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It sounds attractive.

• Be your own boss
• Make more money
• Work your own hours
• Steer your business exactly how you want to

Here’s the reality.

You are one person responsible for:

• Attracting customers
• Quoting customers
• Meeting customers
• Billing/collecting deposits
• Coming up with design concepts
• Finalising design concepts
• Purchasing/managing Domain Registration & Hosting
• Coding the web site
• Launching the web site
• Billing the client
• Reminding the client if payment is late
• Fixing things when it all goes horribly wrong (Site goes offline)

If you’re a hard worker, stubborn, prepared for sacrifice and you don’t take no for an answer, you have the personality for it. But be under no illusions it IS a lot of hard work, and a fairly steep learning curve particularly for the first two years.

Not only is it a learning curve, but every penny you make, has to go back into the business. So get ready to live on the absolute minimum. You need to have an excellent ‘buffer’ for your business in case of equipment repair, equipment purchase, office rental, sick time, cash flow problems (eg. bills are out payment is slow), quiet time etc. So if you do pay yourself a salary, it must be the absolute minimum you can survive on, and everything extra goes into equipment, office rental if needed, and eventually a wage for an assistant.

Here’s my advice to you if you do want to freelance:

• Get an accountant: You are already responsible for billing and chasing bills, take a bit of the burden off your shoulders and believe me they are not as expensive as people make out!
• Get organised: Get an on-line billing client that you can run from your web site, this will keep track of invoices outstanding, invoices paid, and the invoice numbers for you. You need it!
• Use Excel for your taxes: All you need is a simple spreadsheet for incomings and outgoings, you can then email this to your accountant in order to determine your end of year tax return
• Get inpired! You are a creative person responsible for a lot of mundane work, this will drain you at times, so take time off. Go to the park, take some pictures, look at inspirational web designs, join twitter, just do something, anything, that keeps you interested and excited about the possibilities for your little company, and for web design in general!

Finally, love your clients! Sometimes it will be difficult to time-manage, but you just make sure an occasional email when you have quiet time is sent to your client, even if only once every couple of months to see if everything is ok with their web site, or if they need anything. This goes a long way towards goodwill for your company, even if they have nothing they need done.

So I hope I have shown a realistic view of this way of working, it is hard work, but it is also the most satisfying hard work you will ever do because everything you do/make contributes to your company, and your companies good name. So if’s job satisfaction you’re looking for, you will get it! Just don’t forget it’s a hard old slog too!!

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