Scaling Your Freelance Business: Creating Standard Services and Securing Retainers

Can you really run a stress-free freelance business?

Yes…

But only if you have these 4 components setup.

I originally wrote about this topic for my newsletter readers.

They wanted to know the best way to to dip their toe into generating income outside their job without having to go fully into a business.

Freelancing is a great way to do that. This post focuses growing your freelance business.

Assuming you’ve got - a freelance offer, an optimised profile, your first few gigs under your belt and a marketing system - we can now systemise and scale.

I appreciate most won’t be at this point yet but it’s easier to get through the tough building stage when you know what your empire will look like once built.

So let’s look at how to make our freelance service more templated so that it’s more easily repeated for scale.

1. Creating standardised services

As you work with more and more clients you’ll see the same basic problems popping up again and again.

This is because similar companies in the same niche will encounter the same problems.

As a service provider pay attention to what these problems are - the more you recognise the patterns the better able you’ll be able to help more customers in your niche.

Ideally we want to find one big problem that all your customers have. Then we’ll create one solution to help them fix it.

Ideally take?all?of your case studies (produced in the last Part) and ask ChatGPT to find similarities between them. ChatGPT can draw the patterns out even if we can’t see them ourselves.

This requires a large (50+ case studies at least) data set so let’s look at a more accessible method to get us started.

Let’s use this prompt:

This is one of the 3 standardised offerings that ChatGPT gave me.

Notice how the scope and pricing are standard. Additional work (here extra slides) is priced in up-front at $25. Everything is set and standardised.

Use your own knowledge of what customers want to fill in the [list common problems] as this is where you make sure you are providing a solution to a problem that exists!

2. Publish standardised services

Upwork generally works via clients posting their requirements and us pitching for the work.

However, now that we have a standardised product we need clients to come to us. We’re not bending to their needs, they are bending to ours.

Upwork has a feature called Projects where we can post our standardised services:

You can find Projects from your profile page or directly?here.

Walk through the process on Upwork, using ChatGPT’s suggested standardised offerings and your own experience to craft a Project.

As well as publishing here on Upwork now that you have a standardised offering you can go to?other?platforms.

The first I’d recommend is?Fiverr.?Both Fiverr and Upwork are similar in that they allow freelancers to both post standard packages?and?bid for work.

Upwork is more focused on bidding, Fiverr is more focused on standardised packages. Similar platforms with a different primary focus.

We started with Upwork?because?of this. We needed to start bidding with ad hoc work and doing client gigs so that we could work out what clients actually need.

Then and only then do we standardise! And once standardised we can add Fiverr as well as Upwork.

The details of setting up a Fiverr account are very similar to the work we’ve done already building a profile on Upwork. You can copy most of the work you’ve done already over into Fiverr and get started quickly. I’d recommend therefore setting up on both Upwork Projects?and?Fiverr for expanded reach.

3. Retainers

An optional extra is to convert our service from a one off into ongoing fulfilment.

In freelancing we tend to call this a retainer - an agreement to continue certain recurring work month after month.

We can pick up retainers without having first standardised our service. In fact lots of freelancers do. The risk of this though is that poorly scoped retainers can lead to overload.

For example let’s say I have 5 clients on retainer but the scope of the monthly work is ill-defined. Most of the time this will be no problem. But there will be months when suddenly all your clients will need extra or special work for whatever reason and you get overloaded. Quality drops and no-one is happy.

If we instead add standardised retainers to standardised service offerings we know exactly what the work is each month and how much we can handle.

Use this prompt below the standardised service offering description of your choice:

This originally featured in my free daily AI Entrepreneur emails.

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