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Yesterday @HarrisonJHepp asked a question about 1st steps for someone considering going FT freelance. We had a great convo. I remember not knowing where to start a few yrs ago so I wanted to share some high-level notes here for anyone else who may be curious #MarketingTwitter
The first thing I suggest is to formally create a business. This is going to separate you and your personal assets from your business’s liability & can also have tax benefits (I’ll come back to that). It’s super easy to do...
the rules are different by geo so I won’t claim to know exactly what you need to do in your location but there are sites that can help you through the process in 5-10 minutes. Your Chamber of Commerce may be able to direct you - it may take more time but may save you a few hundo
Build out your brand, your website, and some stationary (ppt / doc templates) while you have the time! Alllll of this gets pushed to the back burner as soon as you have clients (or maybe that's just me?) Take on a few clients before leaving your FT to build a base if you can.
Get an accountant. It’ll save you so much time if you do it from the beginning. They can also help you choose the right business type & with other opportunities for tax savings.
I'm not an accountant but here's my take that nobody asked for: As a sole proprietor or a single-member LLC, everything you earn will be taxable in that year as personal income unless you elect to be treated as an S-Corp, in which case your business has a bank acct & it pays you
100% recommend this: 1 for just the purposes of tracking income 2. Because then you can control your actual paycheck regardless of the ebb & flow of business & 3 you can save on taxes by not taking your whole earnings as salary, if you make more than you really need to live on
Don’t forget to save for taxes. 1 of the most painful parts of being a consultant is seeing the $ come in that isn’t *really* yours to keep. Coming off of a W-2, you’ll be used to taxes being withheld from every paycheck & it’s painful to pay it back at the end of the yr.
That’s basically the extent of my tax knowledge other than to make sure you track expenses for eVerYtHinG. For tax purposes you want to make sure you’re counting alllll expenses. Fully recommend starting your business w/ a separate bank acct. It’s so much easier to keep track.
Which takes me to invoicing. If you plan to do it yourself - I recommend using a system. I’m not really here to drop names but Wave accounting is free and super easy to use sooo… they earned the mention. They also allow you to offer the option to accept online payments.
I highly recommend offering an online payment option no matter what system you use. In my experience, I’ve had to follow up *way* less by offering online payment options. People often pay the bill as soon as they receive it instead of setting it aside and then accidentally forget
I also keep a spreadsheet of all clients, what they owe, what’s been paid, what’s overdue, and what’s still open. Reconciliation is my LEAST favorite part of the job but with some clients still preferring to send checks, I haven’t found a good system that can fully automate this.
Beyond invoicing, unless you’ve ran a business before (I hadn’t), the admin part of the job is completely new. I like marketing. I don’t really like invoicing, accounting, etc. Getting organized from the beginning can save time. Did I mention you should get an accountant?
Actually, consider all of your processes. For example.. what do your pitches look like? What do your proposals look like? How does that process flow? (There are a lot of proposal softwares, too, btw. I didn’t use one initially but now I do and it saves SO. MUCH. TIME.)
Once they sign, what does onboarding look like? (Go ahead and prep a doc that you can send to clients that outlines what needs to happen for you to get all the access & assets that you need to get started 
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Talk to a lawyer about your contracts. Be descriptive about the work to prevent scope creep. I recommend creating a way for your scope to scale or adding a period of time that you’ll revisit & renegotiate. I welcome others to chime in w/ tips (on any part of this thread actually)
Think about who you want as a client. In the beginning, you might not feel like you have as much choice but - and this is coming from someone that learned the hard way - don’t feel like you have to take everything that comes your way.
It’s way easier to reject business that won’t be a good fit than it is to fire a client. Plus, for every missed or lost opportunity, another better one seems to come along. Just trust me on that. Some poor fits will slip through. Make note of what makes them
less-than-ideal & add it to your list of flags. Rework onboarding to filter those clients out in the future. Sometimes you need to let a client go that isn't a good fit. It sucks but it's oddly empowering, too. One red flag, IMO, is someone that pushes back on price.
If they don’t want to pay your price then they aren’t seeing your value & you might think you can prove it over time but most often people that are paying more than they want to are going to be the hardest to please.
Think about how you will price. @duanebrown wrote a great thread on pricing so I'm not going to reinvent that wheel: https://twitter.com/duanebrown/status/1339583904890540036
Reach out to your network, especially ppl that know your work. Let them know you are going out on your own. Talk to other marketers that do other services & refer business to each other. I don't have a reco for how much you should save before going out on your own but
I would suggest being comfortable knowing you may not make much for a few months while you scale up. (Again, highly recommend starting a base early if you can.)
Just a heads up - I thought this was just me - but I’ve heard from a few other consultants that this happened to them, too, so maybe I’m not crazy (or maybe I am but just not for this reason 
): you might occasionally and randomly get this sense of panic.
): you might occasionally and randomly get this sense of panic.
What it if it all collapses? What if all my clients leave? What if I can’t get clients? What if the revenue dries up? It won’t. They won’t. You will. It won’t. It’s (apparently) natural to feel this stress but like I said, there’s a lot of business out here. Just. Keep. Going.
If you feel like you’re hitting a wall, reach out to agencies. I often see them looking for an extra hand here and there. It usually doesn’t pay as well but if you’re really in a pinch, it can pay the bills.
Lastly, a quick shoutout to ppl that were super supportive and gracious w/ their time as I figured things out. @John_A_Lee @wilcoxaj @coryhenke @PPCKirk @SusanEDub @NeptuneMoon @AkvileDeFazio @HeatherCooan @duanebrown & I'm sure I'm missing ppl so I'll apologize in advance
