Today's post is from the lovely Amy Derby, one of my Twitter friends, talking about some of the obstacles that keep virtualpreneur/freelance writers (and other creative types) from earning six figures in their businesses. -- Trish
“You’re so lucky,” people like to tell me. “You earn a six-figure income pursuing your passion from home.”
When my family and friends say this, I just nod and smile. When aspiring freelance writers approach me with this sentiment, I get a little worried. Earning a decent living as a freelance writer has nothing to do with luck and, quite often, little to do with writing.
If someone had told me going into this that I would spend more than seventy-five percent of my time doing (or delegating) administrative tasks, looking for work, marketing my services, networking with potential clients and colleagues, talking with and coaching clients, tracking my expenses and any number of other tasks that have nothing to do with writing, I would have jumped off the freelance ship before I ever got on board. I outsource, I delegate, I employ accountants and virtual assistants, and yet I still spend only about twenty-five percent of my time writing.
Six-figure freelancers wear more than six hats. We also face a lot of obstacles getting to the point where we are able to afford those hats.
1) Ourselves: From the beginning, we are our own greatest obstacles. We hate our day jobs and want to freelance, but we’re so comfortable in what we hate that we fight ourselves. Maybe we think we don’t have what it takes to make it as a full-time freelancer, so we hang onto our cubicle lives during the day and try our hands at freelancing on the evenings and on weekends. We sacrifice more time than we have trying to prove to ourselves that we can do it. Sometimes we stay stuck in this should-be transition phase so long we get burned out on freelancing before we ever make it a career.
2) Our Families: Once we decide to go for it, our families aren’t always supportive. They don’t think writing is a real job. They’ve seen us stressing ourselves out trying to work full time and write part time, and they’ve seen the rewards we’ve reaped as small in comparison to what we’ve taken from our families – our time, our attention. If we’re lucky, they’ll come around and support us eventually.
3) Failure: Sometimes we fail. But before we do, we expend so much energy worrying about whether we’ll fail that it’s almost like we’re setting ourselves up. Failure isn’t a bad thing, as long as we can learn to look at it as a learning experience and pull ourselves up from what wasn’t working and into something that does work. Meanwhile, we have bills to pay and families to feed. On one hand, it’s realistic to keep our ventures low-risk so that small failures won’t break us. On the other hand, if fear of failure is keeping us from taking risks and putting ourselves full-force into what we want to do and be, the chance of succeeding big is smaller.
4) Success: All successes, big and small, affect us. Long before we reach the six figure income mark, success has the opportunity to taint us. Some of us get quite cocky and begin to slack off on our marketing efforts, or we develop an attitude that folks should be drumming down our doors begging us to work for them. If this is the case, success will surely be short-lived. Failure is only one badly-accepted success away.
5) Changes: The more we endure, the more we grow. If we’ve done well in finding clients and working with them, accepted our successes gracefully and used our failures as tools rather than weapons of self-destruction, we have changed. Our inner fraidy-cats might still rear their heads occasionally, but we have grown up. We have learned, through trial and error, what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, a lot of times what we learn is that to continue to grow, we will have to change even more.
6) Decisions: There comes a time in the lives of most successful freelancers where the path forks. Do we continue along as we are now, or do we pave ourselves a new road? Many freelancers earn six figures for a year or two and decide that’s it; they’ve had enough of living a life of working for others and decide to work for themselves. Some choose to write ebooks, create ecourses or develop other products to give them a passive income. A few take some of their earnings and get away from it all to pursue a fiction writing dream -- that novel they’ve always wanted to write. Some enjoy what they’re doing so much that they decide to become a bigger version of what they already are and expand their solo writing business into a partnership or larger operation. They hire employees and create an enterprise to reach more clients and earn more money. Any of these decisions will be a difficult one, one which will probably make them feel a bit like how they felt back in the beginning when they were leaving the false-comfort of that pseudo-cozy cubicle to pursue the freelance writing life.
Along the way, we learn to deal with obstacles. If we’re lucky, we learn to see these obstacles not as scary trolls guarding our bridges but as navigational signs along the highway telling us we’re headed in the right direction. If we’re smart, we also learn to sell hats.
What obstacles have you had to overcome to get to where you are now?
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Amy Derby intentionally left her corporate paralegal life in 2004 to accidentally journey into the adventures of freelancing. She now earns a six figure income blogging for lawyers and hopes to retire by the time she’s 30. She prefers a life without hats.
