When I speak with freelancers and small business owners we all come to a similar experience. You work a lot or don’t work, like a rollercoaster. The reason is that when you work you don’t do business development and when you don’t work you do a lot of business development so all the work comes at once. Here are some tools to help the freelancers and small businesses to deal with the downtime.
Freelance part time
One of my tricks to manage my income is to work part-time as a freelance in a client’s office. This gives me a steady income to cover my business costs including my salary.
Put yourself in databases
Get yourself signed up on peopleperhour.com or freelancer.com – they are not great, you only have to accept or apply for jobs or projects that are worth your time. Note: you will have to sieve a lot but there is gold in them.
Use the time for business strategy
Downtime is a great time to plan and create your strategy. For example, when I have time, I use it to create promotional marketing and go to network events. But the best use of time is strategising my next few months. Put timelines, earning projections and budgets.
Courses and personal development
Downtime is an excellent opportunity to study and grow personally. Sign up to a course or simply study and read things that can help your personal development. I use Coursera a lot of times to get some new skills.