When to stop and change what you’re doing
Posted by Paul Silver
This is a broad topic, but as general advice it is good to occasionally stop and assess what you’ve been doing and work out whether it is sensible to keep doing that or change. Here’s some examples to help explain:
Is your marketing right?
An easy one to spot to start with, is your marketing working for you? I’ve seen this for clients, myself and other freelancers.
Sit down and list out all of the ways you market yourself, then look at all of your clients and list out (or indeed find out at all) how they found you to hire you. For the clients, this is much easier if you ask when they first get in touch and you note it down somewhere so you can remember later.
I did this a while ago and my marketing channels were:
- SEO (my website did quite well for some PHP freelancer searches)
- Referrals from people I met networking
- Referrals from clients
- Social media (LinkedIn and Twitter)
My clients came from:
- Companies in the same group I used to work in
- Referrals from networking
- SEO (but really only one very long term client client)
- Niche forum posts
- Referrals from clients, but only small, occasional clients
When I looked at leads I was getting from each of these, the easiest to land projects came from referrals from networking and clients. The worst leads came from SEO, very few of them converted into work but one did big time and gave me consistent work for over ten years.
Putting aside the outlier within SEO, it wasn’t worth me pursuing that as doing well for SEO as a web developer is very time consuming as there is a huge amount of competition both from other developers and agencies, and most of the leads I was getting didn’t convert into customers, they were people who didn’t understand how much they would need to spend to make their project a reality.
I didn’t get any clients from posting on social media, but I never gave that a really good try as it was very time consuming and I was getting work from other routes.
So my changes were: stop trying to use social media to get work and let it be just for keeping in touch with friends, stop putting energy into SEO for my services, put more energy into networking.
That has worked out for me, the networking side has got me work while the market has been very bad.
Are your services right?
I used to get work building small sites for clients and small online shops. That work went away as services like Squarespace, Wix and Shopify got bigger and bigger. There was no real point trying to stay in the “low end” of making websites as that work was being taken away by companies with lots of employees and venture capital backing.
Fortunately, I was already moving up the chain to more complicated websites as my skills and experience improved so this didn’t hurt me too much. It was a shame to lose work that was easy to do, even if it wasn’t highly lucrative.
Look at what you offer clients. Is your work being taken over by large, well funded companies? If so, it’s time to work out what you go into next, whether that’s different work within your industry, or having to learn something else entirely. It’s unfortunate, but that is life. There is no point clinging onto how the market used to be, that’s just a way of losing money until you give up.
Currently, the design world is going through this due to generative AI tools. A lot of low and lowish level work is being taken over by clients using image producing AI tools instead of hiring a designer or photographer. This is a shame, often the results are no where near as good as the work a designer would do for them, but it is reality.
If you are a designer who was offering small websites, leaflet design, logos, too much of that work may have gone away for you to be able to do it as a freelancer. Can you offer full on branding services to small-mid sized companies? Or User Experience (UX) work? Or… basically anything more complicated than what you were doing? It could offer you a life line.
Sometimes, the market you were in going away pushes you to learn something new and you end up in a better place afterwards. It doesn’t make what you’re going through now feel any nicer, but try to bear it in mind while you go through the pain of learning something new.
Are your side projects/ideas for the future right?
I used to try and start a Software as a Service (SaaS) company on the side of my freelancing. As a developer, this is not unusual. Freelancing has the problem that if you’re not working, you’re not earning. Having software do the earning for you means you’ve got a chance to scale beyond your limits as a freelancer, and to take more breaks (well, this doesn’t always work out for the SaaS owners I now know, but it was the dream.)
However, building an extra company on the side of what I was doing for clients was very tiring and stressful. I was trying to investigate markets, write marketing material, talk to potential customers, and build a minimum viable product to test markets, all on the side of running a busy enough freelancing business to pay my family bills.
Was I actually succeeding in doing this? No, I was not.
Having come up with two products not compelling enough to actually break through to consistent paying customers, I took a step back and realised I was spending more time stressing about the projects than I was working on them. I was too busy with my freelancing and family life to actually create a separate business, and I was making myself too stressed and tired trying to do my existing work properly.
After too long, I stepped back and… stopped. Stopped building the SaaS product I’d been putting not enough time into. Stopped talking to the potential customers. Stopped trying to squeeze in the time. Fundamentally, I didn’t have enough time to do what I was trying to do.
Instead, I spent that time partly working for clients and partly spending it with my family. Life improved. I was no longer stressing about something I wasn’t making progress on. No one I’d talked to really cared that the product wasn’t happening (another indicator it wasn’t going to succeed.) My days were calmer.
It was one of the best decisions I’ve made in recent years. I stopped thinking about the product and ways to market it in the evenings and getting stressed about lack of time. I stopped seeing the freelancing as a bridge to running a product and could concentrate on turning that to work I liked doing.
I’m good at being a freelancer, I get on with my clients and they like what I do for them. I’m not good at building a SaaS and… that’s fine.
Stop doing what isn’t working
Occasionally, try to take a step back from what you’re doing and make sure you’re not hammering away at something that is no longer working.
Sometimes this is forced on you when there is too little work in what you’re doing. Other times it could be pushed by stress. You can review your own business any time you like. It doesn’t even need to take a long time. Just give yourself an hour or two, sit down somewhere with a notebook or computer and go over what you’ve been doing. Does it work? Is there enough clients there? Do you need to change? Start pushing a part of your services that you should be doing in the future? It’s a lot easier to do now, before work runs out because of something you can’t control.