Growing as a Freelance Designer

Ian Paget: You've been freelancing yourself now since April, 2017, and I know a big part of what you do now is help other freelancers succeed. I know there's a lot of people in the audience that will probably already be freelance. They dabbled in freelance or they want to go full-time. So I think this would be a good opportunity to dig into that a little bit more from your perspective. I know myself it's not an easy thing and I read some of your blogs. I can see that you've got an interesting perspective on it. So, what are some of the common problems that you see freelancers face when they first start out?

Jay Clouse: Totally. When I got started freelancing, that word wasn't even really in my vocabulary. For me, I think I came at freelancing from the opposite direction of a lot of people where I had a good background in business and entrepreneurship, particularly working at startups, and I just didn't want to have a boss anymore. And so I went out on my own and I just was confident that I could figure that out. And by virtue of people asking if they could pay me to do certain things, I found myself freelancing. And so, the biggest mistake that I see so many freelancers make is just, they're uncomfortable with the business aspects of running a business and resistant to learning.

If anyone's ever read the book, The E-Myth Revisited, this really lays out the problem where a lot of people who get functionally and technically good at a skill think the natural evolution is to start a business leveraging that skill. But starting a business is a completely different skillset to the technical ability to design logos or design documents. And so when people get into this, they think, well, I'm really great at graphic design, I should just start my own graphic design business. You can do that and the business skills are very easily learned, but a lot of us also grow up with a certain amount of guilt around selling and being around business and we resist learning those skills that will actually help us be successful business owners.

So that's mistake number one because if you don't embrace being a business owner as a freelancer, you will never build a business that supports you and gives you what you need to survive. The second mistake that I see a lot of people have is not having a clear client acquisition strategy. And to me, there are really three different routes you can go and you don't have to go at only one. You can have all three of these as part of your strategy. A lot of people assume they're going to work directly with clients, which means finding a person, selling them on a project, working with them directly, nobody in between. That's kind of the classic freelancing model and that's what I've done for the most part.

But there's also a lot of people who are really successful subcontracting to agencies. Maybe they are a great logo designer and they build relationships with agencies who are really great at developing websites. And so now that agency can sell a larger project to the end client saying, "Not only are we going to build the website, but we'll do a whole brand package around your business." And they subcontract to the designer to do that part of the project. That can be really lucrative and really great because you don't have to find the clients yourselves, but it removes a certain level of control that you have of your own destiny and of your own client pipeline.

Ian Paget: I know people that have taken that direction and although it's great for them because it keeps them very busy, but to some degree, it is a little bit like still having a job, still working for someone. You're still working for someone else. You ultimately don't really own the work that you're doing. It will always be the agency that will get the credit for your work. So I guess it depends on what your ultimate goals are. If you want the benefits of being a freelancer, so being able to work from home and having control of your time and what you do with it, that's one thing.

But I know for me, and I'm sure other people are the same, I like that control and I like that what I create, I can promote on my website. I can share it off. That was always one of the things I hated about working for agencies is that I've personally worked for probably about 15 years working for other companies and I can't really show any of the work that I did in that time; say in terms of growing as an individual and growing my own business and my brand and everything like that. Owing what I do as work is important for me. So, it all depends on your ultimate goals.

Jay Clouse: Totally. And to me, it's actually a little bit worse than having a job because at a job you usually have a salary and you know that if they're not sending you work, at least you're getting paid. And with this model, you have no idea if they're going to keep selling projects that they can even give you work on. But you're right. Everything you create for the agency is building equity in the agency's brand and the agency's reputation. You sometimes don't even get to communicate directly with the client. So there's no real long-term benefit. And for that reason, that part of the strategy for me has always been just like bonus. I'll consider it. And if it comes in, it feels like a really easy project that just brought in money, but I've never depended on that as part of my income.

And the third strategy that I did just want to touch on is sort of the marketplace strategy. Upwork or Contently or any place like that, which is also a really great place to start for a lot of people. But to me, having a mix of all three of those strategies is what can make your income a little bit more predictable and stable.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Totally agree, because people that I do know that do work for agencies, they also combine it with their own clients; so it's a win-win situation really.

I was going to say quickly one benefit of people that I have seen that do work for agencies. They tend to get involved in much bigger projects than they probably would get on the road. Those individuals have worked on some huge, huge brands, but when you see their work in books, it's always credited as the agency. I know that's not an issue for them, but I know for some people it's a potential deal breaker.

Jay Clouse: Exactly. And that company, they're working with the agency of record. They're not working with, they might not even know who you are as the small part of that large project.

Ian Paget: You mentioned the book, The E-Myth Revisited. I absolutely love that book and it actually makes a lot of sense for the stuff that you sell as services and how you support other graphic designers because one of the questions I did have for you is that on your website, you do talk about building systems that bring in new leads. So building systems, and I think that's one of the key components of that book. Listeners, you have to read that book. I think anyone that wants to get into business in any way building a company around their skillset, they have to read that book to really understand it. But anyway, going into that question I had, you do talk about building systems that bring in new leads. What does something like that look like in reality?

Jay Clouse: Going back to those client acquisition strategies I was talking about, whatever your strategy is, you need to compliment that with a system. And system doesn't always mean software even. A system can be a process that you follow that you know works. It's approaching your business as if it's a series of experiments and when something works, saying, "Okay, I want to keep running that experiment or keep doing things that way." So for me, when my strategy has been predominantly direct to client type work, I realised, wow, building really strong relationships and creating advocates has been the biggest driver of my business. How do I actually put some more rigour and systems around that? And it came down to things like building out a really good CRM where I can keep track of the different people that I've had contact with and the types of things we've talked about the last time that I talked with them so I can follow up.

There's this idea called Dunbar's number that says you basically can only maintain, I forget if it's 150 or 250 close personal relationships at a time as a human being. And when you augment that sort of natural cognitive limit with a tool like a CRM, which is a customer relationship management tool, you can really blow that number out of the water. When so many of our businesses depend on word of mouth or really grow because of word of mouth, it's to your benefit to try and increase the amount of word of mouth you're receiving. And if you can be proactive and be one of those rare people who stays in contact with your friends, your family, even just acquaintances on a regular basis, that can go a really long way. And having a tool like a CRM goes a long way in doing that.

But also things... Ian, when you and I scheduled this podcast, we used a tool called Calendly. You could spend so much time in your own inbox communicating with clients, trying to schedule a time with clients. I joke that Calendly was my first virtual assistant because literally it just did so much work for me in terms of finding a time to talk with people. And then 30 minutes spent on the phone after 15 seconds spent in Calendly booking the time and suddenly there's no more delay in the project, there's no more delay in moving forward with somebody, it's all happening.

So systems don't have to be these really big scary things. Once you get some of these systems in place, you can really improve them like my CRM, which started as just a way to track the people in my life, is now where I manage all of my content and manage the entire process, start to finish, for my podcast. I've really fleshed that thing out and now it's like this backbone of my entire business. But systems in the beginning can just be knowing, okay, I know that if I go to Upwork and send 30 proposals today, I'll probably get one or two calls that become clients down the road. If you experiment enough and you know that when I put this input into the system of my business, I get this output, create a system around that so you know, "I'm going to spend the first hour of my day sending proposals on Upwork. That's what I'm going to do." That can be a system.

Ian Paget: I absolutely love this type of thing. And I've spoken about on the podcast a number of times because I use systems myself and it's one of the reasons why I like to offer just one core service is that when someone gets in touch with logo design specifically, even when they call, I know exactly what I'm going to say because I have a script in my head that just rolls off my tongue. I mean, that's one system and it's right. And just like the whole dessert of the process every step all the way through the whole thing is, I mean, it's not properly documented, but I could easily document that and almost give that to someone else. But for me, where I see the real benefit and say, Jay, I went full-time in March. I've been doing a lot of part-time freelance projects for a number of years leading up to that.

But I really noticed it when I went full-time because I started booking in more projects. Say for example I booked in a web project and I used to do a lot of web projects where I used to work and they had systems in place, but I didn't have any of that at home. So I agreed this project and at the beginning of the call, there was no system, no framework to it. So it just took a lot longer. The contracts, the proposals, everything, all needed to be created from scratch because there's no system already in place. And just running through the entire thing. That project's been going on for like three months now. It's taken a lot longer than what I thought it would have done. I feel the primary reason for that is because I don't have a system in place for it.

So I feel as a freelancer, anything that you repeat over and over again or will repeat again on other projects is absolutely fundamental to success because I know because I've done so many logo projects, I know exactly how long they will take, exactly what happens at certain points, and it's just easy for me.

Jay Clouse: Kind of what you're speaking to, a lot of creatives, they think about things like systems and they feel almost suffocated by the structure of it because they want to play and I totally get that. I'm naturally a fairly anxious person and what systems do is give you a lot of comfort and confidence and also conserve a lot of your creative energy because you no longer have to make decisions that you've made in the past. You don't have to recreate the wheel.

You've already determined the best way to move forward and that becomes the system and you don't have to question it. You just do the next part of the chain and you don't have to expand any of your mental energy that day making the same decision again. And you can go into a client call with confidence because you know, like you're saying, exactly what happens at this stage. "Here's what we do next. This is my process. This is my system." And it gives you a lot of creative energy back and decision making energy back that you can put towards the uniqueness of that given project or task.

Ian Paget: And another thing that book talks about is working 'on' your business, not 'in' your business. I would say that's like the core message of that book. I mean, now I've been full-time I totally get it is so important.

I just wanted to ask you quickly. You spoke about CRMs. What are some typical CRMs that the average freelancer that's just starting can sign up to? Because I do know that there's a couple of different options. I've heard people talk about Basecamp, but I don't know which ones the best ones are. Have you got any advice on that side of things?

Jay Clouse: As a system's person that spent a lot of time using different project management tools, most CRMs are just so much more bloated and robust than anything you would need, and I got really frustrated with it. Where I started was I took a template from Google docs and used a spreadsheet template and then really beefed that up a little bit. And so to this day, that's the CRM that I give so many of my clients and it's inside the freelancing school courses. I've moved now over to Airtable. But again, that started with a template and then I build on top of it.

At the end of the day, what you really need is just an organised way to track somebody's name, their contact information, information about their website and their social. You need to have an area where you can say, here's the last time I talked to this person and here's notes from that conversation. If you have that, that's just about all you need. And then you probably want to add a field to track the status of that relationship. How close is this to being a paying client? Because then you can filter by any one of those fields and see day in and day out, okay, I have three warm leads that are making a decision whether or not they want to work with me. Last time I talked to this guy was a week ago. This is probably a really good time to follow up and ask him what he thinks of that proposal. It can be really simple. Starting with a spreadsheet is plenty.

Ian Paget: Whilst we're talking about relationships, I know that is really key for any business, especially a service-based business which listeners will probably be building. Once you've spoken to that person, if it's a sales interaction, that's easy because if you send over the proposal, you would follow up after a week or two. How do you track it when it's someone that you've met and there's currently no form of transaction happening in between you. You just spoke at some point. Like yesterday I had a sales call with a guy. I'll never hear from him but it would be nice to touch base at some point. Keeping all of that information, do you have some kind of system in place so that you get back to them at a certain point later in the year? How long do you wait? Do you wait three months, do you wait six months?

Jay Clouse: The first thing I do is I have different categories or tags for different types of relationships. Generally, anytime you sign a client, it's because they have justified to themselves that you are the person they should and want to hire. I use this term, advocates, a lot in the things that I teach other freelancers. An advocate is somebody who is that mouth giving you word of mouth. They're that person who is saying good things about you and your business. Anybody in your life can be a good advocate for you and for your business. Almost no one in your life will become a client. Like just statistically speaking, very few people in your life are actually paying clients.

A lot of people go into conversations trying to create a client relationship right away. And I think that's really backwards because even clients start as advocates. So if anyone can be an advocate and even clients start as advocates, any relationship in your life should start as an advocate relationship. So in my CRM, I have a tag that is advocate because before someone can be a prospect, they're going to be an advocate. And before anyone can be a client, they're going to be an advocate. So I use specific terminology like advocate, prospect, and target to kind of track the nature of the relationship.

Is this just somebody that I want to have a good relationship with, is it somebody who may be a client someday, or is this somebody that I actively want to make a client? I'll follow up with those people. I don't have a hard rule of like every month follow up with this person. It's more of, when can I chime in to this relationship knowing that it's been a while and add value? Because just sending an email for email sake to keep the relationship "warm" without having something to add isn't actually a great way to nurture the relationship. It's better to say, "Man, I haven't talked with Ian in awhile. I should find a reason to chat with him." And maybe that's listening to his podcast and saying, "Hey, I listened to this episode, I really liked it. Checking back in. Want to catch up and see how things are going with you." Have a reason that makes that person feel good.

But yeah, to me, for advocate specifically, it's less important to stay in constant contact and more important to leave every interaction with them feeling valued and grateful for our relationship. And also frankly, knowing what it is that I'm up to right now. And that doesn't come from having a conversation and saying, "Here's what I'm doing. Let me tell you a little bit about me." Actually, it comes from having a conversation and asking them a lot of questions about what's going on with them. And at some point they'll realise, "Oh gosh, I've been talking this entire time. What's going on with you?" And if you leave the conversation talking about you, that's what's most recent in their mind. They are grateful that you gave them an opportunity to share so much. And now they can go out in the world knowing, "Okay, sounds like Ian's freelancing and he's creating logos for people." When they cross paths with somebody who says, "I need a designer or I need a new logo," you're going to be the first person in mind.

Ian Paget: I know I've spoken about this on the podcast a number of times, but I think it's really important that people understand that networking and the people that you know is the real core of everything that you're doing and every single person that you know. I think Michael Janda mentioned it on a podcast I did with him recently. He mentioned even your mum. Even your mum can be someone that will go out and once they hear someone that says, "Oh, I'm building a business," they can be someone that will share with that person that you can help with that thing. So, definitely nurture those relationships.

I think another key thing, and you alluded to it in what you just said as well and I mentioned it on the podcast before; when you network, I remember when I first started and I'd go to these networking events. I don't know if everyone thinks this way, but I remember thinking, I hate this whole networking thing. You go to something, you kind of need to do a sales pitch. You hand over your business card and away you go. But that's not how networking is. Networking needs to be seen as building friendships, getting to know people. The more genuine it is, the more successful I feel that you would be.

I'm going to give a quick example. I've been working really closely with a client over the last year, I would say. We originally just met through LinkedIn and we've worked on a couple of projects. But we really got to know each other over the time. I know about her, her kids and what they're doing. She knows about my little one and we share these stories. When the whole COVID-19 situation happened, she actually gave me a project. She actually said to me that she wanted to make sure that I was busy during this time. So she actually created a project for me because of that relationship that we built up.

I've actually got to know that person. So when it does come around to touching base with her, it's not just a case of going, "How is your business going? Do you need any more graphic design?" It is more like, "I notice that you went on this trip. It's somewhere that I really want to go to. Have you got any advice of places that you went to?" I can bring in something quite genuine that I feel still keeps that relationship going.

Jay Clouse: Totally. When people go to networking events or when they think about networking, they often come from a standpoint of collection. I want to collect new relationships so I can just have them in my stable of people. But it's really about connection. It's about having an actual tie to somebody. I've had a similar experience to you. My first year freelancing, I really messed up my cashflow. It came to the end of the year and I realised I don't have any projects in the hopper right now and I'm going to run out of cash in the next couple of months. And the first thing I did was I just went back to people who are close to me, advocates, who are business owners.

There are a couple of them that I knew personally enough and felt comfortable with enough that towards the end of the conversation they said, "So, how are things going for you?" And I said, "Actually really great. I started this business this year. I'm excited about X, Y, and Z. But I am having a little bit of a cashflow situation right now. So if you're looking for some help with A, B or C, I can do that for you." And that solved my problem because that person not only knew that I could solve the problem for them because they knew me, we had a history, they realised, "This is an opportunity for me to support this person that I care about."

I don't think there's any shame in that. I think that's just really smart and it's... like that was an incredible project. It was like a three or a four month retainer and I enjoyed every bit of it because I already had a relationship with that person. Like I would so much rather, I talk about this a lot too. I would rather create clients than find clients. I'd rather create projects with people that I want to work with, rather than just try to capture these projects that are kind of ephemeral and exist right now where a lot of people are competing. I would rather go to somebody and say, "I see that you have this problem. I see that you have this need. Let's work on that together."

Ian Paget: That's a really nice way to look at it. I mean, what's one example that the audience could relate with with that? I know your listeners are probably graphic designers and they do all sorts, but in terms of the branding, like a design side of things, are there any examples that you could give as ideas for people to help them create clients in the way that you did?

Jay Clouse: Totally. And what doesn't work here, let me preface by saying this, is going to somebody and just pointing out flaws and saying, "This part of your business is really bad. Let's fix that." That's not going to be received well. But when you can have a conversation and start to surface problems that the person may not even be really consciously aware of yet, you have a really great opportunity. And what I mean by that is, go into a conversation. All of us are fairly self absorbed self-centered people. We think about our own problems all day, every day. And so if you go into a conversation and you say, "Hey, catch me up. What's been going on?" And they answer, and they'll probably answer kind of vanilla. And you can say, "Okay, what's the biggest problem that you're chewing on right now?" They're going to let out this sigh and their shoulders will kind of sink and they'll start unloading on what's been on their mind for the past week.

Sometimes that's something that you can help them with, either personally or by referring someone else that can solve a problem for them. But when they start doing that, you can repeat back to them and say, "Well, it sounds like your website isn't performing right now or it sounds like you're really frustrated with the way that people are finding your business." And they'll be like, "Yes, I just need more clients." And you'll say, "Do you think maybe improving the speed of your website, the look of your website, do you think that would convert more clients?" And they'll say, "Yeah, probably. It's been something I've been wanting to do for a year. I just haven't gotten around to it." And you can say, "Well, I can do that for you."

Now you've avoided this whole period of searching. A lot of times when you're trying to find clients you're entering into their life when they're actively searching and frankly, price shopping for a solution. And instead, you are surfacing this problem, they're feeling that pain and the solution to that problem is sitting right in front of them. I listened to this really great interview and it was a comedian talking to an actress and they were talking about the process of auditioning for a role. It's really stressful for the actor or the actress because they go in and they sit across this table and this person tells them to realign. And it's just, it feels almost humiliating to feel like you're auditioning for something, literally auditioning.

But the difference that this person felt or what they came to realise was, the director, the person doing the casting, they want you to be the solution. They don't want to sit there all day and talk to 20 people to find the right person. They would so much rather the first person that walks in is very clearly the right person for the job so that they can hire them, they can get the job done and they don't have to keep looking. In your life as a freelancer, when you're talking to clients or potential clients, they're in the same spot. They want to get the job done. They want to have a good outcome and they want to have it soon. So if you can be the obvious, clear, best solution for somebody, they're going to want to hire you on the spot. They're not going to want to go and do a bunch of price shopping because a lot of business owners will realise that time is money and even looking for other service providers is costing them time and costing them money.

So, being confident in your ability to solve problems and really speaking their language to say, "I know the outcome you're looking for here. Is it safe to say this is the outcome you're looking for? I can deliver that outcome for you. Here's the price." Too often we get stuck in the, here's how I'm going to do it instead of saying here's... Instead of saying, "It sounds like you want more of your website visitors to convert to customers," you say, "It sounds like you want a new logo." That may be true, but if you can tie it to a business outcome, it's going to be so much more clear to them why they are paying for this thing. "A new logo is going to modernise your brand, it's going to make you look better in the eyes of your customers. That's going to have an effect of more customers or higher brand loyalty." That helps them connect the dots to say, "Why would I spend money on this? Oh, because it's going to generate money for me in the long-term. Great. Easy."

Ian Paget: Absolutely fantastic answer, Jay. I would say the way that you speak and the way that you answer questions is almost like you had it prepared already. I mean, for listeners, I just pulled that question now. That wasn't planned. Brilliant answer, Jay. Thank you.

Now, I'm going to move on to one of my other questions because there was something that I read on your website that I think hit home with me a lot personally. I can imagine that anyone that goes full-time will probably have this realisation at some point. You said that you do not equate earnings with success and that if you were to look at earnings alone, that 2019 for you would look like a huge step backwards. That was something that really hit me because at the moment, and I'm going to be honest with you and listeners, since going full-time, I've done loads of work and I've made plenty of money to keep me going for a while. But at the same time, there's a part of me that doesn't feel like I've made any real progress. So, I wanted to ask you like that sentence that you said, what did you mean by that when you said that?

Jay Clouse: Well, I actually meant several things. In the context of the article, this is an article where I was breaking down basically the finances of my business over the last three years, which isn't something that I do very often. But every year since I've started my business, I have given an annual reflection. And so, being three years in I wanted to give, now that I had several data points and a trend, I could give some context to like how's this business doing? What's the reality of a freelance business three years in. And so in that article, one, it shows that 2020 for me has actually been a really great year. And so, part of my statement of I don't equate earnings with success was saying, I don't want you to feel bad if your numbers don't look like this. And then also part of it was looking at last year, which was a 25% income reduction from the year before, I wanted to say, "I don't feel bad about that sacrifice either."

And frankly when people get into freelancing, most of the time it's because they want some sort of freedom or flexibility or optionality. They felt undervalued, overworked. They felt like their creative energy was going to other people and they couldn't do things on their own. And so they start freelancing. And then suddenly the bar of success is six figures. You need to be making six figures as a freelancer on your own. That's really hard to do, frankly, and you can do it. But if your goal is six figures as a solo freelancer, you're also probably not spending a lot of time on your own personal projects to be frank. And so to me, earnings is not a measure of success. Your measure of success is your measure of success. You have to know why you're doing this in the first place.

A lot of people don't want to freelance forever either. They're doing this as a means for flexibility. In my case also, I wanted to create a financial engine that was in my control, but also really flexible as to when I turn it on and turn it off so I could have my own control of my time and what I was doing. So to go back to the article, last year, earning 25% less than the year before was because I was working on my business and not in my business and that has had a huge effect on this year's income. And so, when we get caught up in just our income numbers and what's our top line look like, that can really confuse us, not to mention despite being down 25% last year in terms of gross income, I actually had 24% more profit than the year before.

So, as far as health of the business goes and how comfortable I was financially, I was actually much more comfortable earning far less on its face. There are a lot of levers that you can pull as a business owner and really what you want to do if you're freelancing to support your lifestyle, you need to understand what is the lifestyle that you want and how do I actually support that? It might not be this mythical six figure mark and that's okay, especially if that's not why you started in the first place.

Ian Paget: I think that's the reason why it really hit me because I've been full-time now for around four months. And like I said, I've been working really hard and I've had this thing on the back of my mind that every day I need to focus on bringing in the money because I've noticed that, well, you can sit down and do all the work that you need to do, but actually doing the work isn't the thing that makes you the money. It's bringing in the new projects and finishing the projects. That's the only point with my current business model where I actually make any income. So that's the thing that I've been really, really focusing on.

But then, it's something I realised and it hit me when I read that. And I think it's good for listeners to hear this as well, is that by doing what I've been doing, I'm actually in exactly the same position as what I was when I worked for an agency. And doing all this work, I don't have any time to add any case studies. I don't have any time to work on things that I want to do, like I want to do a magazine, I want to do maybe a course and some books and so on. There's all these things I've been dreaming of doing for a long time. But because I'm taking on all these projects, it's great, I have money. It's a nice situation to be in, but then I'm realising that that is a trade off to other things.

So suddenly I don't have the time that I want for the things that I really want to work on, but they are things that don't make money now. They are things that will make money next year. So what you said about you reduce your income so that you have time to work on your business. That year, you made a loss. Well, from a figures point of view, you made a loss. But this year, because of the work that you did, you're now making more than what you would have done if you didn't pause.

Jay Clouse: Totally.

Ian Paget: And I think that's really important. It's funny I've mentioned the same thing to a couple of other freelancers within the last week, and they've all said the same thing as like, "Oh yeah, I'm not spending enough time working on my own thing." It's almost like they forgot because they're so focused on working in their business; just speaking with clients, getting into money, doing the invoicing, doing the actual design work or whatever they do, that they forget that things like writing case studies, adding that, working on your website, redesigning your website, updating your systems, updating your processes, working on some product that could generate a recurring income. They forget that that's building their business long-term. And I think it's, for me personally, it's something that I've become very conscious of in the last couple of weeks and that was partly triggered by reading that from you. And I just think, yes, if you're a freelancing, you need to be thinking long term and not just short term.

Jay Clouse: It's so easy to become the boss that caused you to quit the agency in the first place. It's so easy to forget that you are your own biggest client, if that's the reason why you got into freelancing in the first place. I am constantly turning down okay work. Most of the time the stuff that comes in just doesn't get me all that excited. And if the work isn't super aligned to what I want for own future, I'm actually going to just eat that opportunity and put that time and energy into my own projects, knowing that longterm, that's what's going to pay off, which is really hard to do. It's really hard to look at money, frankly, and say, "I don't want that because I know that the expectation is a lot of the time that I want to use for my own stuff." It's really hard to make that call.

And honestly, the only way you can make that call is if you're comfortable enough with your finances that you know that you can. If you don't have a budget in place, if you don't have a system for managing your own money, it's really hard to turn down paying projects because you don't know where you stand and you don't know if you can afford to do that. Another reason why working on the business not just in the business.

Ian Paget: Well, I know how I can possibly predict. What I do is I have a separate account that my clients pay into and that's not something I can touch. That's just there and it just accumulates. And then I basically pay myself. So I've got it set up so it just automatically transfers over to another account. I don't know if this is the way that your advice here. For me, it just makes it easy because I know each month I'm going to pay myself this amount of money and then the rest of it is what I can use either to hire people to help with things or it's just for paying myself. So I can almost predict it's like, okay, there's like six months worth of salary there for me. So I could technically pause for that length of time and be okay. I don't know if you have another better method for managing that type of thing.

Jay Clouse: That's a really great system. I mean, at the end of the day, you need to realise that you're going to be responsible for taxes. And a lot of freelancers, especially in their first year, don't realise that and they under save and then tax time comes around and they owe money for the first time in their life. They're used to getting a refund and now they owe money and they don't have it. And now they're in this chronically cash strap position. If you can look every month at your finances and figure out, "Okay, here's what came in, here's my estimated tax on that. I'm going to put that in an account over here and hold it."

What you're doing, Ian, is pretty close to a profit-first methodology, or can very easily adapt to a profit-first methodology which I think is a great system for somebody who is freelancing. But at the end of the day, you need to make sure, one, that you know what your average monthly expenses are. Do you know how much it costs you to exist every month? Both like from-

Ian Paget: For sure, yeah. I've got it all written down in a book at the end of each month. I mean, going into this in more details so that you understand. I'm sure listeners will be interested. I've got three accounts. I've got the one where clients pay. And then at the end of each month, I kind of do my accounts myself. I write down everything that I've... I've got it written down on a book. I've got an electronic copy as well. But I like to have it down in writing. But I write down all the income that I've made and then I'll work out, okay, this percent needs to be for tax and I'll put that into a separate account.

So I've got one that's my personal money where all my bills and stuff go out. I've got my business one and then I've got the tax one. I hate looking at that tax one because a lot of the time it's like if I really want a new car. But yeah, I find that it just separates these things. I think I would be quite stressed if it was all in one account. I know on the back of my mind I'd be like, am I allowed to spend that? I don't know. I think just having it separate just makes it more manageable for me. I don't know how other people do it, but for me that's just the most simple, most basic way to do it is just to each month work out and then transfer that into the other account and it's just there ready for when tax time comes.

Jay Clouse: That's a great system. And I don't know if in the UK they have better personal finance training than we do here in the US. We received no training. So most of the clients and freelancers that I work with have a single bank account when I'm working with them. They might not even have a business bank account yet. They might not even have a legal entity yet. And so, to have that system in place is really, really great because you're already thinking in terms of, where are the buckets of my money going, and let me make sure I have enough in each of those buckets to actually afford the things that need to happen. Treating your business as if you are receiving a wage is really smart too because it's always better at tax time to realise, "Oh, I over saved for taxes. I'm going to get a refund." That's such a better way of running your business than being at breakeven all the time and stressed out.

I even have a profit account that I am trying to generate profit. That's the point of my business. So when I earn money, I think it's 10% of my allocation right now goes towards profit. And that lives in a separate profit account. I have a tax account. I have owner's comp. I have business operation expenses. Those are the buckets that I have. And it's so much more comfortable now to realise when tax time comes, I have enough money, probably more than enough money. And if I do have more than enough money, I'm going to put that in the profit account. And that profit account every year can go towards what I need it to. Maybe it's new software for the business. Maybe it's a new camera so I can start doing things on video. Maybe it's towards a down payment on a house. It's nice to have that flexibility. But when you're operating out of a single bank account and just kind of estimating all the time, it doesn't give you that.

Ian Paget: I think as well one of the other benefits of paying myself a monthly salary is that I know exactly how much I need to make each month to be comfortable. So as long as I make that much, it's fine. And every time I get to that point, I kind of relax a little bit, like I don't need to stress too much. But if I see I need to make another say $1,000 or £1,000, I just knuckle down and just either contact existing clients or do what I can to try and attract some new potential clients. I don't know if you find that with freelancing, I'm sure listeners would be in this situation. But yeah, you can have some months where you're doing incredibly well and other months where you're doing not so well. But I think if in those months where you do make like five figures say, don't suddenly just splash out on-

Jay Clouse: I don't need to work next month.

Ian Paget: ... holiday or something. Keep that in the account and continue to pay yourself because that month where you've done really well will balance out the months where you don't do so well. So actually just ongoing, you can manage everything quite comfortably.

Jay Clouse: Yeah.

Ian Paget: Now, we're near the end of the time that we have. I want to ask you, and I want to give you a bit of an opportunity to talk through what you are doing to help freelancers. What are some of the services that you're currently providing to help freelancers accelerate their growth?

Jay Clouse: To answer that question, I think it's prudent to kind of talk about how I got here.

Ian Paget: Sure.

Jay Clouse: When I started my business and I was freelancing without realising that I was freelancing, the first thing I started doing was facilitating mastermind groups for friends and business owners around me who didn't have the built in community that I did. And that became Unreal Collective, which is still my main business to this day. It's a community. But more than that, it's also this 12 week accelerator program that looks a lot like a mastermind program. We meet every week for an hour for 12 weeks straight and I do that program two to three times a year. Coming from a startup background, I thought that my clients for that program would be other startup founders. And within a matter of months, it was pretty clear that the people who wanted that help the most were service-based businesses.

And so through working with more than 100 freelancers through that program, I realised all these commonalities that freelancers do well and don't do well, a lot of things that we talked about in this conversation. And so I turned that into a set of courses around three key verticals: business for freelancers, marketing for freelancers, selling for freelancers, helping people embrace the need to become a business owner with the business course, helping people feel confident and comfortable and effective in marketing themselves. And then also helping them sell projects.

So that's freelancing school, that's that platform. And since publishing those courses, now I write articles pretty frequently. We have a free community for freelancing school and for freelancers themselves. That's the biggest thing. Unreal Collective, the accelerator program still runs. We'll have a cohort in the fall. But freelancing school is where I'm really trying to help as many people as possible. When the pandemic hit, I cut the prices for all of those programs in half because I wanted people to be able to support themselves and their families and grow their businesses. Yeah, that's at freelancing.school.

Ian Paget: I'm going to say that you need to sign up to your email newsletter. I'm going to say for listeners, how I actually found out about Jay. I was speaking on a Zoom call with a few other graphic designers and someone actually mentioned you. What I did is immediately, it was kind of like on that moment. I was on the Zoom call. Someone else was speaking and I was multitasking. I signed up to your newsletter just to keep up to date with what you were doing. Your emails come through. I get layers of emails, so half the time I just click on them and scroll through them. But yours are always very genuine, very helpful and just worth. It's just worth signing up to because I think it's very good information and really well written.

Jay Clouse: Thank you. Yeah. I'm in a season of trying to create as many free resources as I can. I've been writing for several years now. I have a podcast called Creative Elements that publishes weekly now. The community that we just launched, that's all free. And so, if you're in a position where you just want to connect with people and kind of learn through this content, by all means follow along. That's why I'm doing it. If you really want to put some rigor behind your business and get up to speed and feel more confident being a business owner, then the courses are a great way to self guide your way through that.

Ian Paget: And I'll link to that all in the show notes so that people can easily find it. I'm going to ask you one last question and it's a little bit of a fun one. Based on everything that you know now, you're obviously very knowledgeable and you've got loads of experience and you've done a lot already in a short period of time. If you could get in a time machine and travel back to any point in your career and you could give yourself just one piece of advice before you come back, what advice would you give to yourself?

Jay Clouse: My favourite answer to this question is buy Bitcoin. But putting that aside, it's hard to say because I'm really happy with where I'm at right now and everything that I've done has led me exactly to this moment, right? Every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results that it achieves. So it's hard for me to make this guess. But what I've done really well and what I would encourage myself to keep doing and do more of is investing in people and relationships and even my own education. A lot of people have courses and have coaching programs. I don't know if there's many people that invest in those same programs as I do. Over the last few years, I've put something like $25,000 into my own education on stuff like this. So I would encourage myself to keep doing that.

But the one thing I would probably change, it wasn't until I was doing interviews on my new podcast, Creative Elements, when I realised that all the creators that I looked up to, as a staple of their business, they're all creating things catered for search. Like they're all rooting their content strategy in search engine optimisation. I didn't put any effort into that for the first almost three years of creating content. And so I have all of these "assets" that I put the time into creating that actually aren't generating any real value for me long-term. They're interesting to read on the fly, the kind of way I would put it is they're more Seth Godin than they are Neil Patel. It's something that you can open. You can read quickly. You can be like, I'm glad I read that, but you're not going to be Googling for something and find that article.

And so, I think it's more important to realise you need strategy and execution to get results. You can't execute without a strategy. Trying to execute, trying to just create without knowing why or what you're creating is kind of just blind action. And so, I wish I would have woken up to that a little bit earlier.

Ian Paget: Yeah, I totally agree. I actually think I'm quite lucky when it comes to SEO because the agency that I recently left to go full-time, within the company they actually had an SEO team and I was quite near them. So, I was lucky enough to be exposed to a lot of the tips and advice and approaches that they took. I personally don't think I would be doing what I'm doing now if it wasn't for writing with intent for search. Personally, I don't think I've ever done anything that incredibly well with any of that content, but it's been enough to position me high up in the search results on Google and that's how I get clients now. So I totally agree with that advice for your younger self and I'll say for listeners as well.

Jay Clouse: And it's worth coming back to that same line that we talked about earlier of, it depends why you're doing this. It's not worth worrying about SEO and creating content if that's not part of what you want to do. A lot of people will think, to get more clients I need to make content. That's not necessarily the shortest path to getting more clients. Probably more time just spent building one-to-one relationships would be faster. So for me I want to get to a point where my content is what's earning me an income and not client work. And that's why this is an important strategy for me. But if you're freelancing because you want to work with a portfolio of clients and you want to invest your creative time into some other type of project, then I wouldn't worry about content necessarily or SEO.

Ian Paget: That was a good thing to say. 100% agree. Anyway, Jay, this has been absolutely fantastic. I'm glad that I reached out to you originally. And yeah, it's been really good to speak about freelancing. I'm sure there will be a lot of listeners out there that are already thinking about freelancing or freelance already that would hopefully got something out of this. So thank you so much for coming on and thank you so much for your time.

Jay Clouse: Yeah. Thanks for giving me the platform. I haven't geeked out this deep on the topic of freelancing over the course of an hour for a long time. So I'm excited to share this with my folks too.