The #1 thing I learned after I quit freelancing and why I decided to return to it
Back in 2022, I felt a sort of freelancer burnout coming over me. The pandemic was a very difficult time, managing family, work, changes in the event industry and by 2022 I felt that I was at the end of my rope and I needed a change. I wanted to continue live illustration and visual harvesting and through a friend of mine I was able to get into an excellent company which does this work at a super professional level in Brussels called Visuality. I learned a lot about working in a team and was lucky enough to be surrounded by exceptional people, yet for some reason it wasn’t the right fit for me and I wasn’t the right fit for them.
During that one and a half years while I haven’t been freelancing, I came to a realisation about what it means to be a creative professional. While it might be self-evident for some people, to me it was a big deal and it has meaningful consequences now that I’m back to freelancing. The number one thing that I have learned is:
Your job is not solely to do your craft, your job is to run a business.
As an artist / creative professional, and especially as a self-taught illustrator, I spent so much mental energy on feeling like an impostor that I have completely overlooked the fact that I was actually trying to run business. I didn’t take myself seriously, I let myself be taken advantage of, felt that my work was worth less because it was a joy to produce it and was doing marketing and outreach on an ad hoc basis without any kind of strategy or vision.
I think as artists many of us still have a deep seated aversion towards taking money for doing our art and often find it hard to see the value in it, let alone put a price tag on it. But if we continue to relate to our work this way, this could lead to some form of burnout or leaving the freelance path all together.
While I was working for somebody else, I realised that this was my biggest mistake, not thinking of myself as a business. So here are a few things that I’m doing now to change this (it’s still a work in progress and I’m constantly trying to figure out how to do this better):
I came up with a strategy for myself.
This includes blogging, connecting with people in real life and on LinkedIn, reaching out to past clients and potential new ones, updating my website and a few other things. I’m committed to doing these things regularly because these are the things that make this a business not a hobby.
I have KPIs that I’m measuring regularly.
I can’t believe I’m using such capitalistic lingo but KPIs matter because without measuring you don’t really know where you are going. The key for me is to measure the right stuff and not vanity metrics like the number of followers one has, as it doesn’t matter from a business perspective.
I’m being more conscious about genuinely connecting with others and figuring out if I can help them somehow.
This one is important for me because if you work for yourself and don’t have a team, you have to make an effort to bring people into your life. I’m working on this now and it makes a huge difference.
As for why I returned to freelancing, the answer is really simple, it’s because I wanted to work for myself again. The “free” in freelancing, it turns out, is so valuable to me that I just cannot let it go. We are all different and I think some people find this “free” while working for a company where they may have set hours, frameworks, clear expectations and projects handed to them.
When you are freelancing, everything is your responsibility and to some people, that’s just too much, and I get this now so much better than before. But if you are a freelancer, and you find a way to make it work, then you get to experience the best kind of freedom there is, to freedom to find your flow.