What does it mean to be a freelancer? What’s the difference between being a freelancer & a business owner?

 Let’s talk about the difference between being a freelancer and being a business owner. Often the two are used as synonyms, but they’re actually quite different.

Freelancers specifically offer hourly services and they tap into a variety of skills.

So when you’re a freelancer, it often means that you can do a lot of things for a lot of people, and you don’t mind taking on different types of clients and doing a variety of different work because you’re getting paid per hour.

That is going to be the biggest difference between being a business owner and being a freelancer. Freelancers almost always charge hourly and businesses charge for set services with set pricing.

The easiest place to find clients as a freelancer, in my opinion, would be on websites like Upwork and Fiverr.

Because it means that you do not have to do a lot of personal marketing. Those platforms are set up for business owners who know they need help to go on that platform, type in the skills that they’re looking for, and immediately connect with freelancers. If you are someone who wants to start working online, and by doing so you are happy to offer hourly services, highly recommend using Upwork or Fiverr to get started.

Now, a business owner. I would say is step two of being a freelancer. Almost every student that we’ve worked with has started off as a freelancer. So someone who offers a lot of things to a lot of people and they charge hourly, but at some point you start to identify the things that you love and the things that you don’t love, and you start to identify.

The things that you would rather be doing versus the things that you have to do, right? So over time, a lot of freelancers will then turn into business owners, and what that means is that you are specializing in one type of service. So say you start off as a virtual assistant and you do a lot of things for a lot of people, at some point you might decide that what you actually love doing the most is social media management. Then the only thing you would offer for your clients is social media services.

What this often means is that instead of charging hourly for the work that you do, you have a set price. Say when you get started as a freelancer, you might charge $30 an hour to do work, but then as you get more established, then it might turn into,

having a social media package that you charge $950 a month for to the clients that work with you. So fundamentally, business owners often have a bit more structure and a bit more of a set pricing model than a freelancer would.

The other thing is that when you are a business owner, this often means that you are known for a very specific type of service by a specific group of people.

I’ll give you an example. An example of this would be someone who offers project management for digital dietician; see how that’s like very specific? Then what happens is because someone is specializing in helping digital dieticians, then all of the dieticians refer all of their friends to the same person because they have a known and established niche and expertise with a very specific group of people. It’s very common for business owners to be really well known in specific online niches.

It makes the most sense to transition away from being a freelancer and into being a business owner when you get really good at what you do.

The thought is that the better you get at something, the faster you do it, that means is you actually get paid less to work faster. That is a big reason why people transition away from being a freelancer and into being a business owner.

People transition into being business owners for income growth as well. Often you can be capped when you charge hourly because again, of the speed. So often when you find that you’re able to do work really quickly and you start to make less money by being better, that is a big time when people transition into being a business owner.

And then finally, when you realize the things that you love doing, that is one of the biggest reasons why somebody would transition away from being a freelancer and into being a business owner. So best place to getting started is going to be inside our leaving corporate portal.

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