Hi Reader,

Happy Friday!

It kinda feels a bit like a new school year now September has hit. My clients that had been busy and OOO over summer have all come crawling back out the woodwork with a surplus of assignments for me, so the last few months of the year are looking nicely busy.

How are things going for you?

P.S. In this week's Instagram post, I shared a tongue-in-cheek look at the key moments of being a freelancer. Check it out here. And don't forget to give me a follow for regular tips and tricks!

Here's what I've been up to this week work-wise:

👉 I wrote 2 pieces for clients (Modash)

👉 I refreshed 3 pieces for Shopify

👉 I worked on some social content for a client

👉 I closed the doors on the latest cohort of The Hello Effect

👉 I sent a proposal to a potential new client

👉 I started planning an in-person talk I'm doing next month

⏱ Approx hours spent on client work this week: ~23

⏱ Approx hours spent on non-client work: ~3

💰 Total revenue this week: £3,105

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Friday Freelance Tip​​ ✨ ​

Three years into freelancing I was charging pretty much the same as I was when I started. Five years into freelancing wasn't much better.

My income really plateaued for those first five years and I really struggled to figure out why at the time. Now, I think I've got to the bottom of it (well, kinda).

Most freelance advice treats a flat income as a volume problem: if you get more clients, work more hours, send more pitches, and post more content, you'll be golden.

The art of more, more, more.

And look, I get why that’s the go-to answer... when you’re stuck, “do more” feels productive. But if you’ve been at this more than a couple of years, you’ve probably already tried that. You’ve already worked the extra hours and your income is basically where it was. Well, that's what happened to me, anyway. I was working 14 hours a day at one point. Not sustainable.

That’s because... drum roll... volume was never the problem. I mean, it is a problem when you burn out around year three or four instead of building something that lasts, because WHO KNEW you can’t out-hustle a structural issue, no matter how many pitches you send????

Here’s the pattern I keep seeing, in myself and in basically every freelancer I talk to who’s plateaued: they optimise for getting the next project. They never optimise for building something that gets projects without them personally re-hustling for it every single month.

In those early days, there were a few "traps" holding me back that I'm pretty sure are the culprits of a lotta plateaued incomes.

The generalist trap

This is saying yes to everything. Copywriting one month, social media the next, a logo thrown in because a client asked nicely and you didn’t want to say no. I've done it alllllllll. I even wrote about short spine syndrome in dogs once because I didn't want to say no lol.

The problem with this trap isn’t that your work is varied... plenty of thriving freelancers do varied work. The problem is that nobody can describe what you do in one sentence, which means nobody can refer you.

Here’s a question I want you to have a stab at answering:

Could a past client refer you to someone specific right now?

I'm not talking about whether they'd say nice things about you (I'm sure they would!). I'm asking whether they could say, unprompted, to a real human bean, "you should talk to [you], they're the person for [specific thing]."

If you've answered no, you miiiiiight be in this trap.

(To be clear: I’m not telling you to narrow your skills. I’m telling you to narrow your story, which is a whole other topic worthy of a newsletter).

The race-to-the-bottom pricing trap

Most freelancers price one of two ways: what they feel they’re worth (usually a total guess), or hourly-rate math... you know, the old salary, divided by some made-up number of billable hours jobby.

Both of those cap you at the same ceiling: your available hours. If the only lever you can pull is “charge more per hour” or “work more hours,” you WILL hit a wall.

Picture two freelancers, identical skillset. One prices hourly, tracks every minute, feels a bit guilty charging for thinking time. The other prices on the outcome and what the project’s actually worth to the client’s business, and never mentions hours at all. The first one plateaus because they only have so many hours in a day. The second one can scale because they're not tied down to billable hours.

Just to say, it was a MASSIVE turning point for my business when I stopped thinking about hours when charging. It's such an easy trap to fall into because society ingrains in us that we trade hours for money.

The single-channel client trap

This is when all your clients come from one place. It can feel very stable right up until it isn't. I cannot TELL you how many times I've fallen into this trap (embarrassingly!). I used to get all my work from Upwork, then it became overrun with new freelancers competing in a race to the bottom.

Then I got all my work via my website, then traffic plummeted and it dried up.

This is usually the real mechanism behind feast-or-famine. It’s not that you don’t have enough clients, it’s that you don’t have enough independent sources of them. When that one channel dries up, you're toooooast until you can scramble and figure out another one.

The no-systems trap

Sneaky one, because it doesn’t feel like a problem until it verrrry much is (and I was totally guilty of this in those first five years).

This is where everything lives in your head. You have no proposal template, no standard contract, no onboarding process, NOTHING. So... every project is starting from zero because you're rebuilding the wheel every single time. Spoiler: this is why you can't take a real holiday 😬

It takes a TON of time doing everything from scratch and if you're personally holding it all together, you're gonna have a bad time.

The motivation to get out of these traps isn't JUST an income boost. It's being able to lose a client and not spiral, it's knowing your rate before someone even asks, it's knowing that work will continue to flow to you even when you're taking some time off.

Sooo let's be honest here, are you stuck in any of these traps?

As always, happy freelancing 🙂

Lizzie ✨

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As always, happy freelancing :)

Lizzie ✨

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