Success in Sweatpants

For me, freelancing has always seemed neither fish nor fowl. How could one truly be creative when the work was being dictated by someone else? It’s like a dressmaker who, dreaming of making a wedding dress of her own design, is stuck forever sewing everyday dresses from patterns provided by her customers. There isn’t time or energy to launch her own clothing line because she’s too busy making ends meet with piecework.

And there is a price for the informal work style—literally. Freelancers have always been expected to charge lower rates than people doing comparable work in a company. They are not perceived as business professionals; rather, they are considered “special talent” without any particular business acumen. Their only contributions are limited to the narrow spectrum of particular specialties.

In terms of service providers, freelancers are on the lower rungs of the commercial hierarchy. Generally speaking, if a person wants to establish themselves at a higher professional (and pricing) level, they have to morph themselves into a consultant or some other label with more cachet.

Perhaps because of the solo aspect of a freelancing life, the types of services connected to the label tend to be limited mainly to creative services: writing, graphic design, software programming, web design. Though not creative (but still a solo pursuit), bookkeeping and, sometimes, accounting were also on the list.  If someone wanted to grow beyond their own two hands, or add services beyond this short list, they eventually had to give up being freelancers—along with the flip flops and home office—and become business owners. Eventually, they would start hiring freelancers themselves to provide low-cost services.

In essence, a freelancers owns a job, not a company.  They are still as chained to the clock, if not more so, than they would be as someone else’s employee. All they’ve done is taken out the middle man.

Back in the old days, before the internet flattened the world, anyone who wanted to work solo, stay in shorts and t-shirts, and have the elbow room to make their own schedules had to remain a freelancer—a sole proprietor with a solid income ceiling that would be impossible to break through without changing their business and life models.

These limitations contributed to what I think of as a freelancer’s mindset, a self-limiting viewpoint that keeps many service providers myopically stuck.

More about this coming up….