Why Working for Free Made This Guy's Career

Working for free – in the form of unpaid virtual internships with authors Seth Godin, Ramit Sethi, and Tucker Max – kickstarted Charlie Hoehn’s career. His experiences ultimately led to a full-time job working for prominent author Tim Ferriss, and to Hoehn launching his own books, including Recession Proof Graduate.

But some may fear that working for free is a form of exploitation. How can you learn from the experience without being taken for granted or becoming a slave? Here’s how Hoehn structured his virtual internships, which he says gave him “access to unbelievable opportunities. You can work with people who are far above your level, you’re challenged with incredible learning experiences, and you discover the work that’s meaningful and intrinsically rewarding.”

Know who you want to work for – and why. Part of the equation is understanding what skills you want to learn or practice, and essentially creating your own syllabus, says Hoehn. “Usually, when you design your own free work program, with specific goals on what you intend to gain from the experience, you’ll walk away from the arrangement happy,” he told me during a recent email exchange.

But the most critical part is figuring out who you want to work for, he says. “Who you spend time with is who you become,” he says. “You want to surround yourself with people who are already at the level you want to reach. If you spend enough time working with them, they will effortlessly shape and sculpt your views. That’s why you should only offer free work to people who are living the life you desire, believing the things you want to believe, doing the work you want to be doing, and having the fun you want to be having. In other words, your target clients must be some ideal future version of you, as well as people you’ll love to work with and learn from.” Hoehn personally prefers to work with successful entrepreneurs, rather than celebrities, whom he notes are generally “unbelievably busy, they’re crazy, and they won’t set aside time to invest in your learning.”

Be clear on how you can help them. Can you provide real value to the person you’re offering to assist? Think carefully about how you structure the offer and what would genuinely be helpful. “I’ll often spend several hours researching a target before I reach out with a proposal, just so I can be absolutely certain that we’ll be able to work together harmoniously,” says Hoehn. “This is why I tend to target people who have an extensive online presence – I can discover so much about their needs just by poring over their Google results.”

The goal of your research should be to discover “ways that you can add value to their business and make their life better, with zero effort on their part. Then do it for free with no expectations. This sets you apart from literally everyone else (who’s asking for their time and resources), so the more you do it, the more they love you and want to keep you around.”

Hoehn recommends asking yourself questions like:

1. Which offers appear to be bringing in 80% of their revenue, and how can I help leverage them?
2. What are three ways I can dramatically increase revenue (or cut costs) without damaging their brand?
3. What challenges are they facing now or in the next 3-6 months? How could I help them implement practical solutions to overcome those challenges?
4. What areas of their business are the strongest? How could I help them enhance those strengths and boost their results by using my unique mix of skills?
5. What areas of their business are the weakest? How could I help them reduce or fix those weaknesses?
6. What are their biggest sources of happiness? How can I magnify them?
7. What are their biggest sources of stress? How can I eliminate them?

Only talk about money for the next project. Virtual internships are about playing the long game and building relationships, not angling to get money in the short-term. Says Hoehn, “I’ve made the transition from free-to-paid by seeing through a project to completion, then proposing a new project for us (another rainbow to chase). I just ask them to give me a cut, or if they’re unwilling/unable to pay, to refer me to 3-5 of the people in their network. In those cases, I’ll have specific criteria or people in mind who I want to be introduced to, and I’ll actually write the entire intro email (including the part that talks about why they think I’m great) so they can just copy/paste it.”

He ultimately turned his volunteering into paid projects with both Sethi and Max. For instance, he says, “I got paid a few thousand bucks to travel around the United States for a month, making funny videos for Tucker’s movie tour. It was the most fun job I’ve ever had.” For Ferriss, he “did a little bit of work for free, then he started paying me hourly. We did that for a couple months virtually” and then Hoehn began working for him full-time. “I rarely had to directly ask to be paid, because [the authors he helped] usually made the financial offer first. Plus, since they were all high-profile entrepreneurs, I really wanted to emphasize that it was about the relationship.”

Doing a virtual internship with someone you admire may seem unusual. Many people still believe internships are only for college students (a notion I challenge in my forthcoming book Stand Out), or that working for free is a sucker’s game – though Hoehn notes that most professional athletes are willing to play for free for years before they make it in the big leagues. But as his experience shows, shucking aside that thinking in order to sharpen your skills and build powerful relationships can literally change your life.

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and Stand Out, and you can receive her free Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook.