How to scale a freelance business

 Earning a living as a freelancer has plenty of challenges, but knowing how to scale a freelance business takes more than just having a sellable skill. If you have had some success as a freelancer, then you have probably thought about how to grow your freelance business even further.

 Here we discuss five valuable tips for freelance scalability. Learn how to acquire more clients and foster long-term relationships before taking your business to the next level and beyond. 

Let’s get started.

Always be pitching

Job boards like UpWork and Fiverr are good places for a beginner to dip their toe in the water and start freelancing. But the competition is high and the pay rates are often low, and they are not how to scale a freelance business. To do that, find clients away from these highly populated websites. That’s where cold pitching comes in, which involves emailing potential clients to offer your services. 

Cold pitching is a numbers game, and you need to fine-tune your approach as you gain more experience. It might seem daunting, but remember some of your future best-paying clients don’t even know they need your services yet. Let them know!

Develop long-term relationships

 Most successful freelancers develop long-term working relationships with their clients. A consistent flow of repeat work from certain clients lets you plan for the future with a stable present. It could also lead to new opportunities as your long-term clients recommend ‘the specialist’ they use to other companies they do business with.

The best way to develop long-term relationships is simply by producing good work. Go above and beyond, especially with valuable clients, such as offering to make amendments to the work for free (within reason) until it is perfect, as well as providing ongoing support. 

Build a team of collaborators

 Hiring other freelancers to outsource certain tasks to as well as building a team of collaborators is the next level of how to scale a freelance business. It could be as simple as passing on a job to another freelancer and taking a management/agent fee off the top. This will be useful when you start getting too much work to undertake by yourself.

Getting to know other freelancers with different but related skill sets can also help you land bigger and better jobs that you can’t complete on your own. Likewise, your team of collaborators can call upon you to take part in jobs that they don’t have the skills to complete alone.

Create a product

Being a service-only business will keep you busy, but there is another way to earn as a freelancer. Knowing how to scale a freelance business also means knowing how to present your skills as a product.

Your product could be in the form of a guide or ebook describing a process or another valuable aspect of your speciality. This can then be sold over and over to different clients to generate passive income while promoting your expertise.

Be prepared for success

 If you are going to scale your business and freelance business expenses, then be prepared for success by having an easy and reliable payments system in place. While all of the above are important steps in growing your business, the ultimate goal is still getting paid for your work. Clients also appreciate a reliable payment system, knowing exactly what is due and when. 

GoCardless is the easiest way for businesses to get paid on time, helping you to easily collect payments on the day they are due. GoCardless also collects approximately 97.3% of payments successfully at the first time of asking. For any payments that fail, Success+ allows businesses to retry payment.

 For freelancers offering their services to clients all over the world, GoCardless also lets you collect payments in over 30 countries.

We can help

GoCardless is a global payments solution that helps you automate payment collection, cutting down on the amount of financial admin your team needs to deal with. Find out how GoCardless can help you with one-off or recurring payments.