How to Scale Your Freelance Business

Turn clients into customers

How will you scale?

I’ve been asked this question more times than I can count over the past decade of my professional career.

It’s a valid question for any freelancer. After all, when you work for yourself, you make a living trading hours of time for money.

The only way to scale a freelance business like this is to buy more time.

Since we can’t magically add more hours to each day, this usually looks like hiring others to help you take on more work. Continue down this path and suddenly you become a manager.

Some like this idea, but others hate the thought of not doing the actual work. Many freelancers enjoy being a one-man/woman army and don’t want to spend their time managing others.

In this case, buying time from others isn’t a sustainable option.

Instead, freeing up your own time is the only other way to scale.

How exactly do you do this?

Turn clients into customers and users.

This has been happening more and more within larger companies. Agencies are productizing the problems their clients face and turning them into solutions to sell. Instead of addressing them individually, they are investing time, money, and talent into creating products that can potentially solve all of these problems at once.

It’s easier to do this when you have bigger budgets available and an army of employees at your disposal, but what does this look like for individuals and freelancers?

All you have to do is look to successful freelancers like Paul Jarvis and Jessica Hische. They’ve been used their knowledge, skills, and experience to create products that solve the problems of their clients for a while.

Paul has taken almost 20 years of freelance web development experience and created his own products including a class on freelancing, training for Mailchimp, embeddable workbooks, and two podcasts. All of his products address the same audience: individual freelancers and entrepreneurs.

Jessica is a lettering artist, author, and entrepreneur who has published books, sold prints, and…