Anyone on here a freelance worker? Whats it like? I’ve read about the pros and cons. Interested to know your experiences…

Ive been freelance for over 7 years, although for a good part of it to some degree or other I had been on a retainer until beginning of this year. The retainer was a comfort blanket, owning between 4 and 20 hours of my week at various times, but making sure I had some consistent income for the bills. Now my work is more piecemeal, but robviously the hourly rates are higher and a fair chunk of my work is success based now so the rewards can be significant , but so to can the periods without income – which is fine now that Mrs Stoner is back out grafting too 😀

I started freelancing at 29ish, and would never ever go back to salaried employment again.

It can be a bit ‘feast or famine’ TBH. Its the way it tends to go. You’ve either got every single one of your contacts on the phone within an hour, or nothing. It can be very stressful. You’re working all the hours god sends, then… nothing!

Once you’ve got a lot of contacts, its great. But it takes a lot of hard work to get there.

Oh… and getting your clients to actually pay you within a reasonable time frame is also a bloody nightmare too.

always been freelance apart from 6 months after i got my degree, wouldn’t swap it for anything. no line manager/emails about performance/targets/appearance/knowing when your holiday is/shitty bosses or co-workers/back-stabbing etc etc. that work/life suits some people but it’s not for me.

Everything binners said.

Most days it’s great, far better than working for the man, but when you are having a nightmare there’s no one else to turn to.

It’s handy that the wife has a steady income, although I’m sure if she didn’t I could pick up steadier work. At the moment I’m tending to go for more interesting stuff but it’s far more up and down the the duller jobs.

loving it at moment freelancing in Madrid, but it is something that you want to build up a buffer of money as you cant guarantee when you will be working.

I’ve been a freelance designer for 8 years now.
Fast internet, skype, etc make it very easy. In fact the economic downturn benefited freelancers as companies had to become more flexible.

Pros:
If you work hard you can earn a fair bit
If you’re strict with yourself you can work a ‘normal amount’ and can fit in other things (cycle, build sheds, etc).
No messing about from management structure. I’ve had way too much of that thanks.
Lots of time at home with my sons.

Cons:
Nobody around to bounce ideas around with and get a sanity check (My wife is also a designer, so that’s handy).
You have to be a very good judge of your own work.
Holidays can be tricky.
Difficult to say ‘no’ to people, which means you sometimes get crap jobs.
Clients can sometimes turn out to be awful (non-payers, etc), but it all usually works out in the end.
Sometimes difficult to draw boundaries between work/home when it’s all the same. Struggled with that at first, but now it’s no problem and boys have got used to it too.
Nobody ever pays you to do admin/keep learning/backup/etc, so you have to build a routine.

Edit: I’m very glad I had a solid agency background before turning freelance.

Effectively freelance (land surveyor & engineer) for 18 months after leaving my corporate nonsense job.

Was quiet or three weeks in June ( went mountain biking to Les Arcs for one of them :D) since then it’s been pretty much more than full time, even did a few days work whilst I was on holiday with the family! 7 days a week in Scotland on a wind farm build for 4 months, 7am – 8pm most days was very hard, especially as I was living in my caravan too!

The best bit is not ring part of a management thing or being involved in office politics, backstabbing, all of which I’d had a gut full of.

Worst bit is working away from family on occasions.

I left my corporate job because I felt t was making my ill. I am a much happier and healthier person these days.

Most of the companies I have worked for have offered me a full time job so I guess it’s pretty secure if things go bad on the freelance side of things.

Sorry for a min thread hijack. Did all of you have a good long list of potential clients before you started? Also do you all work in the type of industry where its lots of little jobs rather than projects that take 10 months?

Started freelancing after coming out of a big plc but quickly needed help and started a business. The only words of wisdom I can offer is that whilst you are working you are not selling and vice versa so it can be a bit of a rollercoaster until you have regular clients supplying work.

Very interesting responses here. Thanks for everyone’s input; more opinions welcome though!

Our Graphic Designer at work went freelance a few years back – first he went part time and then finally fully freelance. Most of his new clients were companies who had employed ex-colleagues – all word of mouth stuff. If you’re good, people will want to use you.

I think alot depends on what your profession is and what your domestic circumstances are.

I have been a freelancer for 11’ish years providing consultancy to smaller local charities and public sector organisations. Due to the well publicised budget cuts this has become very frustrating and financially challenging in the last couple of years, and I’m seriously considering trying to get back into full-time work. I currently feel I am not utilising my extensive skills, knowledge and experience – I have run two charities / social enterprises in the past and am currently a trustee of a couple of charities – and the sector I am in is unlikely to change whilst the current Government is cutting expenditure. A key issue in the sector I work in is that most pieces of work or contracts are put out to tender, so you can spend a significant period of time completing applications and attending interviews. Getting ‘repeat business’ or ‘word of mouth’ recommendations is harder in this sector as many of the contracts are either directly or indirectly funded by public money.

I mainly work at home and recently am more frequently finding it quite a lonely existence, so family and friends are important to keep sane.

On the plus side there is lots of flexibility and I can work when it best suits me (I am not a morning person), and can also take the odd day or half day for other activities – cycling, walking, meeting people for coffee, going for a day out. There have also been a number of very interesting and diverse projects and clients which you may not get working in one organisation – I have done everything from acting as an Interim Manager for a Citizens Advice Bureau, to organising a national conference for a national charity, setting up a Furniture Re-Use and Recycling project from scratch, researching race hate crimes, consultancy support around a merger of 6 organisations, and raising hundreds of thousands of pounds for various organisations.

There are also financial advantages – offsetting expenditure against tax can be very beneficial.

On balance, and assuming there is a regular stream of work in the area in which you work, I would err towards self-employment.

The missus is earning the main cash no we have moved to Oz, I ended up getting retained for 1 day/week now up to 2.5 with a small consultancy. Like job but risk both ways.

I’m basically trying to do the work generation this for the business as it’s a tight industry which needs contacts first skills second.

It’s up and down, you either need a big savings account of a partner bringing in the cash.

Was. didn’t get enough work or make enough money, had big problems with self-esteem, confidence in my work and all that (maybe stuff I have anyway), and was a very small competitive market even before it went tits up. It’s a nice ideal though and I really admire people going for it on their own. Did ok for a bit. I think huge self confidence, motivation, drive etc is a large part of being good at it, not in a deluded way but as being good at whatever it is you do. Cos lots n lots of people are good at stuff. And knowing people – contacts and networking and all that are the only thing that are going to get your brilliant thing work..

The thing to keep in mind is ‘freelancing’ is just a state of employment. The fun, worries, dangers and rewards are all specific to the sector you are working in and your angle, where you are directing your services to people and why they’d use you.

So ‘whats it like being a freelancer?’ is a bit like asking ‘whats it like having a salary?’. I don’t think a premier league footballer, a submariner and a carehome worker will give you the same answer. In the same way an odd job man, film crews, the ubiquitous IT consultant and a hitman will all have very different existences as freelancers.

So in you’re industry – whatever that is – you’ve got to look at the work a freelancer can actually do and how it can be compared to the work thats already been done by your potential client’s employees. Supermarkets will already have their own shelf stackers, so putting an ad in the local paper ‘Freelance shelf stacker for hire’ will probably not yield much work.

When I returned to freelancing, after 5 years of wage slips, I had two ‘angles’:

One was to target the kind of work that my salaried peers struggle with because they couldn’t untangle themselves from their routine job commitments to give them thinking time – feasibilities, curatorial work etc. This was a good angle to get me started but my enthusiasm for it waned pretty quickly.

The other was looking for geographical areas where there was little potential for people with my skills to work. . I provide a lot of technical and project management services to art galleries and arts projects, so I targeted venues that are comparatively isolated. I based myself in Glasgow where theres a lot of potential clients but also a lot of competitors, but I targeted venues in rural lincolnshire, northumbria etc and got used to life in B&Bs. Isolated venues like that can’t sustain a pool of appropriately skilled/experienced people locally, there isn’t enough work across the year to create a post or keep freelancers available so when they have a bigger, more ambitious project to undertake they need to hire someone in from further afield.

Whats proven to be most useful to me about this latter approach is the kind of person who books me in those circumstances moves job pretty often – people in my sector will jump from post to post every 2-3 years. When they arrive in their new post, with an unfamiliar venue and an unfamiliar crew they first thing they seem to do is call in someone familiar – and its me they want, someone they know the measure of, rather than a specific service I offer.

interesting. Maccruiskeen – I acknowledge your point that its just a state of employment and peoples self employment experiences wouold vary drastiaclly from one to another.

My situation is I have an opportunity to become Freelance and work for a bicycle manufacturer selling bicycles to retailers. I have a background in sales and i have always wanted to combine selling with bikes! I know the motivation is there, cold calling doesn’t phase me. The risk comes from the expenditure it will cost to undertake this task, car, petrol etc vs the gains made from the comission.

As of yet i dont know the numbers precisely enough to do some sums but im researching this. Its also quite exciting becoming self employed and i think it will look good on a CV.

What are your thought on this model?

What are your thought on this model?

You’d need input from someone who freelances in a similar way. I either pitch to undertake work or get approached to do work, but its all agreed term, agreed outcome, agreed price stuff. I’m not doing anything on a commission.

The key consideration if you are transitioning from PAYE to freelance is you need to become allergic to fixed outgoings. The salary cycle encourages you to break outgoings into monthly chunks. SE you strive to do the opposite, cover your overheads in whole whenever you can, minimise you’re regular outgoings so when you hit a lean patch you can ride it out.

The underlying difference is a trade off between security and hope. The ‘fear’ that a lot of people associate with self employment is really hope, it can be a nervous situation but when people say they couldn’t go back to salaried work what they mean is that fear/hope is actually very satisfying and they don’t want to give that up, even in exchange for security.

My situation is I have an opportunity to become Freelance and work for a bicycle manufacturer selling bicycles to retailers

In Germany? Have you seen how few people can actually be bothered to go into bike shops?

Seriously though, what is the deal based on sounds like commission only, so you need to persuade a small business to take the bikes from you, then in 30/60/90/how many days pay you so you can pay the company who gave you the bikes. Add on to that the LBS hasn’t sold any because you were better at sales that than they were so have no money to give you.

I guess find somebody doing similar, buy them a beer and see what it’s like for real.

If you have sales, it is great.