Are you thinking about quitting your job but worried you won't have enough clients or a solid plan to make freelancing sustainable?
Making the leap from a steady paycheck to freelancing can feel risky, especially when you're unsure how to attract clients while still working full time. This episode breaks down a practical, step-by-step roadmap to help you build a freelance business with confidence before handing in your resignation.
Listeners will discover:
A clear 12-step framework to build a freelance business before leaving their full-time job.
Proven strategies to market consistently while balancing a corporate role, including proactive and reactive marketing methods.
How to leverage a warm professional network, secure early clients, and create systems that support long-term business growth.
Press play now to get the complete 12-step blueprint so you can start building a freelance business that gives you the confidence to quit your job on your own timeline.
TRANSCRIPTBy the end of this episode, you're going to find out those 12 steps you need before you quit your job. You're going to find out how to market yourself appropriately while working full time and why a warm network is so much better than a cold network.
I was just thinking the other day, if I had to go back and do everything all over again and set a plan for myself and say, this is what I'm going to do to start a freelance business and make it successful enough that I'm able to quit my corporate job. What would I do? So when I started out, I remember I bought this, this book on freelancing and it was Amazon Kindle book? I don't know, it wasn't even, like, a physical hard copy. And I was taking notes with it. And I absolutely hated this one section of it, but I was like, get your clients through marketing. Eventually, they'll come through referrals. And I was like, wait, what? It had so much good information about how to use your skill sets for freelancing, et cetera, but when it came to getting clients, there wasn't anything in there. And there wasn't a step-by-step plan. What I did was craft 12 steps, right? Today we're going to look at 12 steps that you need in order to quit your job. And, I like the 12 steps, because to me, you can take it or leave it, right? You can do this on your own time, and you can make sure that you're doing it as fast or as slow as you want. So you could take the 12 steps and do one a month, right? If you wanted to. Or you could take the 12 steps and do them one a week or every single day. I mean, every single day might be a little tough. You'll see why as I go into this. But I'm someone who loves just like step by step by step. Give me the step by step information and then I can check it off and follow it so here we go we're going to just we're going to talk about these 12 steps.
Number 1. Register your business. Now, this is really important to me because a lot of people are like, oh, you can do it later. You don't have to do it. But the mindset shift that comes with registering your business can't be understated because all of a sudden it's real. Hot damn. You just paid money to register a business. And now it's real and you better go out there and start marketing it and start getting your act together, right? So you can either register as a sole proprietor or an LLC. It really depends on what your goals are with the business, how much you want to put into it, if you're doing a side hustle, if you want to take it full time, etc. And like I talked to my students at length about this in my program and what the better fit is. Step number two, define your offers. So now you're going to look at your corporate skills and everything that you have and say, okay, what exactly am I really good at? What do I excel at? What have people hired me for and complimented me on? And that's what I'm going to make my offers into. And this is really important, okay, because I know a lot of you might be like, I have a passion for writing though, or I have a passion for, for social media, but you have no experience in it. And I want to tell you, if your goal is to quit your job, go with what you're good at, because it'll be easier for you to sell, you know it back to front, and you know you're good at it, as opposed to jumping in and trying something new. Now, once you've built your freelance business to the point that it's stable and successful, you can go try different things, but Fastest way to the money? Stick with what you know. When I have students who shift what they're doing. and shift and pivot their business while I'm working with them, it usually does not end well, because most of the time they're shifting or pivoting into something they don't know, and they don't know it well enough to sell it, and they don't have that confidence. So defining your offers And based on what you're good at and what you've done in your corporate job, we'll see you success faster.Number three, I want you to research what makes a successful online business. Like listening to this podcast will help you a lot. Also looking at forums, also understanding. You know, people in the social media space that do the same thing as you. And I also want you to start researching what others are doing in your space specifically. So if you decide that you want to do like social media marketing or something like that, or you want to do something with AI, or you're really good at accounting, look and see what people are doing online because it's different online than it is in a corporate job, even though they might be doing the exact same skill sets that you have, and exact same jobs, and the exact same projects, how they actually market themselves online is very different. So I want you to start researching that, see what they're doing, and see what you want to do from that, alright?Number 4, I want you to pick a target industry. For example. This is something I teach in my program a lot is not so much like an ideal client, but an ideal industry because there are industries out there that can afford your rates and that is how you are going to actually be higher paid because you're targeting the industry that really needs you that can also afford higher rates. There are gonna be tons of ideal clients out there, okay? Tons. And you will be able to find those ideal clients within the ideal industry, and you're gonna find people you love to work with, and that's what you're gonna go with. But when it comes to paying you higher fees and trying to match your corporate salary, you want to do an ideal industry and look for in that area.Number 5, based on your research, your offers, and everything, pick what social media channels you want to market on. I know social media can be exhausting, but guess what? It's free. And it's one of the best ways to build trust with potential clients and get clients.Number six, find out your proactive versus reactive marketing strategy. So proactive is something like outreach, cold outreach, DMs, maybe even going to networking events, pitching people. That is proactive. Reactive is a social media posting. It's doing workshops, webinars, educating people. That is more of reactive. You want to have both in your arsenal, right? You want to both in your toolkit that you can use to be able to get clients. Number seven, you want to use that information and create a marketing schedule. So this is where you're going to look at the research of the people who were in your online space, the research of online business, the social channels, the proactive and reactive marketing. Create your marketing schedule. This is something you're going to want to try to stick to. So maybe every morning you're going to be marketing on Reddit, maybe posting on LinkedIn, maybe creating TikTok content, whatever it is, you're going to be sticking to that schedule. And then maybe In the evenings, you're going to be pitching and reaching out to people and trying to get anyone who might actually want to work with you, right?Number 8. You want to reach out to your past network. You want to reach out to all your colleagues that have known you in the past and say, this is what I'm building. Do you know someone who is interested in this? Are you interested in this? Of course, you have to phrase it a little bit differently, but you need to be as friendly as possible. And I have templates for this in my program, okay? But you want to be able to reach out because the warm network is generally the best people because the trust factor is completely eliminated. That sounds funny. Basically, you don't have to build trust, right? reaching a cold network, like social media posting and all that stuff, you're Trying to reach people who have never heard of you, who don't know who you are, who don't know what you do. And you're trying to build that trust through your marketing so that they want to work with you and think of you with your warm network. You don't have to do that. They already know how good you are. So it makes it way easier. It's like you're skipping a video game level, right? And going right to the big bad boss and maybe someone is going to want to hire you. Okay.Number nine, you want to start your marketing. You want to actually start marketing consistently. And that, again, is the combination of outreach, the combination of passive posting, networking events, maybe being a podcast guest. You want to start marketing consistently. Now, this step. Ranges for everyone. Some people find a client pretty quickly. Some people it takes months of consistent marketing and really tweaking and trying to figure out exactly what their audience needs to know before they start getting clients. This one is a little bit of wishy washy. Everything else is like something you could probably do every day. But this one is something that you need to build that muscle. And build it as a habit. The sooner you build it as a habit, the faster you're gonna see success. Don't start skipping days, don't start getting lazy. Make sure you're marketing yourself consistently. Number 10. you're gonna get your first client. Woohoo! And get your first client in any way possible, right? Remember, if you still have a corporate job, or any kind of job you have a little bit of income to rely on right now. What you want to be thinking about is, like, maybe you give people introductory offers, maybe you lower your rates, maybe you do trial runs, whatever you're doing, you're trying to rope in your first client. That first client is not only going to give you confidence that client is going to actually be able to write a testimonial for you, which is social proof, it's gold. You want to make sure that first client, you're getting as much as possible. Maybe that first client can also refer you to others who might need your services, right? This first client is everything.Number 11. build your website. I do think websites are important. Sometimes I have people build websites beforehand, depending on where they… their comfortability level is with the building an online business process, but building a website's important because this is, like, your online storefront, so you will need to invest some time and money. There are free ones out there, but most people have to invest a little bit of money into buying a domain name and all of that. And you're going to invest your time into it. So once you get that first client and you understand the offer that works and what your marketing is, you're going to start creating that website. And then you're going to use the testimonial that you have from that client and put it on there. Right. And if you have more testimonials from past colleagues, past people you've worked with, that's going to be super important as well. And you can grab that and put that in there as well. Social proof is everything.Number 12. Hopefully, you've maybe gotten a few more clients. Even if you just have one client, it's the time to start thinking about systemizing and automating as much as you can. So looking into invoices, how can you automate that? How can you automate the onboarding process with clients, like signing contracts and getting them follow-up calls and setting up calls and all of that? How much can you systemize and automate? Where can platforms help you? What makes you look the most professional? Because as you grow, you want to have that in place so you don't have to worry about it anymore.And then finally, Now, we've got a bonus, is quit your job. you can now quit your job. That could be number 13, right? Quit your job. That's so exciting, and I'm so happy for you if you are almost at that place. And then, once you've quit your job, don't stop marketing, don't stop learning, keep pushing yourself, keep understanding. I think that's, like, a big difference between corporate and being a freelancer or owning an online business is that once you get the job, you're done. You're done interviewing, you're done selling yourself, you're good, you can relax. That's not the case here. You have to keep marketing. You have to continually have a pipeline and get more clients so that you never have to worry about, you know, a client leaving you and it's more stable.To recap, these 12 steps are register your business, define your offers, research online businesses and others that are in your space, what are they doing, pick your target industry, pick social channels, figure out your proactive versus reactive marketing. Create a marketing schedule, reach out to your past network, start marketing consistently, get your first client in any way possible, build a website, use the testimonials, and finally systemize and automate as much as you can because you're in the early parts of your business and it will be harder the busier you get.I hope this helps you. These are the 12 steps that you can take now to build a freelance business before you quit your corporate job and it will set you up for such success. Stay tuned because we're going to have a tip of the week coming up where we're going to be talking a little bit about what you actually need and what you don't need to become a freelancer. And then, following that, next week on Tuesday, the next lesson is common mistakes that you make in the first 6 months of freelancing, and how to avoid those.I am Kiri Mohan, I'm the founder of Flourishing Freelancer, and I would love to talk to you about And even if it's just a kernel of an idea, I offer free consultations to anyone who listens to the podcast. You can find the link in my show notes, and let's chat together, okay? Until next time, keep flourishing.