A Freelance Couple on Consistency - and What Finally Clicked

Most freelancers have what it takes to succeed - the challenge isn’t skill, it’s consistency. One month is busy. The next is quiet. Even when things are going well, it can feel like you’re always starting over.

Usman Ilyas and Rohma Rizwan, a married couple originally from Pakistan, took very different journeys into freelancing. He was building and scaling e-commerce businesses across international markets. She was climbing the corporate ladder.

Here’s how this freelance family discovered that this way of working only becomes sustainable when your efforts start working together.

Growth doesn’t happen in pieces

Early in his career, Usman chose independent work for the flexibility it offered, including the ability to travel. He focused on e-commerce, managing advertising, SEO, promotions, marketplace operations, and inventory.

It wasn’t until he launched his own business that the bigger picture came into focus. In 2021, he cofounded Bebecan, a U.S.-based consumer brand, and became involved in every part of it.

“I wasn’t managing one function. I was responsible for the entire business outcome,” he said.

That meant making decisions across product development, advertising, pricing, profitability, inventory, manufacturing, supply chain, compliance, and customer experience.

Between 2022 and 2024, Bebecan’s annual sales grew from approximately $453,000 to more than $2 million.

That experience changed how he approached growth.

“Many brands treat growth in silos, but it only works when all the moving parts are aligned,” he said. “You can have strong advertising, but if the pricing, inventory, conversion, or supply chain isn’t working, the business still cannot grow sustainably.”

That insight became the foundation of his work as an e-commerce and Amazon growth strategist: not simply executing individual tasks, but connecting decisions across the business to drive measurable results.

It also led him to build EscalateCommerce, an e-commerce growth and operations company supporting consumer brands across advertising, marketplace strategy, inventory planning, supply chain, profitability, and international expansion.

Even as Usman’s independent business gained traction, Rohma wasn’t convinced. Freelancing felt uncertain, especially compared to the steady track she was already on.

When success starts to look different

For nearly a decade, Rohma followed a path many professionals aspire to. She built a career in corporate sales and branding, working with multinational brands, managing portfolios, and leading launches.

“I just thought: I’m going to nail it,” she said.

But after relocating to Dubai and becoming a mother, the trade-offs became harder to ignore.

At one point, she was in the final stages of interviewing for a dream role. The process ended when she mentioned maternity leave.

“I saw talented women labeled ‘less available’ the moment they became mothers,” she said. “For the first time, I realized how broken the 9-to-5 system is.”

With Usman’s insights and encouragement, she started exploring Upwork—applying to job posts during lunch breaks and searching for opportunities at night.

What she expected to be short-term gigs turned into long-term projects across clients, teams, and time zones.

Why disconnected efforts hold people back

Usman’s experience as a founder reshaped how he approached client work.

As he puts it, “What if the website or advertising isn’t actually the problem?”

A client might ask for better ads, but the underlying issue could be pricing, positioning, contribution margins, inventory availability, product-market fit, or even supply-chain limitations.

By looking across the business, he helps clients focus on what actually drives results.

“The visible problem is not always the real problem,” he said. “Sometimes increasing advertising simply sends more traffic into an offer that is not positioned correctly or creates demand the inventory cannot support.”

His role consequently expanded beyond traditional freelance execution. Clients began relying on him to evaluate the entire commercial operation, identify constraints, coordinate teams, and make strategic decisions affecting growth and profitability.

Through his independent work and EscalateCommerce, Usman has supported e-commerce businesses operating across the United States and other international markets. His work spans Amazon strategy, advertising, listing optimization, inventory forecasting, logistics, supply-chain planning, compliance, and operational leadership.

Rohma saw a similar pattern as she started growing her independent business.

Getting new clients can feel just as disconnected: a profile, a proposal, a portfolio, an interview—all loosely connected and expected to somehow add up.

At first, she took on long-term roles across multiple clients. Over time, the experience she gained led her in a new direction as a career coach for freelancers.

“I help people understand what they really want, then create targeted job campaigns to get there,” she said.

Instead of casting a wide net, she helps people focus on specific types of roles and align how they present themselves so each step builds on the last.

Different work, same idea: both Usman and Rohma have seen that progress comes faster when everything points in the same direction.

What changed once things started to click

By the time Rohma started freelancing, Usman had already been working independently and building businesses for years. He had established long-term client relationships, cofounded a multimillion-dollar e-commerce brand, and was building an agency.

Having someone close who understood how it all worked gave her a head start. More importantly, it shaped how she approached the work from day one.

“If Usman hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have been applying for jobs five times a day,” she admitted. “But because he was, I stayed consistent. I had the Upwork app on my phone and kept scrolling it, like Instagram or Facebook. I’d see a job and think: OK, this looks good, let’s apply.”

Get clear on what you’re going after

Rohma got specific about the work she wanted and the high-value clients she wanted to work with.

“I prioritized clients who had a hiring history, paid fairly, needed ongoing support, and viewed freelancers as an essential part of their team,” she said.

The result was fewer, better opportunities, along with higher earnings, more flexibility, and work that fit the life she wanted.

Usman followed the same principle in his own career.

Instead of positioning himself around a single e-commerce task, he focused on situations where he could take broader responsibility for growth and business performance.

“The highest-value work usually begins when you understand the whole business,” he said. “That is when you can solve the issue that is actually limiting growth instead of only completing the task that first appeared in the job description.”

Make each step build on the last

Usman saw how quickly progress stalls when work is handled in isolation. The same applies to how independent professionals present themselves.

“Growth only works when all the moving parts are aligned,” he said.

For Usman, each stage of his career built on the previous one. Experience in advertising and marketplace operations led to broader responsibility in inventory and supply chain. Client work contributed to his ability to build his own brand. Operating that brand then strengthened the strategic perspective he brought back to his clients.

For Rohma, alignment meant making sure her profile, proposals, portfolio, and interactions all pointed in the same direction. It’s the same approach she advises her coaching clients to follow.

Pay attention to what actually works

Both of them adjusted their approach based on what actually worked.

Rohma stopped treating applications as one-off attempts and started paying attention to patterns—what got responses, what led to conversations, and what turned into long-term projects.

“Upwork functions as a search engine,” she said. “Once I understood how freelancer profiles, keywords, and proposals actually work, I stopped sending applications into the void and started getting responses.”

Usman applied a similar evidence-based approach to e-commerce.

He looked beyond headline revenue and considered advertising efficiency, conversion, inventory availability, pricing, contribution margins, customer behavior, and operational capacity.

“Revenue alone does not tell you whether a business is healthy,” he said. “You have to understand which decisions are producing profitable, sustainable growth and which are only creating temporary activity.”

That shift from guessing to learning is what made their work easier to build on.

How it all comes together

Usman and Rohma started in different places, with different goals in mind.

For Usman, independent work became a path from specialized e-commerce execution to entrepreneurship, brand ownership, agency leadership, and international growth strategy.

For Rohma, it became a way to continue building an ambitious career while gaining greater control over how her work fit into her life.

But they arrived at the same way of working—not by chasing every opportunity, but by getting clear on what they wanted and making each step count.

“Consistency becomes powerful when the work starts to compound,” Usman said. “Your experience improves your decisions, your results strengthen your reputation, and that reputation creates larger opportunities.”

That’s what turned unpredictable work into something steady—and something that keeps growing.