The Ten Commandments of a Freelance Techie

For this week’s offering, geeks and geekettes, we are going to examine the ten commandments of staying in business when running the gauntlet that is being a freelance IT technician, and the seven deadly sins to avoid at all costs…

Commandment number 1

Plan your business. You must, at all costs, have a strategic business plan. You just have to. If you don’t have a business plan, how do you know what you are supposed to be doing, and when? When you work for someone else, you don’t have to worry about this type of thing. Just turn up, put in your eight hours and then go home again. It doesn’t matter if you spend all day playing Gears of War or online Poker, you are getting paid, and, if things start to slip, it’s someone else’s worry. After all, they are the ones with the business plan. However, when you work for yourself, you must know what the end goal is, what the plan of attack is for your business, because, otherwise, how will you know what to do to get there?

Commandment number 2

Plan the steps along the way. Take your business plan, and work out what you have to do to get to the end, and then divide it into how you are going to do each part of it, and when. This makes an ‘Action plan’. As you complete each part of your action plan, you can update your overall business plan into business ‘actual’. However, if you fall down somewhere along the way, you can make some changes to the overall business plan, or maybe make some changes to the next action plan you make to compensate for any shortfalls.

Commandment number 3

Have a marketing plan. Again, if you don’t know how you are going to get your customers, or where from, or how many, how do you know what to do to get to this? It’s all about setting goals, and setting out targets in achievable chunks, and then doing the things you need to do to make them happen, and then, if they don’t happen, doing something else to make up for it. It works that way with marketing too.

Commandment number 4

Network (the people stuff). Speak to people, and keep speaking, handing out cards galore, as often as you can. And track it – then you can do it again if it works.

Commandment number 5

Stay ahead of the game. In the world of IT, especially when providing freelance support, you need to be ahead of the game. This means you will need to research your specialism or general support area on a regular basis. Plan in your research time, and find out as much as you can about what is going on in the world you operate in. Use the forums (I can think of a good one!), use the software vendor pages, the IT magazines and any other areas you can think of to ensure you are reading all about the developments that may affect you in the future. Go to conferences, updates, do whatever you can to stay ahead of your competitors.