GUEST POST: 6 Obstacles to a 6-Figure At-Home Writing Income
Written by Trish - September 23, 2008 16 Comments 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.
Read the Comments
16 Outstanding Responses to "GUEST POST: 6 Obstacles to a 6-Figure At-Home Writing Income"
Amy Derby on September 23, 2008 at 10:28 am | Permalink
Hey Trish! Thanks for having me.
James Chartrand - Men with Pens on September 23, 2008 at 4:18 pm | Permalink
Ahh, the famous six-figure income… Was that James-bait?
Having a business that pulls in a few of those six figures a year, I can say that the biggest obstacle to people reaching the first six-figure goal is… wait for it…
Themselves.
There is no greater obstacle than the mindset that you will start a business to do what you love for a living.
Then you end up building yourself a job for a business that can’t run without you wearing all hats – and you limit your own income potential by working for the business versus getting the business to work for you.
Once freelancers realize that mindset and a few internal management changes are all that hold them back, the sky’s the limit.
Cheers, Amy. Well done.
(Oh, hell, what?! No subscribe to comments?)
Trish Lambert on September 23, 2008 at 4:39 pm | Permalink
Amy, Come post here any time! The more folks “who have done it” that my readers can hear from, the better!
And James, you are absolutely spot on. Your points are really the basis for my “freelancing is dead” argument. Freelancers own a job, vpreneurs own a business. If a work-at-home company owner is looking for six figures on the income report, it’s going to happen much faster when they get out of the job-owning mindset and into “grow the business” mode. Thanks for the great observation (and, sorry, I checked Typepad, but can’t find a subscribe to comment feature to enable!). Trish
Karen Swim on September 23, 2008 at 4:54 pm | Permalink
Hi Trish! Hi Amy! Well, I am quite fond of hats but not so much when they’re labeled with business tasks. :-0 Amy, your 6 points were so right on and I could add #7, rinse, repeat. As you change and grow, you get new failures (yay!) or you won’t change and grow and then your business will stagnate and die and you’ll be homeless or worse forced back into corporate America, oh sorry, I digressed. Anywho, where was I, oh never mind, you really did say it all and you said it so well!
--Deb on September 23, 2008 at 8:36 pm | Permalink
Yep. I’m my own worst enemy. I already knew THAT! (grin)
Great post!
steph on September 23, 2008 at 9:21 pm | Permalink
Amy: Congrats on your guest post! And what an eloquently written post it was, very insightful, helpful, honest, and true. I’ve already stumbled your latest on your own site, and now I will this one if I can!
It’s easy to see why you make what you do, not only because you write well but on your blog you often talk about the work you make yourself to do succeed. It still scares the crap out of me, but I have to decide what I want more: a successful business later or comfort now? Which is going to pay off?
Friar on September 23, 2008 at 9:33 pm | Permalink
Okay, someone please explain to me what “Six Figures” means.
Earning $100K in one year, working 40 hours a week, with 3-4 weeks vacation?
Earning $100K in one year, working 80 hours a week, with NO time off?
Or earning $50 an hour when one actually can find work? (which theoretically, works out to $100K if you multiply it by 2000 work hours per year).
Reason I’m asking, it that it’s not often made very clear when I read a lot of blogs.
I suspect making a decent wage at freelancing is a lot harder than it woudl seem.
Alex Fayle | Someday Syndrome on September 23, 2008 at 11:24 pm | Permalink
As the others have said – well done and great post Amy! I’m with Friar with the question – what does six-figure income mean? With another question – does that include billings before paying subcontractors (do you even have subcontractors)?
Amy Derby on September 23, 2008 at 11:49 pm | Permalink
Hey all.
James — I would never bait you. At least not with money.
What you said.. “you end up building yourself a job for a business that can’t run without you wearing all hats – and you limit your own income potential by working for the business versus getting the business to work for you” … that is so true. And you’re so right about this too: There is no greater obstacle than the mindset that you will start a business to do what you love for a living.
Karen — Loving the rinse and repeat! Seriously, I’ll confess. I would rather do anything than return to corporate america. In fact, I left corporate america with no plan of what I would do next. I had saved up some money and was like “I’ll figure it out, but I’d rather be a homeless poet than do this anymore.” Luckily I found a good compromise. But I would have gladly gone to a blue collar job at minimum wage than go back to working in an office.
Steph — Thank you. You’re so sweet! Honestly, it scares the crap out of me too. I just force myself to do as much as I can anyway, for now at least, so I can stash away some cash and quit working in a few years. Or at least work in a different capacity.
Friar — That’s a good question. And yes, it’s a lot of work. I earned six figures last year working about 60 hrs per week. I didn’t take a vacation, but I took several weeks off for illness, so I guess that balances out the same. In comparison, I worked about 80 hours a week for half the salary at a law firm where I was twice as stressed and still had three hours per day of commuting, not counting waiting for trains. Had I only worked 40 hours a week last year, I would have still earned six figures, but barely. It might have been in the high fives. This is after taxes which, by the way — for anyone who doesn’t understand self employment, which probably isn’t you but just putting it out there — adds up to nearly half of my income. This year I’ve cut back a lot for the sake of my health and sanity. I just touched over the six figure mark this year, but this year I only put in about 6 hours of actual work per day on average. This includes over a month I took off at the beginning of the year and a few month where I was only putting in maybe 4 hour days after recovering. But yes, it is much harder than it seems.
Alex — See above. Oh, and no, I’m not counting subcontractor payments. Or consulting fees or speaking engagements or the time I was flown out to a conference to train a group of fanatics. LOL The numbers are still in the six figure range including all of that, just a bit higher up.
Trish — Thanks for asking me to blog about the six figure income thing. My earnings are something I rarely discuss — at least in such detail — at my own blog. I always feel like I’m coming off as bragging, and I don’t like that. But I do think it’s good to put the info out there so others know it’s possible (and at the same time not easy). So thanks for giving me a push, in a friendly kind of way.
Trish Lambert on September 24, 2008 at 8:21 am | Permalink
Hi all!
I want to weigh in on the 6-figure equation question here. My business crossed the $100k in its second year, and has done at least half again that amount last year and this year. Besides shifting my mindset to allow that kind of income, I did some number crunching, as follows.
First, if it’s only going to be you bringing in revenues, do a reverse calculation. Estimate how many billable hours you will (or want to) work in a year. I assume a billable work year of 1000 hours. Then, decide how much revenue you want or need. Obviously, if you want $100K, you will need to bill out at $100 per hour.
If you can leverage your revenue with contractors, you can be logging billable hours while earning a markup on your team’s hours. To bill for business growth and manage risk (if, for example, you end up having to step in and finish the job for some reason), target for a mark up of 50% of the rate you are charging your client, and don’t charge less than 25% of the rate.
Trish
Karen Putz on September 24, 2008 at 9:57 am | Permalink
Six figures–ok, now I don’t feel so guilty about Amy paying for lunch yesterday.
Cath Lawson on September 24, 2008 at 10:59 am | Permalink
Hi Amy – This is a brilliant post and I guess it will open a few people’s eyes.
It would probably be quicker to list the obstacles I haven’t had – chauvinism has been a huge one.
And another thing a lot of folk don’t understand is that you wind up spending more if you earn more as you don’t have time to cook, clean etc.
Also, when you sell a business & start again – you really are starting from scratch. A lot of folk don’t seem to get that – they seem to assume everything you touch turns to gold.
There is one good thing though – you no longer have these stupid ideas about making a ridiculous amount overnight because a) you realise how dangerous fast growth is and b) you know that being able to pay yourself a whole heap of cash isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Amy Derby on September 24, 2008 at 1:24 pm | Permalink
Karen — Lunch was so much fun!! And you drove all the way out to my house, so you don’t get to feel guilty for my buying your lunch.
Cath – You’re right about the chauvinism. Don’t even get me started on that one.
As far as money goes, I’ve never cared much about money. I was just as happy before I had any, maybe even a little happier because I had more time to think about it. 
Also, like you said, there are so many things people don’t see. I spent most of my income my first year of freelancing paying off medical bills, and now a pretty good portion of my income is going toward a family member’s medical bills. I’m still managing to put back into what I’m doing and stash away some cash so that I can retire from this phase of life and move on to something new in a few years. But I can only do that because I don’t own anything fancy and don’t really have the desire to. I’m lucky, I think, in that I was raised without having anything, so I know what to do with nothing to make something out of it that’ll work for me. I could work ten more years to afford fabulous homes and such, but I am happy living in an apartment. I would rather enjoy the simple life I like, and have time to really live it.
Michele on September 24, 2008 at 1:29 pm | Permalink
This is an awesome post, Amy! I’ve always loved your honesty!
It is amazing to me how many people just don’t understand why freelancing takes so much time. Of course, in other businesses, the owners wouldn’t just open a few hours a day and never stock the shelves, clean, or order new products. Why can’t folks see that?
Fantabulous points! Thanks for sharing your wisdom.
*smiles*
Michele
Amy Derby on September 24, 2008 at 7:56 pm | Permalink
Thanks Michele! Your comparison is dead on to what I’ve told a few of my local friends who think freelancing means I’m here to stay home and fetch their children from the bus stop. I tell them think about the guy who runs the corner store. That guy is ALWAYS there. He has a few employees, but he is at his shop 8 hours a day working and supervising and such. That’s how freelancing is for many of us, at least in the beginning, if we make a business out of it.
Rex Harris on October 1, 2008 at 6:36 pm | Permalink
Hi Amy…
“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…”
That is one of the most intelligent things I’ve heard said in a blog in quite some time. You have to learn from the road blocks so you can navigate!
Great blog site!
Cheers!
Rex