What The Freelance Pro Is All About
Hi. I’m Dean Rieck. And I’m a freelance professional. I started The Freelance Pro to show you how to be a freelance professional too.
The Freelance Pro is about building and managing a career as a highly-paid and highly-respected freelance writer or designer and selling your expertise to businesses who need your skills. If you simply want to earn a little extra income on the side or get some work between jobs, that’s fine. You’ll find plenty of advice here that you can use to add a few thousand dollars to your wallet this year.
But if you want more, if you’ve always dreamed of leaving your job and setting up shop as an independent copywriter, designer, or consultant, this is the place to find out about how to think, act, and earn like a true professional.
As an self-employed copywriter or designer, you’re a professional same as any doctor or lawyer.
Over the years, I’ve talked to a lot of freelancers. And the one thing that so often strikes me about these talented people is their “employee” attitude. Even if they leave a job specifically to escape the corporate meat grinder and assert more control over their lives, they still tend to think and act like an employee — always looking for the security of work from one or two “employers.”
It’s not their fault. That’s just how the corporate world trains us all to think. There are employers and employees. And “freelancers” usually fall into the “employee” category.
But I always saw things differently. Right from the start, even when I had no idea what I was doing, I always acted like a professional, the same as a doctor, lawyer, or accountant. The way I see it, I’m a highly skilled professional who has hung out a shingle to do business. I don’t look for “work,” I seek out clients. I don’t ask how much a job “pays,” I provide quotes for my services.
This approach has worked out very well for me. I’m good at what I do. I enjoy my work. I make my own hours and have plenty of time for hobbies and recreation. I’m happier than I ever was working for other people. And yes, I earn a good living. Six figures year in and year out.
Am I a hardball sales type, a risk-taking entrepreneur, or a Harvard Business School Graduate? No, no, and no. I’m just an ordinary guy who got tired of working long hours for lousy pay and decided to do something about it.
My rags to “riches” story.
With all the wrong experience, no training, no contacts, living in a small West Virginia town with no one to show me the way, I quit a dead-end $5.50 an hour job and, to the horror of my wife, struck out on my own as a freelance copywriter.
Over the next two and a half years, I experienced some of the most devastating and relentless failure of my life, searching desperately for a way to make a living. I read business and freelancing books, but nothing seemed to work for me. I think one big reason was that all the advice I got from other freelancers was based on the “employee” thinking that I was trying desperately to escape.
I found myself once again working for nearly nothing, doing work I didn’t like, and feeling completely out of control. I repeatedly applied for full-time jobs to escape what I concluded had been a terrible mistake, but no one would hire me.
Then, while literally working around the clock just to pay the bills — often for 48 hours or more with no sleep and with debt mounting on 11 separate credit cards — I finally got the break I was looking for. While summoning the courage to ask for $3,000 to write two direct mail packages (my freelance work is in the direct marketing industry), my client took me aside and ask if I could do the job for $9,000. Giving an Oscar-winning performance, I nodded slowly and said, “Well, if you think that’s what the job is worth, I’ll trust your judgment.”
Outside I was cool. Inside I was jumping up and down and screaming, “Yippee!” In my first job, it would have taken me an entire year to earn that much. And here I was about to earn that for just one project!
That experience gave me the financial and emotional boost I needed to turn things around. Now, years later — but far wiser in the ways of freelance business — I have a blue ribbon roster of clients from coast-to-coast and earn from $350 to $500 an hour. Life and work are better than ever.
That’s what The Freelance Pro is all about. More respect. More money. More control. More fun. All doing the professional writing and/or design work at which you are the expert.
I want to share with you all the mistakes I’ve made as well as the many secrets I’ve discovered along the way. I promise to tell it like it is and never, ever sugar coat the truth. Freelancing is a great way of life, but it can be rough if you don’t know what you’re doing. I hope to give you what I never had — advice from a personal mentor who’s “been there and done that” as a freelance pro.
