This lesson is called how to grow your freelance business and is going to show you two different ways
you can go about scaling your business.
The first is how to charge expert level rates as a freelancer.
The second way is to build a freelance team or a freelance agency.
And then we will go over how you can skyrocket your success.
The reason growing your freelance business is important is because of the freedom that a successful
business provides.
And that is, it helps fuel your why, which is your passion.
The whole reason you're doing all of this in the first place when you have a profitable freelance business
bill and running, you really have the freedom to control how you want to live your life.
You get to decide where you want to travel, what days a week you want to work, what time of the day
you want to work.
And ultimately, it grants you the freedom to be the architect of your life.
And that is the position I am so grateful to be in.
I'm talking from experience.
I went from working a nine to five where I felt trapped at to being my own boss with unlimited earning
potential, as well as true freedom over my life.
The first way you can grow your business is by becoming a freelance expert, a freelance expert is someone
who can charge higher rates.
And the reason behind that is because you were providing a higher level of value.
So as you go along in your freelance journey, continue to invest in yourself and into your skill set.
The more skills you learn and the more results you are able to get, the more chances you have for becoming
an expert.
And when you're an expert, you're able to charge those higher monthly rates.
The second way to focus on becoming a freelance expert is to focus on quality instead of quantity of
projects.
You might think that it makes a lot of sense to get as many reviews as you can, which it does, but
you also need to make sure you're focusing 100 percent on the quality of each project.
Then you can move on to the next one.
Once that first one is completed to the best of your ability, you do not want to spread yourself thin
here, especially when you're first starting out as a freelancer when you're working your way up through
the ranks.
Keep this in mind, and it will help you have more success.
Also, be more selective with your choices.
I turned down a good amount of projects because I know they're not the best fit for me based on my skill
set and my availability.
So if something is below my skill set or below the rate that I want to charge, it doesn't make sense
for me to work on that project or with that client.
That is the time I could be investing with a more high tech, a client that makes sense for me.
So don't be afraid to say no to specific projects.
This all goes back to qualifying those clients if they're not qualified.
You need to move on and be selective and find someone who is the best fit for you.
Once you start to implement all of these different things, that is when you will start to have clients
knocking on your door.
And that means they're going to be finding your upper profile and they're going to be reaching out to
you to see if you're available to work on their project.
That's a great way to keep your pipeline full and to continue increasing your rates as a freelance expert
once you become an expert.
Upwork will prioritize you in the algorithm and continue to help you get more and more work.
So on the screen right now are some examples of expert level copywriters, and as you can see, they're
all charging over $100 an hour on average.
And they also have jobs in the triple digits.
So when you start to see this and you start to explore some of the top experts and freelancers on the
upward platform, you'll see how much potential there is to become an expert and to charge those higher
rates.
Because those high ticket clients on the platform are looking to have their problem solved by the industry's
leading freelancers and by becoming an expert, you can become their go to freelancer.
Your second option when it comes to growing your freelance business is to build a team or an agency.
This provides its own set of pros and cons, and it really all comes down to your personality type.
Whether you want to become an expert in go more the consulting route or if you want to build a team
and you're more of a leader if you enjoy building effective teams and you like working with people and
managing people.
Building a team or agency might be a great fit for you in the freelance world because digital teams
and agencies have a number of advantages.
Two heads are better than one when you're working on a team.
You will always help solve more complex problems quicker because everyone has their own perspective
in ways at looking at challenges.
When you get multiple smart minds together, you can accomplish larger tasks and tackle bigger projects,
a.k.a. you'll start getting bigger paydays.
You can also hire for your weaknesses when you're building a team or an agency.
This one is huge because once you have your skill set mastered, you can then focus on building a team
that is good at your weaknesses.
The skills you're not good at is something that you can hire for now.
Always hire people that are smarter than you, and that can help you with areas that you are weak.
So, for example, maybe you are not artistic, then you can hire a graphic designer to join your freelance
team, or maybe you want to move your role to focus on large scale tasks.
And so you hire a virtual assistant or someone to help you with the admin level stuff.
The idea here is to build a team of people who all complement each other.
After you've built a freelance team, it's also way easier to systemize that in scale than if you're
just working alone, because once you have a team member roles established, creating a process becomes
much easier.
Everyone is assigned a specific task and everyone knows what to do.
It's no longer all on you, which means you can now work on scaling your business with your efficient
freelance team or agency.
You also have the ability to leverage buying time when you're building a team and you're hiring people
that allows you to gain more time, and we all know time equals money.
So if you want to make more money, you need to find a way to maximize your time.
You do that by hiring people and building a team when you have people working for you on your team and
making you money.
They are actually an asset and not a liability to you because they're helping you expand your time and
get more revenue.
This means you are buying time to make more money.
And last but not least, when you're building a team, you have the ability to be agile in 100 percent
digital, so you don't need to have any overhead.
You don't need to pay any rent for an office.
You don't need to commute anywhere.
Everyone can be located in different parts of the world.
It really doesn't matter.
You have the flexibility to shift from project to project quickly because you have a tight knit team
and you were the one that calls the shots.
That gives you the benefits of having an agile agency and the flexibility as opposed to those bigger
agencies that aren't able to be as agile and shift from project to project as quickly.
That gives you all of the benefits of having a team and none of the cons of having a big agency that
slows things down.
When you go to build your team, a good way to do it is even using the upward platform, you can add
your agency on there and you can post jobs looking for dedicated or long term work by using Upwork in
reverse.
You can use everything you learned about being a good freelancer to handpick the best ones to join your
team.
Another way that you can leverage a freelance team or hiring freelancers is by hiring for a short term
project.
For example, let's say you have a client, but you need help to complete the project.
You can hire an expert level freelancer, pay them for an hour or two of their time, and then you get
to use their expert level advice.
This works extremely well because now you are basically getting paid to learn from the expert and your
project gets to have a better chance for success.
So you're doing multiple things that help move your freelance career forward.