Thinking of being an entrepreneur or freelancer?

If you’re one of the thousands of Americans who wants to quit their day job for freelancing or opening up your own company, are you sure you have what it takes to succeed? I’ve been in the game for nearly five years and what most won’t tell you is that there are many ups and down – it’s about more than grit. Succeeding is about more than just a will to win, rather your character – what’s inherently inside of you.

Before starting out, you need to assess your skills and traits. Here are the top 10 characteristics of what successful entrepreneurs have in common:

1. Independence

You’re going to have to make decisions on your own. Rejection will happen. You have to trust your instincts and work with no one pushing you forward.

2. Risk-taking and assessing

When you’re your own boss, you have to measure the risk of every decision. Buying property is a great investment, but what happens if the market drops out of your industry two or three years down the road. If you can’t face uncertainty, you’re not going to make it in the entrepreneurial world.

3. Confidence

The SBA talks about being persuasive to get customers and employees, but before that, you need confidence.

I’ve learned that sometimes, you just have to fake it until you feel confident.

4. Creativity

You’ll never flourish in business if you can’t be creative. It’s not just about having new products but also about innovative marketing techniques and finding new methods of reaching customers. I started out covering news and writing website content, but now I write white papers, case studies, and press releases.

5. Support

Although this might be financial, it’s most certainly emotional. It’s draining when you begin your business. You have to spend time curating clients, marketing, finding support staff, and watching your books. You might go a month without getting a paycheck. If your family isn’t behind your decision, it’s going to be difficult when things get tough.

6. Discipline

There’s no substitute to take your place when you don’t get out of bed to take on your day. There’s no boss checking up on you to make sure you got to work on time. If you don’t have the incentive to get out of bed when you don’t have clients, you’re going to find it’s hard to meet their deadlines when you do.

7. Ethics

It’s hard to be financially responsible and follow all the rules of your industry when no one’s looking over your shoulder. You can’t just take money from your business accounts to pay yourself whenever you want. Well, I guess you could, but when you miss a tax payment or can’t pay your electric bill, who will you ask to pull you through?

8. Time management skills

I write a lot about productivity. To manage my clients, I can’t spend so much time working for one when another has deadlines that can’t be missed. You also have to manage your time to give yourself breaks. No one can work seven-day shifts indefinitely without burning out eventually.

9. Quick decision-making skills

There will be times when you don’t have two or three days to make a decision. You have to balance the risks of making a quick conclusion versus missing out.

10. Self-awareness

When you start out on your own, you want to know why you want to work for yourself. Be specific. You can’t say, “I want to be my own boss.” You’re going to need this self-awareness for times when it gets rough. Have goals and objectives, not just financial ones, to measure your success.

The takeaway

Being a freelancer and/or entrepreneur offers a lot of benefits, but there are downsides. You have to have the disposition to deal with the ups and downs of working for yourself.

#entrepreneurs

More than a thousand words

A picture may say a thousand words, but a photo doesn’t just tell a story. A simple photo can be an excellent example on how to price your next business product.

Photography blogger Sarah Petty wrote her method of pricing a simple 8×10 inch photograph for as advice for her fellow photography business owners. But her advice can actually be applied beyond the world of studios and darkrooms. Here’s how to think like a photographer whenever developing the cost of your next good or service.

Step One: Know thyself (and know thy client)

Your first step in knowing your next price for your next best selling item or service is knowing what type of business you run. This is solved by answering the simple question: are you a high volume seller with lower prices or lower volume seller with higher prices?

This question can be answered by looking at your sales for the past month. Are your trends indicating your customers prefer a more personalized, boutique approach to the things they purchase from you (with higher prices), or do you move a lot of product (with lower prices)?

When you understand what type of business sales trend you’re following, move onto step two.

Step Two: Understand your sunk costs.

A sunk, or fixed cost, is the price to manufacture or deliver a good that will not change (unless reacting to the market’s inflation). What is the basic core cost of manufacturing the product you intend to put in your store? That amount, your cost of goods sold (CGOS), is the baseline from which your ultimate price will come from. Now to step three.

Step Three: Look at your other overhead for producing your product.

So you know your CGOS, so all you do now is just add what money you want to make off that? Wrong. You’re forgetting that you’re not just making that product. You are maintaining a store or electronic storefront, you’ve got office space, human resource costs, and other things that may slip by whenever you’re trying to develop your price for your next big thing. This doesn’t mean you’re charging a customer a month’s rent for consultation fee, of course, but knowing that you’re going to need a comfortable cushion whenever figuring this product’s cost out. According to the federal Small Business Administration you should allocate a portion of the profit “to each service performed or product produced” and this cost should be calculated annually. Finished, now to step four.

Step Four: Profit!

Finally, after factoring your CGOS and your overhead, now you can decide what you want to make by selling. Petty personally uses the approximation of making 4 or 5 times her CGOS plus her overhead per item. Whatever the ultimate cost is, it has to be able to lend you the ability to live comfortably in order for you to be able to manufacture more in the future.

The next time you have to develop a price for a new product, don’t forget to step into the world of photography for awhile. You’ll be saying cheese all the way to the bank.

#KnowYourPrice

So often, we hear the phrase “quality, not quantity,” which can be appropriately used to describe ideas we give to our boss or the amount of effort we put into volunteering. The long and short of it is – don’t half-ass something because you think it’s fulfilling the need of “quantity.”

Quality is always so much more important when it comes to output in your job. Like, okay, great, you worked 11 gillion hours this month, but what did you actually accomplish? Did you finish endless busy work and take pictures for social media of how busy you are? Or did you grow your bottom line?

Over the years, we’ve heard a lot about flex hours and more working from home options, but a hot new idea is (you guessed it) quality hours, not quantity hours. Sometimes fitting into that 9-to-5 framework is satisfying the quantity aspect, but are we really being as productive as we should?

Many people argue that we should be working less in order to produce more. Wait, don’t leave, let me explain.

Does it really seem like the best idea to be working when your energy level is in the negatives? Probably not. This opens the door for more mistakes, less engaged work, and less output. If you’re a night owl and your brain fires on all cylinders when the sun has gone down, is it really worth focusing your work energy during the hours that your brain isn’t fully on?

If we work only when we know we’re going to be productive, we can really make the most of our time. Now, don’t get that confused with “sit around and wait for lightning to strike and THEN work,” it means schedule your tasks based on when your mind is typically the most productive.

When are you most productive? In the morning after you’ve had a quick job and some coffee? Or post mid-afternoon when you’re full-on awake? Jonas Downey pondered this question, and said, “I’m usually at my creative peak in the mid-morning and lose steam after lunch, so I shuffle my work accordingly. I do exploratory freeform stuff in the morning, and I save routine tasks (like implementing something I already know how to do) for the afternoon. I also have a rather short attention span, so I take tiny breaks a lot.”

Be honest – do you do your best work when your head is in the clouds, or when you show up to a task, raring to go?

Glorification of the 80 hour work week is dead in most circle, so consider scheduling yourself for times and days that your brain will cooperate with you instead of work against you and force you into menial work that feels like you’re accomplishing tasks!