? Illuminating the Freelance Way: Two Mentors and Their Unspoken Lessons

A long time ago, when I was just a 20-year-old freelance kid, I was lucky to be around two great business mentors.

They were both entrepreneurs at heart, but their approaches couldn’t have been more different.

The first was a client of mine, a Moroccan guy running his own company in Barcelona with dozens of workers, mostly technicians. As an owner/operator, he was ruthlessly efficient in making all managerial decisions. He loved the game and he was absolutely crushing it.

Even though they were in the HVAC industry (think heating and air conditioning) and the late 1990s were not really booming online in Spain, he made a decision and founded an online project for his professional peers with me as its lead developer. In less than a year, the project was up and running, generating substantial traffic, revenues, as well as leads for people who wanted to work with the company.

I was impressed.

Yes, we had to work very hard to build the new venture from the ground up, but that was just a part of the journey. However, what I witnessed there firsthand for the first time, was the raw entrepreneurial power in play — an unrestrained force creating something valuable and useful with few resources.

Over the next 25 years, I’ve met many other natural entrepreneurs of this kind and they never stopped amazing me. They usually don’t fancy MBAs or follow established business frameworks. It’s very hard, if not impossible, to pin them down from an academic perspective. They seem to be running on pure instinct, but that’s just a false impression. They’re pragmatic and results-oriented. Most of all, they don’t lie to themselves. They know how harsh the market conditions are to those who do.

So that was a very valuable lesson for me early on, to see how an experienced owner/operator masters his craft and creates things. It encouraged me to adopt a similar approach as a freelancer.

The second mentor and friend of mine was a prototypical independent professional. He worked as a freelance translator, writer, and maker of natural products which he sold directly to a vast network of friends and acquaintances. He also traveled a lot, to over 70 countries by now, I guess.

In the early 2000s, when I was starting to develop my own business projects, I made one that was generating perhaps €400 in monthly revenues — quite little next to my freelance web-development income at the time.

When I told my friend about the modest earnings, he surprised me by saying: “Hell, that’s pretty good!“

He immediately understood something I didn’t at the time, which is that creating a new, steady revenue out of thin air, even a small one, is no small feat. With some 20-odd years of freelancing under his belt, he knew that €0 and €400 a month is one hell of a difference. He was right of course. In the years that followed, the project bloomed.

Entrepreneurs and freelancers who have truly inspired and guided me rarely went beyond brief remarks or simply being themselves, and I loved them for it. The entrepreneurial spirit is hard to put in words, but you know deep inside when it touches you. A good insight or a living example is like a touch of divine inspiration. While it might go unnoticed by others, you know you’ve spotted something true and essential there.

If there must be a take-away, it is probably this: Being around entrepreneurs and freelancers is priceless for all the reasons that are pretty hard to put into words.

Happy freelancing, everybody ?

Written for the Freelancing.eu newsletter.