Nicola Balkind

Freelance Writer & Content Specialist

Skilling Up

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Skilling Up

I’ve written a lot about my freelance journey and about a lot of my favourite resources for running a microbusiness. In addition to my mantra about working on my business as well as in my business, I have to keep on top of the latest trends and relevant skills. As freelancers, we have to work on our skills without a board member to send us to a seminar or call in a training squad. Here are my tips on skilling up.

There’s a lot of talk about digital natives – oh, we millennials and our innate skills and internet prowess. But the truth is that almost everything I know about working in digital content and marketing, and all of my related skills, are learned. I can navigate around faster than the average 40 year-old, sure, but no-one is born knowing how to craft an excellent call to action or photoshop an image.

Skilling up is important to me, and this year I’ve focused a lot on multimedia, particularly audio and image editing – but more about those below. Here are three resources that helped me to skill up this year.

 

Business Training & Mentoring

Last year, I won a place on the Flourish programme from the Cultural Enterprise Office here in Glasgow. The programme included 4 days of business training along with private sessions with a mentor.

The time and space it afforded me to refine my business model, think about customers and plan growth was so welcome, and the mentoring sessions were a lot like business therapy. Whenever things are slow or I’m struggling with a recurring problem, I have advice to remember and apply to the new situation. It has been invaluable.

 

DIY Practice-Based Learning

Being a digital autodidact is a great asset, particularly these days. There’s tons of great software, online and off, that’s easy to use when you put in the time to learn to use it.

This year I embarked on a new audio project with my friend Holly. Making our podcast, Bookish Blether, has given me a chance to work on my audio production skills, particularly the use of GarageBand for audio editing. Now I feel ready to move on to more professional software and am looking into more options to up our game even more.

I’ve also taken visual content more seriously, creating my own header images and video thumbnails. I have a reasonably good eye but have never been happy with my artistic skill. While my cobbled together header images aren’t necessarily works of art, they’re eye-catching, and trying harder and making that extra effort was necessary so as not to be left behind. It has also raised the bar for the standard of content I’m willing to publish.

The secret? I’ve been using the free online software at Canva – give it a shot yourself.

 

E-Courses with CreativeLive

Another audio-related course I’ve taken this year is Alex Blumberg’s Power Your Podcast With Storytelling with CreativeLive. It’s up to you to make time to work on these, and it has taken me a while to work my way through this one. However I found it’s a great way to gee yourself up when you’re feeling uninspired, and I learned a lot from this one.

CreativeLive is a great platform that brings in experts to teach 1–3 day workshops across creative disciplines including photography, video, design, business, and audio. You can log in and watch live online workshops free in real-time, or you can purchase the course materials and watch the training in your own time. Some of the courses are quite entry-level, while others are more advanced, so even if you’re just thinking of starting up there might be some workshops that are relevant to you.

They also have a fantastic blog, by the way.

 

Your Turn

How do you skill up in your business? How do you decide which skills you need or want to add to your personal toolkit?

Freelance Finance

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Freelancing & Finances

Let me tell you a story about freelancing and finances…

Last week I returned home from my holiday to find that one of my long-term contracts was being terminated without notice.

Usually, when setting up a new agreement, I specify one month notice from either party. However in this case I had signed the client’s standard contract. I hadn’t anticipated that it’d be terminated early – but when you are a contractor there’s always risk involved.

Fortunately, I’d already been offered a few pieces of work to get me through the end of the year, but I was also prepared in other ways.

Although it’s never fun to lose work, it’s important to plan for the best and be prepared for the worst. With that in mind, here’s my brief guide to freelance finance.

 

How to be financially prepared

1. Forecast your income

My contracts can run for anything from one week to a year, so I track my clients and number of contracted days as I go.

On my wall I have a calendar for the year. Under each month I list my client names alongside the number of days or fee for that month. At a glance I can see how many days are spoken for and how much I’m due to earn.

I also keep a spreadsheet with invoices due, sent, and paid where I can track my income, all of which keeps me right when it’s time to file taxes, too.

 

2. Know your essential costs and income

My basics are rent, bills, travel allowance and food. You may have others, like childcare or a car or a mortgage.

These basic costs amount to an average of £1000 per month. To account for tax and savings (see next point), I need to bring in at least £1400 per month to cover it. (I also work on the assumption that I can and aim to make a little more than that to cover things like clothing, cleaning supplies and maybe even some social engagements.)

Here’s a simple formula: work out your essential costs, divide by your day rate and you’ll have the minimum number of days’ work you need to live. Voilà!

 

3. Set money aside

I have a rule for getting paid: don’t even look at what’s come in before detracting the basics.

For me the basics are:

  • 20% for business savings (these cover taxes and National Insurance);
  • 10% for expenses (this will depend on your overhead);
  • 10-20% for personal savings (depending on how much is coming in).

After those are spoken for, anything over and above your basic costs can go towards the finer things in life.

 

4. Limit stress: have a float

Most sources suggest saving enough to cover your basic expenses for at least 3 months before going freelance.

I have a couple of personal savings accounts: one for fun stuff like holidays and treats, and another as a nest egg / rainy day fund which acts as my float. Having a float is vital for any unexpected expenses: loss of business, illness, a broken computer – you name it.

Let’s be real. When you freelance, you probably won’t have a reliable income. Payments will be late, contracts will break, or other life hazards might get in the way. Unless your business covers sick pay and leave, you’re probably not going to be earning while you’re sick or taking a break. Have a float, save, and plan for those instances and cover yourself for those things large and small.

Knowing you have a float can make setbacks (like the one I’ve just experienced) so much easier to deal with. It can still be a blow to the ego, but I know that financially, I’m fine and I have time to find a new opportunity.

 

5. Don’t kid yourself

Now a general point: have a good relationship with your money.

The worst thing you can do is to be dishonest with yourself about your finances. Even if you think you aren’t “good with money,” you need it to live. You must be good with money to freelance successfully.

 

6. Avoid the time = money trap

Time is money. It’s a cliché for a reason. When freelancing, time often does have a direct correlation with money – but please don’t let it control you. I see a lot of freelancers give up opportunities to work on their business, or just to relax, because they are too busy working in their business.

Know how much you want to make, how much time and effort it takes to make it, and how far you can reasonably stretch it. Save for rainy days and factor in holidays, research days, professional events and any other time-costs you encounter. You’ll be saner for it.

 

Your Turn

Did I miss anything? What are your best tips for dealing with freelance finances?

Do feel free to share them in a comment below, tweet me, or shoot me an email and we’ll chat.

 

I’m available!

As you may have guessed from the story above, I have some availability through 2016. Want to work with me? Get in touch!

Managing Yourself

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As a freelancer, my work often involves a lot of irons in the fire and a lot of spinning plates.

Clichés aside, one of the biggest challenges is managing in a time that works for you and for your clients.

Here I’ve compiled just a few of my favourite tools, tricks, and nuggets of wisdom for managing yourself and your own time as a freelancer.

 

1. Take the best advice, not all of the advice, you can get

With so many business start-up and productivity blogs and books around, it’s easy to get stuck in a research rut. I’ve found that you get much further with one or two good, solid pieces of advice.

Rework by the guys at 37 Signals was a revelation for me because it justified a lot of my existing working method, while giving me new ways to think about how best to handle my time. Manage Your Day to Day from 99U is also packed with simple, easily implemented advice on managing your time.

More recently, this blog piece on structuring your ideal workday further confirmed my theories about the best times of day to get certain types of work done.

Now that I have those fundamentals down, it’s time to move on and put them into practice. Don’t get bogged down in the latest tricks if you’ve found something that works for you. Give it a go and try to develop it into your perfect practice.

 

2. Find a system that suits you

In earlier (and less lucrative) days as a freelancer, I kept all sorts of paper notes and a planner. The planner was my own diary, keeping track of meeting dates and deadlines, and I liked to keep a separate notebook for each project. As I  gradually added more and more projects to the pile, it became important to keep all the key things in one place.

Now I use Basecamp Personal, using my work-life as a single Project. Within that, I have a to-do list for each client (each to-do is attached to a deadline), and a document for each week in which I list the days of the week and the time spent on each client. After trying tends of productivity apps to manage them all, this has been the best solution I’ve found for keeping separate lists in one place.

Some other great tools with similar functionality are and Toggl for time management and Trello, which is a dream for to-do list addicts.

 

3. Don’t forget the fundamentals

You know how the tax deadline seems to come around earlier each year? And you end up spending hours in a sea of receipts, wishing you’d been more organised? Try dedicating 20 minutes per week, or an hour each month, to getting your receipts together.

I like to keep my monthly receipts in separate envelopes. Usually I’ll clear out my purse at the end of each week and write the totals on the envelope. Then I keep a separate spreadsheet where I tally up the monthly totals and separate day-to-day and capital expenses. As an added bonus, breaking it down will keep things fresh in your mind so you won’t miss those stray receipts, and I promise you’ll feel loads more sane.

If you’re more of a geek about these things, try Kris Atomic’s blog post on The Joy of Accounting – it could be a life-changer!

 

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This blog post was originally published on the Small is Beautiful blog.

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