During my time at FreelanceSwitch, I spoke to many would-be freelancers. The idea of freelancing and the freedom it entails appealed to them, but they all had a common fear: what would it be like to leave the comfort of a corporate job and become responsible for one’s own paycheck? When business is slow, where does the money come from?
My experience was a little different. I started my career as a freelancer, and when I was asked if I wanted to come and work at Envato (who was then a client of mine) full-time, I had the opposite fears. I was always a vocal proponent of freelancing as a more profitable and stable alternative to full-time employment, so I surprised a lot of people by taking the job. Everyone who worked at the then-much-smaller Envato was a pleasure to work with as a freelancer–I got paid quickly, and they were all both insanely creative and ridiculously kind-hearted. It still is that way, despite the company having grown in huge leaps over the years. I thought trying out the life of an employee would be an interesting change of pace, and it was.
In my time there, I was the lab rat at AudioJungle for the now-commonplace Site Manager role, I was the editor for Audiotuts+ and FreelanceSwitch, helped launch another site which I edited for a year, WorkAwesome, and helped convert the Netsetter into a proper Envato publication (and yes, then proceeded to edit it). In more recent times, I worked with a great team of editors comprised of Amanda Hackwith, Mike Vardy and Joseph Robert Lewis in my role as the Business Blogs Manager.
However, as of last Friday, I no longer work for Envato, and as of this week, I’m once again a freelancer. For the first time, I’m in the same position as those FreelanceSwitch readers. I always knew I’d eventually want to go back to working for myself, and luckily I’ve had a few years to think about what I could do differently if I laid the foundations of my business from scratch again. I’m excited to put that into practice.
If you’re in need of a writer or editor, check out my services page. Drop me a line and we’ll talk your project over.
I may write about the process of re-opening a freelance business from scratch here on the blog. For now, I’m off to work on a piece for my first client, who just so happens to be my former employer.
I recently switched back to freelancing too!
Welcome back and I wish you the best of luck!
Why did you end up leaving Envato? Good luck with jumping back into freelancing again!
Very nice! Best of luck, man!
Hi Joel: I think that a blog post on this would be interesting. Did you feel your productivity dropped while you were working for someone else and had a steady pay check? Did you spend more money, fully knowing that in two weeks you’d be getting another paycheck? Did you feel you were more or less creativity when working for someone else?
Thanks, guys, for the wishes of luck.
I wouldn’t say my level of productivity dropped, but certainly the hours per week that I worked dropped and thus the total output was lower than when I was working for myself. When you’re freelancing there’s a strong incentive to work late and on weekends, even if you’re covering all of your bills and living comfortably with what you can earn working reasonable hours–and ultimately it’s one part of why I took a full-time job in the first place. I’d simply burned myself out by taking on too many clients and doing too much work without any delegation to subcontractors. Working 14 hours a day, seven days a week was the norm for me.
I don’t think I’ve ever frivolously spent as much money as when I was a freelancer, but that’s because I was working so many hours that I had money left over
. The thing about employment is that your income doesn’t really change–you can’t simply take on extra work and bill for it. The family budget tells you where each portion of that pay check is going to go and if you want something outside of that, you have to swing some numbers around. Which, given the way I feel about spreadsheets, is usually discouragement enough for me!
On the topic of creativity, it’s hard to say. As a writer, your day is all about coming up with ideas and then turning them into finished pieces of work. Aside from time spent tending to the books and finding new clients, it’s pretty much all creativity, all the time. As an editor, you’re mostly polishing other people’s ideas and as a manager your concerned about things like increasing traffic and revenue, looking at spreadsheets and approving invoices. Sure, I had to come up with ideas for things we could do with the sites frequently and I don’t think I ever left more than a couple of headlines intact in three years of editing, but the nature of what I was doing as an employee and as a freelancer were very different. So yes, I’d say I felt less creative, but because the job wasn’t as much about my creativity.