Many freelancers will know that crossroads well—the point at which you question whether to stick with your current workload or take the leap into growth. While it’s a daunting prospect for those considering how to scale a freelance business, the benefits of getting it right can be substantial. You can grow your client base, increase your revenue and still maintain the personal touch that makes your work unique.
Lindsey Loring, owner and creative director of Canada-based Cinch Communications, knows the journey well. She went from working as a freelance web designer to growing a full-service creative agency of 10 people in less than six years. The Cinch team now covers web design, branding, social media management and SEO.
For Kyle Prinsloo, scaling was at the back of his mind ever since quitting his full-time marketing job to go out on his own. Outsourcing work to contractors and mastering the art of upselling helped Prinsloo scale as a one-person business. Today, he advises web designers and developers how to become successful freelancers through Freelance Fam and in the Wix Studio community.
Whether you’re looking to expand your solo offering or evolve into a multi-person agency, read on to discover nine essential steps from two veteran freelancers on how to scale a freelance business and achieve your growth goals.
How to scale a freelance business in 9 key steps
There’s no definitive strategy that guarantees the growth of your freelance business, but there are a combination of steps to follow and a mindset to adopt before achieving scaling success. Here are nine:
01. Make a plan and set goals
It might sound obvious, but your scaling journey must begin with a plan. Consider why you want to scale in the first place, take time choosing the right business model and make sure you can shoulder the initial costs of growth. Set targets for your first six months or one year so that you can review your progress. Plus, know where that first project is coming from that will set your growth in motion.
Prinsloo reminds freelancers who have reached this point that they’ve already proven what they’re doing works. “I think the hardest part is getting from zero to one client,” which you’ve most likely done long ago,” he says. “You've already proved yourself. Now you just do more of it.” He adds a caveat, advising always to have enough revenue on the side so that if your growth plans don’t work out, you don’t go bust and can pick up where you left off.
02. Tap into your industry experience
Most freelancers will have at some point gained industry experience at an in-house agency or corporation. As much as it might not have been the right fit, chances are you learned a lot. Loring’s years working at an agency have served her well.
“Having agency experience meant I had something to emulate when I felt it was the right time to grow,” she says. “It helped me understand how I wanted the business to function, how to project manage, how to manage my time and how the company managed billable time. I often think how grateful I am to have been exposed to the industry, because then I designed my whole internal infrastructure and systems around it.”
If you don’t have experience like Loring’s to draw on, join communities, get networking and learn from those who do.
03. Know who and when to hire
Any freelancer taking those next steps in growth will be considering how to grow their team. You can do this in many forms like hiring contractors, forming agency partnerships or making a more long-term investment by hiring your first employee. What you choose will very much depend on your business plan and your pipeline of work.
In her first big growth play, Loring hired a part-time digital marketer straight out of university, someone who still works with her today. She knew it was time to recruit when she no longer had capacity to manage a client’s social media account. “I thought, ‘Now I'm losing money by not hiring’. So that's when I actively went and sought out somebody.”
Choosing to hire someone straight out of college meant a manageable salary for Loring and a lesson in how to let go. “As a sole proprietor and perfectionist, it was a difficult step—to learn to trust someone else. But it was really important in the early parts of scaling my business.”
Loring learned that in a creative industry, you have to be open to being inspired by others and surround yourself with people who can do things you can’t. “That was difficult for me at first, but the more I've hired, the easier it's become. It's been a pivotal part in having longevity.”
In Cinch’s six years of business, Loring has only ever had one employee leave, which she credits to giving them freedom to be seen and being open to criticism.
04. Build an internal infrastructure that can scale
Any business growth depends on smooth processes that ensure consistency across communication, collaboration and delivery of client projects. Loring says this need became apparent when she made her first hire.
“Immediately, I thought, ‘What kind of structure can I put in place to facilitate growth and not feel like I'm flying in the sky with no direction and nothing to tie me to what’s important to my clients?’”
Loring has leaned heavily on freelancer tools like Monday for HR, sales and project management, Wix Studio management tools for marketing and collaboration, Oviond and Agency Dashboard for reporting, and Microsoft Teams for managing remote employees.
While management software for agencies is changing all the time, Loring advises choosing the one you feel most comfortable with, and that gives you a clear birds-eye view of all your projects at any given time.
05. Be strategic about the work you take on
There is a tendency among early-stage freelancers to never say no to a client project out of fear of missing an opportunity that might not present itself again. According to Loring and Prinsloo, that changes as you grow and you need to be more strategic about what you sign up for.
Prinsloo says working with clients across different industries with different budgets and demands is best left to those starting out. It helps provide clarity around the clients you don’t want to work with and those you do. Let that clarity be your guiding light when you define your USP and scale.
Loring has worked with bigger clients and taken on more demanding projects as her business has grown. “I’m no longer providing the same services to that smaller mom and pop-type business,” she says. “My pricing structure has outgrown them. The bigger a project I take on, the more skills my staff can bring in to provide a better service. It makes a huge difference to my pricing structure.”
Despite state agencies and corporations now forming a large part of her client base, Loring hasn’t forgotten her roots. She says you can continue working with smaller businesses if your offering is packaged the right way. Loring is staying true to her word and currently building a digital marketing course on Wix Studio for SMBs.
“You need to be able to say no,” she adds. “A proposal or brief might look great on paper, but it’s not worth it if you don't have the capacity or if it's not contributing to your wider vision. You can’t do everything for everybody all the time. It isn't realistic and if you spread yourself too thin, you’ll fail at everything.”
06. Outsource to fill the gaps
Contractors and freelancers are a great option for scaling freelancers who might not be ready to commit to paying a full-time salary. Not only are they experts in the services they provide who can jump into a project at the drop of a hat, they can be valuable contacts for future collaborations.
“Using freelancers has been incredibly impactful for my business in being able to properly evaluate my need for growth without committing to it,” says Loring. “Freelance designers, social media experts, web designers, advanced coders, I've hired all of them over the last six years to help recognize when it’s a good time to step into growth mode.”
Loring recommends freelancing platforms like Upwork and the Wix Marketplace for finding talented web professionals who can perfectly fill your resource gaps while you figure out your next move.
Prinsloo is a big advocate of outsourcing and currently works with ten contractors on a part-time basis. This “hybrid” approach to growth has been vital in helping him scale.
“It works for me, and it works for them,” he says. “We’re located remotely around the world. Our terms are flexible. If there's some work we need to cut down or some stuff we need to add, like more time, we can do it. For me, this approach is extremely beneficial compared to the corporate 10, 20 and 50 staff in an office, which I think is a model in decline.”
07. Take a leaner approach
All businesses benefit from greater efficiency and leaner operations, but those freelancing as a business preparing to scale have to be extra particular about managing their time.
According to Prinsloo, structuring your day into blocks is critical to productivity. He also doesn’t do meetings on Mondays and Fridays, choosing to use those days to stay hyper-focused on different tasks.
Prinsloo is a big proponent of the Ivy Lee Method, a productivity technique that involves writing down the six most important tasks for the next day, prioritizing them, and focusing on completing each task one at a time to enhance efficiency.
“What I’ve come to realize about time is that it isn't important to focus on how I work, but what I work on,” he says. “I think many freelance people are so busy focusing on being busy and not efficient. Over time that efficiency, cost and approach become clearer. Now, I make sure I focus on work that moves the needle. I outsource, delegate or automate the other stuff that is taking all my time. That perspective has really helped my business grow.”
08. Be opportunistic
Scaling your freelance business isn’t all about taking transactional measures like choosing new software or hiring a new team member. Sometimes it involves something far less tangible, but just as important—like a mindset shift.
A characteristic that Loring didn’t recognize in herself before starting out, but it turns out she has in spades, is an opportunistic mindset. It’s something she says has proved pivotal in the growth of her business.
“If something is presented to me, I will sit back and think, ‘Can this be leveraged for growth?’” she says. “Is there an opportunity behind it, not just to grow my business or to make more money, but to provide opportunities for my staff that will help keep them engaged? So I think having a mindset that identifies and acts on opportunities is very important when scaling.”
Loring’s latest opportune move has been hiring for a business development role in another city, Calgary, to grow Cinch’s client base in a new market.
One of the ways Prinsloo capitalizes on opportunities is through upselling, the practice of guiding a client to an upgraded version of a service. Reflecting on how he turned his first ever freelance job on Fiver from $5 to $50,000, he advises freelancers to think about how to upsell their services.
“What I did was upsell some initial website work to $200,” he says. “Then I upsold that to $1,000. After, I upsold that as a $2,000 monthly retainer, which I then sold to multiple websites. So that $5 turned into all of $50,000 in the course of a few years from this one small job.”
09. Assume clients will leave
While it might seem contrary to our previous point on having an opportunistic mindset, effectively managing the risk of losing clients is also critical to the success of any freelance business. And your growth might just depend on the revenue generated from one big client.
Prinsloo advises treating them all the same way: with the assumption that someday they won’t be your client anymore. He has seen many freelancers get burned because they expected their clients to stay with them indefinitely.
“When I work with clients, I assume it’s a case of when they leave, not if they leave—and plan accordingly,” he says. “I do everything I can to service them and I've clients who've been with me right from the start. I've witnessed too many times freelancers land a big client and get lost in the idea that everything is amazing. But when they leave, they say, ‘What just happened?’”
Prinsloo says you should always be building relationships with existing clients but simultaneously plan for their departure, seeking to win new business and create additional revenue streams to mitigate the risk.
Scale your freelance business with Wix Studio.
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