Spark Your Freelance Business with Strategic Synergy

Credit: Solarseven on Photodune

Are you trapped selling buckets of time? Bouncing from one freelance project to the next? There is a better way – develop a synergistic approach to your freelance business.

At times we all need to take the work that comes before us to generate income, yet we should develop a personal strategy to minimize this. I propose that we do so by building synergy among a range of products and services. This approach maximizes your time, utilizes your energy, and when done well builds long term income.

The Time Dilemma

As a freelancer it is relatively easy to find yourself doing a wide variety of work. Established and successful freelancers can more easily dictate the type of work they take on, while many others have to more or less take what they can get.

When we are trapped in the cycle of selling buckets of our time, it can be hard to set aside part of our work schedule to develop products.

Oftentimes, it feels like we freelancers have to take most every opportunity or risk running out of work. Certainly there is a limit to this, but in general that tends to be the state of mind. This is especially true of those that find themselves kick starting their freelance business.

When we are trapped in the cycle of selling buckets of our time, it can be hard to set aside part of our work schedule to develop products. There is a conflict between our immediate income needs and what would put us in a better position in the future.

It’s more productive long term to build products that work in tandem with your freelance services. Building synergy there can help you reach both your short term pay needs and long term income goals. Let’s look at this in more detail.

Tug of War

In the past I freelanced as a web developer, working on various web sites coding for money. At the same time I was working on writing my own books. Given that my books are all about web design, one would think that the two would go well together. Certainly, my experience as a developer have come to shape and inform the direction my books take. However, they do not go together nearly as well as you might imagine. In fact they down right work against each other.

Freelance web development involves the actual work, the sales process and all the overhead that comes with web projects, not to mention the effort it takes to stay current. Running such a solo operation leaves little energy to fit in writing a book. In fact, the very nature of selling development time drives you to do nothing else. And this is a good thing, if that is all you want to do.

As it turns out tough, I really wanted to be doing the writing, yet it always felt like it was taking away hours I could be coding for money. Yes, my books earn money, but it was just really tough managing the tug of war.

Finding a More Synergistic Balance

The answer to this of course was to cut the web development, but what was I going to replace it with? Well, I found that I could easily write and sell articles about the web and web design (and the business of freelancing of course). At first it felt like writing articles for money might absorb all my energy and yet again leave nothing to write my books.

On the contrary, the more I write articles, the more I polish my perspectives on similar topics for the book. And as I write the books I see new article ideas. It turns out that the two are totally different outlets. Books take about one and half years from start to the day it hits shelves. Articles on the other hand are written today and go live next week. As such, I had stumbled upon a strategy that works marvelously.

And this leads me to the notion of synergy.

Turn Everything Into a Product

One way to view this is to turn everything you do into a product. For me, some of my ideas work well for books, others work well for articles. The two allow me to make use of a much wider range of ideas. This diversifies my income, and stabilizes my business. It also gives variety to my day, while allowing me to focus on one core type of work I want, writing.

Instead of latching on to things that appear to relate, simply turn what you already do into a product.

Let’s consider how this might apply to other types of work. In the past I have worked for several agencies doing contract web work. At each of these I pushed to make the development of products we could sell over and over, but it never happened.

The contract work will always look more lucrative and demand priority, leaving little to no time for anything else.  The two worlds simply don’t work well together. And I am not the only one to figure this out.

So, if you sell design work (like many agencies) and want to diversify your work what would that look like?

Instead of latching on to things that appear to relate, simply turn what you already do into a product. For example, a designer could develop various libraries of tools like: icons, layouts and templates. These are things that a designer uses every day, and if further developed could streamline day to day work. Not only that, but they could be sold online through services like ThemeForest, Graphic River and other such outlets.

In this way, the work you do every day inspires closely related products. And the products can greatly impact your day to day design work. Not to mention that such products can attract more clients for the type of work you do!

Short Term in Sync with Long Term Goals

Consider this in light of short term versus long term pay offs. The day to day design work brings in a certain amount of money, and short of hiring help it is really hard to grow it any larger, there are just so many hours in a day.

In contrast, if you develop tools along the way, you not only get more done, but you develop a product line that simply sits on the shelves and makes money. Once you have done this for a while you will build a passive source of income that works even when you’re on vacation, and who wouldn’t want that.

Your Mission – If You Choose to Accept It

So, my challenge to you is to carefully consider the work that you do. What elements contradict each other? What could be extended into a new product or service? What tools could you develop to streamline your work and sell at the same time? Where is your business synergy?

Look carefully at the work you do and consider what you do every day that you could package up and sell. I am certain this is not always easy to accomplish, but the end result is well worth it.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Solarseven.