You know your craft, you’re great at what you do and are confident you can delight clients with your products and services, but are these key elements enough to be a successful freelancer?
Being great at your craft alone isn’t typically enough to run a freelance business and thrive. You also need certain core business skills.
Here are 5 core business skills to enhance and refine to make your freelance career a success.
1. Negotiation Skills
Being able to negotiate successfully with clients will mean you don’t have to settle for work offers that aren’t suitable for you; this isn’t just about money issues but also terms and conditions that might not sit well with you (or need some tweaking), such as timescales, resources and deliverables.
Negotiating isn’t a one-way street but a conversation that can lead to wins for both parties involved, so communicating your needs properly will set you up for success.
Poor negotiation skills may lead you to take on work that doesn’t pay enough, that you don’t enjoy, or just don’t have time to do in the allotted timescale. Good negotiation skills aren’t just for client conversations either but can lead to you getting better deals on other things, such as the tools you use for your business or rent you pay for business premises.
Remember: This is your business, and you absolutely can run it on your terms.
2. Client Communication Skills
How you communicate with clients as a freelancer is crucial to your success. Dealing with clients is a key aspect of freelancing and one that can cause issues if not managed well from the outset.
Having solid business processes in place, such as a smooth client onboarding process, can help mitigate many potential misunderstandings, and being clear upfront as to what a client can expect working with you can manage expectations on both sides.
These points will typically be detailed in your client documentation, such as your initial proposal, right through to your written agreement, which will, of course, also include your freelancer payment terms and conditions.
Clear and effective communication will help ensure there are no ‘surprises’ down the line.
3. Time Management Skills
When you are running your own business, you are responsible for making things happen, and that includes showing up, being punctual, getting things done and meeting deadlines.
While you might outsource specific tasks, you are still ultimately responsible for ensuring your business runs like clockwork and stuff gets done, especially when it comes to tasks of a regulatory nature, such as paying the correct taxes or getting accounts filed on time.
Good time management also impacts on your productivity. Planning ahead and reviewing processes to see what can be done more efficiently is all part of this. That’s why it makes sense to automate any repetitive routine processes that need to be done but devour up your precious time, such as invoicing.
You can read more about the benefits of automation for small businesses at our post here.
4. Sales & Marketing Skills
If you don’t market yourself properly, how will potential clients find you? Whether you use content marketing, SEO, social media, cold calling, email marketing or a combination of inbound and outbound strategies, you have to put yourself out there and be confident in your communications.
And it’s not just how you communicate (via what medium, your brand voice and style) but what you communicate. For example, how you position yourself in the market, who your ideal client is and the marketing message you put across to target your ideal clients.
Likewise, honing your sales and discovery call skills will help you better identify clients who are the right fit, boost your confidence and help provide clarity to your potential clients regarding what you do, the value you provide and the transformation you offer.
5. Money Management Skills
You don’t need to be a financial whizz kid to run a successful freelance business, but you do need to know the basics and understand the principles of how a positive cash flow is essential to keep you afloat.
Knowing what’s coming into your business, what’s due out, the related expenses and what and how to charge are all vital for you to prosper. Hiring an accountant can help with a lot of the more top-level money management issues, but to help maintain a positive cash flow, one essential thing you can do is to ensure your invoices get paid on time.
Invoicing software such as Invoice Ninja can automate this process so it is streamlined, and what’s more, if you integrate with one of our payment gateways, your clients can pay you fast.
Payment gateways enable you to accept credit cards and other electronic payments online directly from invoices you email to your clients. This means clients can pay you in just one click, and they don’t even need to leave the Invoice Ninja client-side portal. Seamless, quick and convenient!
Invoice Ninja integrates with many high-quality payment gateways, including Stripe, PayPal & Venmo, Go Cardless, Checkout, Square, Apple Pay, and many more. You can even get paid in Bitcoin. View all the payment gateways we integrate with here.
Try Invoice Ninja out for free here.
