One year as a freelancer
I left regular employment and set up my own business a little over a year ago. Celebrating my anniversary, I thought it was fitting to do a retrospective with myself (yes, that was my idea for celebration).
At first I tried structuring my thoughts under the “Liked”, “Didn’t like” and “Neutral” categories. When my “Liked” category became too long and my “Didn’t like” category came out too short I decided I am dealing with a case of confirmation bias. So naturally I tried to spin the “Liked” into “didn’t like” which didn’t help much and only made it feel less authentic. After some more overthinking, I scratched all categories and bundled everything under “Learning”. Because you can turn everything into learning.
So here is how I experienced the first year of being self-employed in Amsterdam.
Variety. Freelancing gave me the opportunity to look at the “career map” and ask myself “Where haven’t I been before that I might want to try?” A different industry, company size, maturity, culture or just a unique, non-traditional role. If you take shorter assignments, in one year you can experience a wider variety and keep things interesting. For me it ended up being corporate innovation in finance with a large corporation and a role at the intersection of recruiting and HR.
Bringing an external perspective to an internal team. Being an external consultant puts you in a good position to give objective advice, bring in ideas and share a fresh perspective, without taking too much interpersonal or career risk. This does have its downside as well. Being new to the company and external, you don’t know the organization and team as well as people who have worked there for 16 years. But then again that’s true for a new employee as well.
Still feeling like part of a team. This one will be very much dependent on the organization and team you are working with, but in my case I still very much felt like part of a team. Regardless of how you are paid and what kind of benefits you receive or don’t receive, feeling included is always better than the alternative.
Time off between assignments. If you are not chasing the next assignment while you are wrapping up the current one and your finances allow for it, time off between assignments is true time off. It was a bit unsettling at first, but once I got over my initial “What am I supposed to do with myself?” phase, I appreciated the freedom and space. Spending time with family, starting that side project that you’ve always thought about, taking a class or simply taking a long nap on a Tuesday afternoon.
Side projects. Speaking of time off between assignments, I’ve enjoyed using that time to kick-start some of the side project ideas I’ve had in the back of my mind for years. This is by no means to say you can’t do that as an employee. This is simply to say that I didn’t. And now I do.
Non-traditional career path. The concept of a promotion or career progression takes a very different spin when you are freelancing. You need to look beyond the title, level and salary change and truly think about it in terms of scope of responsibility, your ability to make an impact for a short period of time, your own learning milestones and how this assignment contributes to you getting the next one.
Developing skills outside my regular field of work. Working on my value proposition, business plan, product offering, marketing and business development are all (slightly) out of my comfort zone as a professional. Regardless of the scale of my business (very much a one-woman endeavour for now), these are still things you need to spend time on in order to build a good foundation, define what you are working towards and how you’ll get there.
More admin work. Being a business owner means you will need to do some amount of administration involving taxes, insurance, finances and IT. I do find myself spending more time on this than I did as an employee. And let’s just say it - I would rather spend that hour doing something else. The upside is that I’ve developed some new habits along the way by channelling my inner James Clear. His book Tiny Habits helped me this year with the habit-building part of setting up a business, as well as building a writing and guitar playing habit into my day.
This list can probably go on for a while and by no means captures all my jumbled thoughts about being self-employed. But I will end with this - excited for the next year of learnings!
