The Skills
The skills required for being a great freelancer can be broken down into four distinct areas,
- Technical Skills
- Business Skills
- Organizational Skills
- Interpersonal Skills
Technical Skills
For a developer, possessing technical skills means that you’re technically competent in your language or languages of choice: PHP, Ruby on Rails, Microsoft .NET, and the like. As a designer, you’d consider the strength of your skills in design software, color theory, typography, and overall design knowledge.
As a designer or developer, you need to feel confident in your own technical ability, as this is what you’re going to be relying upon. You can’t just lean over to a coworker’s desk and ask about anything you’re not sure of! Consider your areas of weakness, and research what’s involved in strengthening these areas—you’ll probably find that they’re easier to fill out than you thought.
Business Skills
It’s vitally important to have, or at least be aware of, the fundamentals of business before you consider running your own. If you plan to succeed, you’ll need a solid understanding of cash flow, marketing, time management, customer service, and other areas. Many of these elements can be outsourced, as we’ll see in Chapter 2, but you’ll still need a working knowledge of all of them.
Organizational Skills
Your ability to be well organized, or at the very least to keep on top of those dreary administrative duties, will be paramount to your success. Start by reading personal productivity books and blogs, and research the different techniques of an organization.
Don’t go overboard though; you could end up being hampered by trying too many productivity methods and not doing enough actual work! You’ll soon find a method you feel happy with, which can be defined in this context as feeling that you have the smooth running of your business under control
Interpersonal Skills
You may think that the freelance life would suit the shy or socially inept recluse, beavering away alone. Unfortunately, however, an aversion to social contact could limit your opportunities more than you think.
Productive interaction with clients and prospective clients, not to mention your suppliers, will become a crucial part of your success, so embrace human contact and be personable.
The predominant personality traits and abilities for a successful freelancer:
- Ambition
- An aptitude for problem-solving
- Courage
- A mature outlook
- A high level of communication skills
- A strong work ethic
- Perfectionism
- A professional attitude
- Self-confidence
When weighing up your own compatibility with such a word choice, it’s important to consider these traits. You’ll ideally possess more than a few of these qualities, if not all of them.
In real-life terms, this means that to be a successful freelancer, you should be able to find resonance in many of the following characteristics; ideally, you:
- Believe organization includes keeping the work-space tidy and planning ahead
- Form short-term and long-term plans, preferably detailed on paper
- Remain calm and able to work through issues in times of stress
- Are able to handle a high level of responsibility
- Understand that research goes beyond a two-minute Google search
- Appreciate the role of financial planning
- Are passionate about design or development, or both
- Understand that budgeting means planning ahead, not spending every cent as it comes in
- Value your health as important, so that you exercise and get regular checkups
- Consider freelancing because you believe you can be successful, not just to escape your current job
- Understand selling and embrace the process
- Have a good support network of family and friends
- Acknowledge that cash flow is vital to the success
- Appreciate that education is a continual process, not a once-off effort to gain a qualification
- Plan towards gaining a work-life balance, and not work round the clock
- Realize that customer service is about empathy and understanding, not just saying sorry after the fact
Successful Freelancing – Prepare for the Transition
This post contain the content of book The Principles of Successful Freelancing By Miles Burke below is link of complete book The Principles of Successful Freelancing