Thread by @omoalhajaabiola

Why you struggle as a freelancer (Almost everyone struggles with Number 3)

1. Looking for Eight-figure companies to work for

You probably will never work for an eight-figure company throughout your freelancing journey (It's not a curse) because the big agencies have snapped up the last one you could work with

Starting as a newbie, I preferred working with small companies. I enjoyed working directly with the decision makers and not have to lose sleep over working with 12 layers of management. Moreover, you will get paid faster but you also risk not getting paid at all

2. Poor Communication
As a freelancer, one of the most important skills to possess is the ability to sell yourself and demonstrate tangible values. In all conversations, whether it's with a potential client or returning buyers, ensure to demonstrate and display your positive

attitude, passion, and the specific values you are adding to your client's business. More often than not, this also includes helping your client to buy into your mission first - walk them through an hypothetical realization of their goals. A typical statement might be "imagine

selling 1700 units of your products in the second quarter of the year while reducing your ad spend and doubling your net profits. This will mean about 11.7% increase over what you realized last year. Yinka (If your client's name is Yinka), what does this means for your business?

for your life?

3. This is often overlooked and even the best of the best service providers make this mistake. Every interaction wit a potential client is an investment vs expense interaction. It involves an exchange of value (this is why many lose clients, undercharge or even

both). During a conversation with @ToyosiGodwin , I explained the psychology of prices and pricing structure as a freelancer. A freelancer values the income he receives on any project; your client values what is it you do for them.

Freelancers engage in business-to-business, or B2B, transactions. You (a business) are selling a product (a website or an article) to another business or organization. Most businesses buy products that do one of two things:

a. make them more money
b. decrease their costs

This means that any transaction that a business takes is often meant to serve as an investment. A factory will hire more staff because they want to increase their output which helps them sell more widgets. A real estate investor will acquire more rental units to increase their

baseline recurring revenue.

Think about the dentists that hired you for a new website content. If you’re a designer, you might immediately switch into “website-making mode” — What style do they like? How many pages do they need? Online ordering or no online ordering?

However, it’s unlikely that the dentist decided one day to burn a few thousand dollars because she felt like redesigning her website.

What she really wants is something else. Maybe she is barely making payroll each week, and she desperately needs more walk-in patients who need

full-mouth rehabilitation. Well, her competitors down the road with a flashy website have filled their appointment books and are not looking for new patients. So maybe that’s it? A flashy, new website?
What’s important is what you find when you peel back layer after layer.

That behind each project request you’ll find a problem. And this problem is affecting the client. So she thinks, "Maybe things will change If I pay for a new website content". When clients approach us, they only tell us the first fragment of the problem "I want to pay you to

rewrite my website content". Clients often leave out the bigger (probably more important story). And so
we will focus on having a good website content but forgoing the bigger problem.

As freelancers, whether you are a newbie or experienced one, writer or developer, until you

can dig deeper into the problem and understand that your client does not, in reality, care about how optimized your content is (but rather interested in raising her revenues in the case of the dentist), you will struggle to charge what you really worth. It's high time you saw

yourself as an investment vessel, one who puts money in the pocket of his clients.

REPEAT AFTER ME:

I am a freelancer. I am an investment, not an expense.