How To Transition to Full-Time Freelance Work

My name is Brendon and I took a side hustle that I started in my parents basement and turned it into a six-figure per year business that allowed my wife and I to leave our nine-to-five jobs and transition to being full-time freelancers with our video production business. Sounds dreamy at first but in reality this took years of growing my freelance business at nights and on the weekends while still working a fulltime nine-to-five job. But now, my wife and I are living a freelancer's dream getting to travel the world and work on our small business from anywhere. So today I wanna show you some of the things that I learned through that process and how you can transition to being a full-time freelancer yourself. Now let's get a few things clear from the start.

I love the flexibility and freedom that comes with being a full-time freelancer and the ability to work from anywhere in the world. But there are some added challenges when you are a full-time freelancer. For example, I'm definitely working more hours than ever because I have to seek out clients, foster those relationships, and at the end of the day, there's no hiding in a more traditional business structure. If I don't put in the work, the income dries up; but, the benefits definitely outweigh these new challenges. So I do encourage you to go down this path but understand the responsibilities that come with being self employed.

It's important to consider the self discipline that will be required to manage your own workload, the feelings of isolation that can come from working by yourself and having that more traditional team environment, and some of the soft skills that you'll need to develop to help with negotiations and client management. 

At the end of the day, no matter how passionate you are about your work and your mission, you ultimately need money to support that mission and with the fluctuations that can come with freelance work, knowing how to properly budget and manage that fluctuating income is another key skill if you wanna succeed as a full time freelancer. But I'm gonna assume that if you're watching this video then you've probably already thought about these things and despite all of those challenges, take it from me, it is absolutely worth it so let's talk about some of the tangible steps that you can take to help transition to full time freelancing. 

First of all, it's important to find and understand your niche; and, something I use for this is what I call the three pillar test. Pick a niche whether that's selling a product or offering a service and ask yourself, do your natural skills and abilities align with that thing? Are you actually interested in that thing? And lastly and perhaps most important, are there clients and customers out there who are willing to purchase that product or service from you. 

You can get away by having just two of those three pillars but in a perfect world, if you're naturally good at the service that you offer, you genuinely love what you're doing, and there's a market for that service, then I'd say it's gonna be pretty hard for you to fail if you refuse to quit.