Skills that are useful to a freelancer

Every three to five years, my understanding of the set of skills important for freelancing changes greatly because I grow up and gain new experience and skills. What I will write about below is relevant at the beginning of 2020. And perhaps it will never lose its relevance. And, perhaps, already in 2025 I will blush and smile embarrassedly, looking at this text.

For example, while still working in the studio, I once took part in tripartite negotiations, where I saw live how the designer skillfully “pushed” his decision. He was so convincing and persistent that in the end the other participants in the negotiations gave up on him and did not argue, accepting the job. “This is aerobatics!” - I thought. And he concluded: “In our profession, the more eloquently you defend your point of view, the more successful you will be.” And for a whole year, or even two, I broadcast this conclusion to the people who surrounded me.

After some time, when I worked as a freelancer on my own and began to collect a base of loyal clients, I saw that I began to lose some of them after the first order, and realized that the skill of “pushing” my decision with eloquence could leave me without the most lucrative customers who were willing to pay more for comfortable conditions of cooperation. Then I began to convey the idea that I need to work with the client “on the same side of the barricades” and express my point of view as diplomatically as possible, leaving room for doubt in my own decisions, so that the client gets the result that not only me, but also he likes.

The same can be said about the amount of the prepayment. If in 2015 I wrote articles where I said that I either do not take an advance payment or take 25% of the project cost, then in 2020 I am sure that when providing complex services (I will talk about what complex and simple services are a little later) you can safely take a 100% advance payment.

These observations allow me to conclude that in ten years, perhaps, many of my thoughts will change again.

Why did I tell you about this? So that you are critical of any information, including that published in this book. Critical thinking will help you achieve your goals faster, without wasting energy on obviously false paths.

Now, with that said, here is my list of things a freelancer will need.

Profession. To sell any service as a freelancer, you need to be able to perform it. Usually it all starts either with hobbies and interests, or with skills acquired as an employee.

I began to gain interface design skills while working on the team of the student portal Finek.org. I first joined them as a text writer in the creative section, then I worked as a designer, editor, and even a little bit of a manager. This was my hobby, no one asked me strictly and no one paid me for my work.

But this hobby allowed me to get a job first at the Realweb studio, and then at Webmaster.spb. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that I was invited there by Sergei Pavelchuk - the very person who founded the Finek.org portal at one time and knew me well. I didn’t understand this then, but now I am deeply convinced: what will help you find a job is not so much your skills (by the way, you can always lie when listing your skills), but the people around you who know about your qualifications and your possession of these skills. Therefore, a balance is necessary between training the profession and shaping the environment.

While working in the studios, I studied at the expense of the employer, gaining additional experience in negotiations, interacting with other company employees and communicating with the owner.

And when I took on my first freelance orders, I acquired the missing skills at the expense of my clients. I felt and understood this, and therefore at that time I valued my services much lower than the market (my conscience was gnawing).

Finally, I felt that the basic training was completed and I could be considered a specialist. From that moment on, the cost of my services began to be dictated by the market and began to directly depend on demand.

In acquiring basic professional skills, aspiring professionals now have an advantage compared to me in the early 2000s. These are educational materials published online. The theoretical component of most IT professions today can be obtained from them, after which you can immediately get a job or internship. Some daredevils even skip the step of finding a job and immediately go freelance after studying the theory.

Attracting clients. Let's say I become an expert in my profession. What to do next? You can’t do without the skill of attracting clients. This includes the ability to “package” your product or service, presence in the information fields of potential clients, as well as skills in journalism and creating video content. The stronger the flow of incoming applications, the more stable the freelance situation and the higher the average check.

My first freelance client came to me through a recommendation. A school friend, programmer Konstantin Malyshev, asked me to design an information system interface for one of his clients. And he would not have contacted me if I had not previously told him what I was doing. Even at the very beginning of my career, I was not shy about expressing myself to the people around me. And it was they, the people, and not my professional skills that served as the basis for my further path.

To create a sufficient volume of orders before going freelance, I sent out emails to ten studios in St. Petersburg and Moscow. In the letters, I offered to take on the role of a remote designer. I accompanied the letters with prices, examples of my work, and also tried to explain in as much detail as possible the benefits of such cooperation. Three out of ten studios responded to the proposal, and after some time a strong relationship was built between us.

Then, having found the ground under my feet, I decided to create my own brand (this is how Projectorat appeared), made a website for it, representation on social networks and worked under the guise of a virtual company. I did my work efficiently, periodically wrote articles and training materials, and posted videos on the YouTube channel. All this led to the fact that there were more orders for my services than I could fulfill. This made it possible to periodically raise prices and not have to worry about finding orders for “tomorrow.”

Negotiation. Negotiation skills are developed mainly during the negotiations themselves. It’s one thing to know what they consist of, what questions to ask, how to inspire trust, how to listen and hear the client, and quite another thing to put this knowledge into practice.

I blushed terribly at the first negotiations, where I acted as a performer. I made up answers where I should have said “I don’t know.” I didn’t feel when I could interrupt a client in order to direct the conversation in the right direction, and when I had to silently catch every word. I didn’t understand how to make sure there were no awkward pauses. I didn’t know how to fit the negotiations into a certain period of time and still discuss all the issues.

All these skills appeared and developed only during live communication with clients. And now this is perhaps one of my most valuable skills.

Time management. When we go to school, university, office, other people manage our time. All we need to do is not be late and complete the tasks assigned to us. Come to work by 10 am, do the things that are required of us, and go home at 7 pm. The business itself is not so important, the size of the salary does not depend on it (unless, of course, this is a salesperson on a percentage of sales). We understand that we will be punished for being late, and therefore we arrive on time.

This will not happen in freelancing. Suddenly all our time is ours. We decide for ourselves when to start work, what time to finish and what to do in the process. This freedom is a great responsibility and burden if we do not know what to do with it.

Due to the inability to manage their time, many beginning freelancers are stuck in a series of projects that do not allow them to develop. They miss deadlines, are late for meetings and negotiations (after all, no one punishes them for this now), and begin to lie when describing the current state of affairs (after all, it is now difficult to check them).

I went through all this too. It was only when I found myself in debt, with a huge overwhelming to-do list and several lost clients, that I realized that I was doing something wrong. I have read several books on time management. The book that helped me the most was David Allen's Getting Things Done. After it, I really put things in order, and then began to manage them from the perspective of achieving my goals. Goals for the day, week, month, quarter, year and several years.

In the end, I mastered this skill and no longer missed deadlines and at every moment I knew what to do to get closer to the result that I needed. After this trait, I was ready for the next logical step: managing other people’s time.

Working with documents. If in hired work, performers more often look at fussing with documents as a necessity imposed by other people, then in freelancing (or in management positions), the efficiency and safety of work depends on these documents. And each of them has its own meaning.

You will have to learn how to competently write letters, issue invoices, prepare contracts and certificates of work performed. Add clients to CRM systems and maintain task lists while doing planning. All these things in themselves are quite simple, but if a freelancer has never done this in his life, then problems may arise.

Fortunately, when going freelance, you don’t have to be afraid that all this knowledge about documents will be needed instantly and all at once. Everything will have its turn. First, we deal with letters, then, after some time, with contracts, invoices, acts, and so on, progressively, with increasing experience and the number of clients in the work.

For example, I remember the moment when I signed my first contract. I did not understand on what basis it was necessary to assign a number to it and where to look for such rules. But if the answer to my question was easy to find and turned out to be quite obvious, then information on how to write letters correctly is much less common. Moreover, freelancers usually are not interested in this issue, continuing to conduct business correspondence on a whim or in the way they are used to doing in hired work.

IP management. Or any other way to formalize your relationship with the state. IP is the status of an individual entrepreneur. By the way, at the time of writing this chapter, an experimental tax regime “Professional Income Tax” (in common parlance – “Self-Employed”) is being introduced in Moscow and the Kaluga region, for those who sell the results of their labor and do not have hired employees. Therefore, perhaps in the future, in order to work with serious clients, you will no longer have to register as an entrepreneur. Individual entrepreneur is the most common option for freelancers. It allows you to work alone or have employees, does not require authorized capital and allows you to choose the appropriate taxation system for yourself.

I registered as an individual entrepreneur in 2011. Even then, you could use online services that helped you register, although they were crude, and you had to figure out some issues yourself. Today, the procedure has been greatly simplified, and online services work like clockwork and lead the aspiring entrepreneur “by the hand.” These services will tell you when and where to open an account for a legal entity; how to submit all the necessary documents in a minimum number of trips to the tax authorities; will help with reports and advance payments to pension and insurance funds, as well as with the preparation of an electronic signature, so as not to personally visit the tax office with the annual report.

However, I still remember well the time when I myself knew nothing about all these things that today seem like a simple routine. And if there are no people around a novice freelancer who can ask for advice (for example, how to choose OKVED codes and what they even are), then you will have to overcome a certain threshold associated with the fear of the unknown and look for information on your own.

Service. Freelancing is nowhere without a high level of service. More precisely, not quite like that. In the market for providing complex services on a freelance basis, the service is so bad that if you improve it, you will immediately stand out in the crowd of competitors. A high level of service is characterized by the fact that the client receives answers to questions about the progress of the service even before he asks them. In this book, I will refer to the topic of service more than once and repeat again and again: “The client is usually not able to immediately assess the professional qualities of a freelancer, but he will appreciate the level of service at any time.”

He himself realized this only when he found himself in the shoes of his clients and ordered design and design services from other performers. This experience helped me change the way I do business. These changes attracted even more incoming applications - and thereby automatically increased the average bill.

Different freelancers have well-developed several skills from the list above, but rarely all at once. Communicating with other freelancers, I noticed: the more points a specialist covered, the more he earned compared to specialists of the same professional level.