Freelancing? Get Some Stability with a Portfolio Career
This Wednesday, May 25, David Holloway will be teaching a Hired Guns Academy class on How to Develop a Portfolio Career. Below he explains how this method can remove the ups and downs that come with a typical freelance career.
“Freelancing” is one of those amorphous terms that mean different things to different people. So here’s what I mean when I use the word: Freelancing is where you’re primarily working alone, using one main skill to generate a service offering that you are deploying outside of full-time employment. For example, photographers, graphic designers, social media consultants, and independent marketing professionals are often freelancers.
The freelance career approach can definitely work, and if you’re in a good place with it, more power to you. But in the coaching work I do, I constantly hear about three main challenges with this type of career:
- Because freelancers often focus on one main skill area, they are vulnerable to changes in the marketplace–a steep revenue drop or the appearance of a new competitor, for example. When you’re only “eating what you kill” and you only eat one kind of food, some scary scenarios are possible. Consider the vulnerability of freelance writers, already struggling to make sufficient income, who are now being forced to compete with online writers who contribute work for a share of ad revenue–or who even write for free. This challenge seems to be growing by the day, and there’s no end in sight.
