One of the main reasons people quit their day jobs to work for themselves is freedom, which comes in all forms — freedom of scheduling, freedom of clientele, freedom to work from home in your underwear while eating ice cream from the carton at 3 AM. And yet so many freelancers conduct themselves as though they’re a one-person office cubicle, unerringly PC, professional and polished as well as (or better than) any salaried employee with a safely-padded 401K.
Guess what: you’re not an employee or a one-man corporation. You’re a person. And one big reason companies like doing business with freelancers is that, when such a rare opportunity arises, people like to work with individuals.
Be one.
There’s a fear among freelancers that acting (or appearing to act) outside the “normal” boundaries will somehow derail your professional momentum. Admittedly, that may be true for a vast majority of the corporations out there, who would have trouble justifying too much outside-the-box thinking on their expense reports. But if you wanted to work with companies that only colored inside the lines, why did you jump ship from the 9-to-5 world in the first place?
Life is full of people who refuse to obstruct the party line out of fear that doing so will rob them of any chance for success. So define your own meaning of “success.” Make your own rules, and live by them. Say what you mean. Take stands. Be an individual, whom other like-minded individuals want to work with (and whom opposing-minded individuals are free to respect). You won’t be someone that every client in the world will want to work with, but the clients who do want to work with you will know (and want) exactly what you offer.
Because you can’t compete with full-service companies in terms of depth, breadth, resources or reach. But you can damn well be yourself, and that’s one service a company can never offer.
Tags: branding, Business, Freelance, honesty, perception, Sociology
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Steven Santos and Joe Cascio. Joe Cascio said: RT @JustinKownacki: Freelancer, Humanize Thyself: http://bit.ly/kJKCt [...]
You are so right, Justin.
For years, if not decades, I hid behind the facade of a corporation as an in-house designer — being anonymous. Now, after nearly 10 years of being a solopreneur I still find it challenging at times to market & promote MYSELF. It is a fine line for the one-woman studio to conduct business as a business but yet be personable to sustain client/vendor relationships.
ITA. On my second step out into freelancing I ditched all the “we” and “and associates” stuff that freelancers so often use and made it REALLY clear that Giant Peach was JUST me.
I don’t know if it increased the amount of work I was doing. But it didn’t decrease, and I was MUCH happier just being my self.
We’reI’m out of ice cream.