From Roller Coaster To Solidly Booked

It is a given or guaranteed when a freelancer is first starting out that they don’t have enough work to fill their work week or achieve their personal goals. There probably are rare cases where some freelancers stepped out of a specialized role with a roster of potential clients and were able to get a running start with their freelancing career. However, for the rest of us, we start from zero - and that’s okay!

The first few months will be more about reputation than money. Having plenty of time to make sure deliverables are top-notch and working out your internal systems is crucial. You need time to think. Eventually, a moment will come that you notice the roller coaster.

Roller coasters in capacity - so nicknamed because of the up and down movement - will occur somewhere around the 4th to 8th month of freelancing. At the start of this period, freelancers have a hang of work activities, but some weeks they work at 40% of capacity and other weeks at 120%. Of course, the desired workload will be different from freelancer to freelancer.

Mindset Shift

What usually occurs some months down the line when dealing with the roller coaster is a question, and the question is “How do I end the roller coaster and stay booked solid?” Typically, what is masked in the question is how to end those 40% weeks and hover around 100% every week.

From experience, this will occur after a mindset shift. Many freelancers will experience the mindset shift naturally out of the pain that 40% weeks cause them. Some freelancers can be influenced by simply becoming aware of certain mental blocks. For most people, the mental block is some formation of a disguised fear.

Exposing The Hidden Fear

Consider your rational thinking, emotions, and physiology when the likely culprit gets exposed in the next sentence. If you’re in the roller coaster ride of your freelancing business, how do you feel about being overbooked and working more than your desired goal? Think on it a moment, and imagine working 60 hours a week instead of 40 hours (arbitrary numbers for sake of experiment). Does the work week look balanced or is work/life suddenly hectic and unbearable? Did you trade one manageable problem for another? If you notice a sudden shift in state to a more defensive mindset, then this is likely your fear.

This type of fear is nothing new. It’s actually just the fear of the unknown taking a subtly different form. In truth, you may have an overbooked week here and there that’s painful, but you control the schedule as a freelancer. This is especially true if you are highly selective of clients you’re working with.

Making The Shift

Somehow and in some way, your personalized mental block will reveal itself when you’re ready and paying attention. Sometimes it’s in the form of rationalized excuses rather than direct fear as we tend to think of it.

Before a freelancer can really take action, they must undergo several mental shifts over their career. This is one of them, and it particularly addresses the fear of being overbooked. Once you realize that you have control over your work schedule and who you work with, then you’re ready to get solidly booked.

Write Proposals & Get Booked

Now it’s time for action. We’re ready to get fully booked and stay booked. The best part is that the action part is the easiest stage. Essentially, in all under-booked weeks you will attempt to balance filling the gaps with immediate work and booking out the following weeks.

Whatever you did to get the several clients you’ve already had or still have, you must take a disciplined approach to continue feeding your sales pipeline until you’re consistently turning work down or referring it out to other freelancers. In most cases, you write proposals. However, it doesn’t have to be limited to only that activity.

If you’ve managed to build referral sources, make sure that you’re reaching out to them to continually build the relationship. Always be top of mind for your referral sources so that they will remember you when a situation presents itself where you’re the perfect fit.

If it sounds too easy, it’s because it really is that simple. It’s the preceding mental shift that has to occur to allow the activity to be fruitful. In fact, at some point people will come to you en masse, and you’ll definitely need to have worked on your ability to say “no.” Also, you’ll then rarely need to write a proposal again.

What’s Next?

Once a freelancer goes from a roller coaster ride to being solidly booked, the next part of their journey will be to make a non-permanent decision:

1. Enjoy the fully booked cycle and maintain

2. Optimize for efficiency and higher returns

These paths will come at a personal preference and goal-setting. The first path allows for the decreasing/increasing desired rate and workload. The second path is a shift into a scalable business (agency) where tools, planning, and delegation become important. Since the former doesn’t take much to implement, some future posts will be about the latter.

Until then, get solidly booked and stay booked!