going to work together you know I am not you're not going to hire me full-time we're we're just going to have this contract that you know I'm going to help you with one project it's pretty descriptive to the the working relationship and it just clarifies this so if somebody tells you that by calling yourself a freelancer you can make a lot of money you can't have resp from clients that is I want to tell you from my experience and I've built like multi6 figure business as a freelance designer I call myself freelancer that's not a problem at all it helps my clients when I call myself a freelancer so that's Point number one consider this number two work and travel everybody has these days the dream of being a remote you know remote freelancer I'm going to work with great clients and I'm going to travel the world and look I know that some people are doing it and they're posting it on the internet and they're going to tell you that they're going to teach you how to do this so that you can leave your dream life and and travel and work at the same time and again while some people do that I want to tell you that from my experience that is very very hard and not ideal situation okay specifically when you're building relationship with clients and and freelancing is a relationship business and when you're working with clients first of all the best and most optimal way to work with clients is work with them face to face meet them go into their office go to go to meeting because information Flows In collaboration works best when it's you know face to face I'm not saying that remote is impossible and I do work remotely with clients but a lot of the a lot of how things happen is the best happen when they're happening face to face now I want to say now I think look look at the world around you and ask yourself are the best designers or businesses in the world are built on by people who are you know traveling remotely no so I'm I'm not saying that it's impossible I'm not saying you can do this maybe you can but I just want to clarify that it's very very hard and very very not ideal look I take vacations and when I I go on vacation I do work on with my laptop I know I can work from anywhere but it doesn't mean that it's ideal to travel and work at the same time it's very very hard when you need to think about you know where where am I going to sleep uh tomorrow when am I where am going to eat tomorrow it does take a lot of your mental space and mental energy and when you're focused on traveling it's very hard to be focused on delivering your best work and best service ever for your clients so just I'm just saying consider this for me what works well I do work remotely with clients but I work here in my office I can focus on doing the best work and I do take vacations and when I do take vacations if I need to service my clients and do some work yeah I can work remotely but that's not how I build a successful business while you know traveling the world and and building a great business um so that's my opinion again some people are doing it but I feel like this is basically because that's the dream for everybody everybody wants to travel the world everybody wants to you know not be stuck in an office so it's basically just a dream that a lot of people play on to sell you stuff but it's actually not not a very ideal to build a successful business line number three freelance is unstable oh you've got ups and downs and you have clients and you don't have clients now there's two things I want to say look most businesses which are let's say Not subscription businesses have ups and downs and sometimes are unstable you know if even if you think about Amazon you know there there is no stability sometimes they sell and sometimes they can sell they do have some subscription model with the prime but let's let's assume before they had prime you know sometimes people needed to buy something so they bought and if they didn't need anything they didn't bought you know it's not as predict right but if you're serious about building your freelance business like I am then you start thinking about cash flow management you know that you know when the holiday season hits not everybody's going to hire you so you're going to have a low month and when they need to finish the budget or have a new budget then they're going to have more money to spend so that's just understanding the business cycles and every business has its own Cycles once you understand that you learn how to work with that and by separating your you know business finances from personal finance which I recommend doing I have video about this then you can pay yourself a fixed salary even if your revenue from freelance is not stable and not recurring every month so it's just understanding how to manage cash flow better and then you can create yourself the safety of a stable income even though freelance Revenue can go up and down and again that's true for most businesses so the not an excuse that's not something that you need to be afraid of you just need to understand that's the business cycle for freelance how do you work with that how do you mitigate the risk so that you can have a stable income to pay your rent your family for your family whatever so that's lie number three line number four freelancing websites are bad oh don't don't go to upw work don't go to whatever Fiverr don't go to them because it's bad people don't don't pay a lot of money people are not you know uh don't uh respect design or whatever I want to say honestly first of all I don't have personal experience selling myself as a freelancer on those platform but I do have experience hiring other creatives on these platforms and I know that I have paid thousands of dollars and have built very long-term relationships with people who I have found on those you know on those platforms and just one example is my amazing cop writer Fabiana which I've met on upw work I've hired her on upw workk paid her thousands of dollars and we now have very long-term relationship super super happy with her I've met other talented people on the platform and I've paid them a lot of money so I do think and on the other side I do know other designers like um like I think Helen UI Helen you might know her from Instagram she have built a very successful freelance business as selling her services and being kind of a top seller on upwork so I do think it is a Marketplace like every Marketplace there are high-paying clients and there are low paying clients and the fact that there is just a lot of low-level sellers on the platform doesn't mean that there's no highlevel sellers on the platform and high paying clients on the platform it's just a platform I'm not saying it's the best maybe it is the best for you every platform has its ups and downs if you are not I'm let's say I'm based in Tel Israel so there's a lot of big Tech around me so it's easy for me to go and network but people who are living outside of big cities maybe it's not as easy for them to go out and network and so platforms like upwork can get them closer to high-paying clients and so it is a platform you have to understand the rules of the platform and you have to understand what works for you what doesn't work for you but it's not a general don't believe those generals generalization like this is bad this is bad because it didn't work for you but there's other people a lot of other people that it worked well for them so just you know learn the rules and understand if you want to play the rules and if you want to win because it is possible to win all right I'm excited about this line number five you won't work on big projects so I think that was something that kind of made me think maybe freelance is not for me because I'll always have to work with small medium businesses and I won't be able to work on impactful projects um but I've also found out to be not true and I have a lot of freelancer friends who've been hired by Google by other great big companies because you know the the search for talent these days is Extreme and I know that if you're now in a position where you don't have a lot of opportunities it might sound ridiculous to you that I tell you that big companies are looking like crazy they're they're like really hunting for talent they're willing to pay a lot of money to find the right talent and they're hiring because they can't hire all their you know full-time position a lot of them are also hiring Freelancers that's why freelancer today can enjoy working with big companies maybe big tech companies or big companies in general enjoy their big budgets enjoy the impact of working on big projects you just need to get yourself in the position to enjoy these opportunities but they are out there and it's completely completely possible if that's what you're looking to do all right right you must have a portfolio website that is the last one and I know that I am a little bit to blame about this because I yell this all the time that you need to have a portfolio website but the truth is if we we're being honest here this is completely real talk it's not necessary right will it be helpful yes will will it increase your possibility of get your chances of getting highed and getting seen and getting exposure yes it is is it necessary is it mandatory do you must have a portfol your website now that the the the truth is that it's not you know I had a lot of years where I didn't have anything up or I had something very old and updated because the way that I get clients is by Network referrals and recommendation those things are so much stronger than you know seeing a random website and again most clients do not know how to judge a website do not know how to judge your portfolio so a recommendation from somebody else is so much more strong than just browsing through a website that you know it's not mandatory I do think again again I do think that it's helpful and you should do this but do not use this as an excuse to say well I'm working on my website and I've been working on it for S months now and until it's not ready no no I can't go out and get clients because I don't have a website yet so many designers are using this as an excuse to not go out to not do to not close sales and I'm just telling you this is an excuse so stop with the excuses yeah work on a website but do not use this as an excuse to not go forward to not starting your freelance business to not starting getting client and putting yourself out there whether you're doing it on social media on you know freelancing website or whatever no excuses you can go out there and build yourself a freelance business last year I was fortunate enough to cross $300,000 as a freelance designer and I want to share with you some of the key takeaways that you can Implement in your business so it will help you grow now I'm not necessarily saying that this is going to like shortcut your process and you're going to make a lot of money next year building a freelance is a long journey and if you've seen the the video that I recently posted about my journey over the last 18 years then you know that it takes time to build these things but looking back at the things that I did I did some very specific things at Major turning points that I think that if I understood them or could have applied them earlier it might help me do things smarter faster and avoid some of the pains and failures so I want to share them with you and let's get started the first lesson and understanding after doing this for 18 years is that freelance is a relationship business if you don't understand this or if you're if you are not good with relationship if you don't enjoy meeting people and making friends and hanging out I want to be honest with you freelance might not be for you because you might be an amazing designer developer you can do amazing job but if you're not into handling people that is going to be a major major blocking point for you because relationships is first of all it's that's what's going to help you get clients and that's a long process of building a network developing relationship but it's also part of you know how you work with people and half the work is managing the process and working with clients and giving them good service and if you don't enjoy that if you don't enjoy having relationship with new people with your clients and with friends in general it's going to be very very painful so you need to understand that you need to understand that a major part of your point is building relationship so it's not a waste of time it's not a waste of time to go to events it's not a waste of time to go to lunch meeting with people to go to coffee with people it's not unproductive time no this is something that is super super important and crucial and if you don't spend time building relationships now again you don't necessarily know that the relationship that you're building right now might lead to something and you don't have to only build relationship out of the need for them to convert into potential clients no it's just building relationship and honestly making friendship because you're interested in those people and you want to hang out with them but if you don't do this then longterm you know you're you're you're going to stay out without clients because that's the the real mechanism and it takes years to build this to bring you um regularly clients good clients high level clients so again understand this before you're going into this if this is not for you you can stop right now and don't waste any more of your time lesson number two you need to get if you want to scale if you want to reach you know multiple six figures you need to get your financials in order and that's there's few parts of that first step is separate a bank your business bank account from your home bank account this actually took me it's not I'm so I've been doing this for 18 years I I didn't do this up until like three years ago I think when I realized that by having my freelance mixed up inside my home I can't really understand what's going on and I can't treat it as a business and if you want a scale if you want to make freelance full-time if you want to reach multiple six figures you need to take this seriously so to understand how what's going on even have a clue what's going on in your business you need to first of all separate bank accounts treat it as a different entity start keeping track of what's going on yes it means you know working with spreadsheets to know exactly how much money you made this month last month what you're projecting to have next month so you know that you know you're not going to have this huge dip or if you will that you have some kind of a financial cushion that's going to hold you for or because freelance is sometimes ups and downs and sometimes you might get like a huge down payment that should last you for 3 months and so by having your financials in order by actually making yourself like sending yourself a regular salary to your home account every month um that really really puts you in the in a position to succeed and to scale um treating this as a as a real business and I do suggest to you take some time and really understand this Finance thing it's it's not hugely complicated there's actually a book that my coach recommended to me called I think the blueprint for insanely successful business something like that really understand the key the key documents and kind of like spreadsheet that you need to understand which are cash flow profit loss and balance sheet I do have some videos covering the difference between them on my YouTube channel so you can look it up or I'll try to link them somewhere um but you need to get a grasp on this because basically you know these These are the metrics of your business and if you can't read the metrics of your business you don't know that you're going in the right direction obviously you want to go up right you want to scale you want to make more so you need to see the trends you need to know that you're improving and you need to measure things so get your financials in order again this might not be sexy this might not why be why you went freelancing because you want freedom and you want to handle in design and creativity but that's part of running your own business so either do it or find find somebody else to do that for you hire somebody for me now at this point by the way my wife does that for me and we have kind of a weekly meeting but for a lot of time I had to do this myself while I was suffering you know I didn't enjoy this but I did this because it's just something that you have to do if you want to build a successful freelance business lesson number three you got to take risks I know this sounds might sound like a cliche or something like that but you know if you don't take the risk of CH asking somebody like meeting a potential client and asking for double the price for example of what you chart well you are scared shitless and you know that they might like blow you off and they might you might lose the project because of if you don't take the risk to try to jump into the next level it's just not going to happen there's I don't remember who said this I don't know if I heard it on Gary ve or something like the financial reward that you get correlates with the amount of risk and stress that you're willing to take if you're not willing to to take risks and risk the it's called risk because it might go wrong because you do not know for certain that this is going to succeed that's why it's a risk if you're not going to take the risk of raising your price trying something new go somewhere you know pay to go for a conference or get a flight to meet with somebody it might not work out and you might lose that's why it's called a risk but if you don't do this then this the the the likelihood that you will improve and you'll get to new places is really really low now I do not suggest and I'm like I'm a father for two I so I I have to pay the rent and I have to make sure that my kids have something to eat so while I do take risk I try to do this in a kind of a calculated way and this goes back into the earlier point about getting your financials in order I do have a buffer saved up so I know that I can take certain risks and even if I lose I have some cushion you know to lean on it's not like I'm taking risk and I we might be evacuated and leave on the streets next month that's not what I'm saying I'm saying you need to take calculated risks but think about what will enable you to take risks so for me it's like having a buffer of like three months in the bank account I know that I can do silly stuff that might not work out if that doesn't work out I have some kind of a cushion on it but I do still have to take the risk otherwise you know nobody's growing and scaling their business while being comfortable and doing the same things over and over again so you need to take try new things that might not work out lesson number four the more you take on the more you earn so this kind of goes back into my full stack philosophy that I think that if you can provide more value and more services to the to your client and the people that you're working with you're going to be able to charge them more so let me give you a few examples so I was I'll go back into web design because that's the easiest for me you know when I was starting out and I used to do the design and hand it over to developers that either they would hire and I would hire um you know I would get paid only for the design part but once I took on the development phase now I'm developing using webflow so I was able to charge more because I own more of the project and it goes the same for let's say you can SEO for example or setting up analytics or writing the copy on the project that you're working on initially when I started off I was very narrow-minded I was like I don't care about those things I want to focus on design but once I've kind of broadened my interest and I was like you know what I'll do that I'll write the copy you know what I can take the photos for you the more responsibilities that I was willing to take on the more my clients trusted me the bigger the scope of the project became and the more I earned so take more responsibility no matter what it is take more of it you'll be able to charge more you'll get more trust and and respect from your clients and lesson number five you have to start delegating at some point if you don't want to um work unlimited hours and actually you do not have unlimited hours then you have to start delegating some of the work now I basically you know when to become a freelancer not because I wanted to work endless nights weekend that type of stuff I finish my day at 6: p.m. so I can go home and spend time with my wife and my kids and so I'm limited right the the amount of hours I can work is limit limited and that's that's a resource and if you want to keep scaling you have to think about delegating now I had a lot of debates about the kind of like starting an agency and I probably have like five videos on this channel about should I start an agency and I was debating this a lot at the end of the day I came to the conclusion that I do not want to start an agency I don't want to start hiring people full-time and managing like a designed Studio that's just not what I want to do I enjoy living kind of the solo life and that's just what I want wanted to do that being said it does not mean that I cannot delegate stuff and there's there are two benefits to it first of all you can stop doing things that you hate doing and that you're not super good at doing and I've mentioned that my wife helps me with the finances which removed kind of released a multiple hours per week for me from not doing the invoicing tracking of spreadsheet and that type of stuff so that delegating that stuff to her um increase the the free time that I have to focus on the things that I'm good at doing the client work and doing the actual design but even when it comes down to design when I for a long period of my time I would do everything myself and you know I've I've mentioned before I think that the more you do um the more you earn and the more responsibility you take but I realized at some point that by delegating specific things which are not my core skills um allows me to actually provide better work so I've started Del gating illustration and sometimes image making and other aspects of my work to specific professional um that can uh do even better work than I am and I still get to be the designer the art director the project manager the strategies together with my clients but some of the execution I get help sometimes and I don't have to hire full-time employees for that I have kind of a network of professionals that I specifically work with um based on the needs of a specific project besides my wife who's like on a retainer like I she's helping me um on a regular base but that's even that's not kind of like a full-time I would say job um to manage the finances of a freelancer so you have to start thinking about how do you become smarter and about your time and about the the things that you're focusing on because otherwise you won't be able to scale so you have to learn how to delegate and what to delegate as I said it comes down to the things that you don't like and the things that you think that some people can do better than you and have you focused on the core thing now I want to say kind of a bonus thing which overlays all the all the lessons here you have to keep improving no matter what you do so there is you start having ass systems right as a Freelancers and every every one of them needs to be improving your the way that you handle your financials need to be improving improving the way that you handle your client relationship needs to be improving even you know you need to learn new skills there might be a new software that you need to learn or even if it's not a new software even if you've been working for years with Photoshop you might still find a new process to be more efficient with Photoshop and by that allowing you to spend less time doing a specific task you always need to think about and see your your whole freelance life career business as a bunch of systems that each one of them can be optimized and improved and you should be spending time thinking about how to improve every facet of it one thing that I didn't mention what that I think is crucial is spending doesn't have to be every week but it doesn't have to be something but sometimes takes some times off to think about here's my business what can I do to improve specific things on it every time spend like an hour thinking about a specific as aspect of your business how can we improve that and as a freelancer you are your own biggest asset so the way that you handle your time the way that you handle your tasks um if you invest in yourself that's going to pay off in in your business all right if you've spent two and a half hours together with me I want to say thank you I highly appreciate your time and I again I know that if you'll take action on this advice you will see results I hoping that you will actually take action on this and see changes in your freelance career as I've previously said we do have full-on courses if you want to work with us with our mentors if you want to take your business seriously build the skills and the abilities to freelance then please check out our full on courses below this video and I hope to see you in our courses cheers