Some consider self-employment a soul-crushing grind—a pit of despair one falls into after being laid off, or after graduating into a job market where entry-level jobs have evaporated. Chasing clients, following up on payment requests, and working into the night, all for little pay . . . it’s a stopgap until you find a full-time job. Who on earth would choose it?
But freelancing doesn’t have to feel like gig work. And in fact, plenty of people, especially Gen Zers, do deliberately choose it. If you’re skeptical about freelancing or struggling to earn enough to pay your bills, it might be time for a mindset audit: Instead of thinking like a paycheck-chasing hustler, think like a CEO.
That means defining your service offerings, pricing them deliberately, and targeting them toward the right clients, says freelance business coach Treasa Edmond, founder and podcast host for Boss Responses. She has 20 years of self-employment experience, and she’s noticed something about those who do this well.
“The people who truly flourish at what they do—the ones who can make the incomes that other people only dream about or have the business structure that we all strive toward—they’ve really dialed in on mindset,” she says. “They’re confident about what they do and how they do it.”
Here are the steps you need to take to shift your mindset and successfully run your business.
Let go of the scarcity myth
The stereotype of the starving freelancer is similar to that of the starving artist. But self-employment does not have to mean lower income.
Edmond, who shifted into self-employment from full-time work, earns more from 20 hours of client work per week than she ever made at her brick-and-mortar job. She also knows freelancers who make a full-time living from five hours of client work per week. Still, she offers a word of caution to anyone who thinks freelancing will be easy: Those professionals have spent years honing their business models, and most put in a lot of hours outside of their billable client work to develop that stability.
To Edmond, the foundational building block for success is how you perceive and communicate what you do. If your pitching strategy feels like begging prospects for money, it’s time to develop a succinct way to express how your services can make clients’ lives easier.
“You have to understand where your value comes from,” Edmond says. “It has very little to do with what you actually do. It’s the return on investment the client can get on the work that you do.”
In other words, freelancers’ earning potential comes down to how they think about their work, as well as how they frame those services to clients. Freelancers who devalue their expertise or talents will face an uphill battle securing the work volume and compensation levels they need to run a sustainable business. Tap into your inner CEO and approach discovery calls with clear, confident talking points. You’ll likely find far more stability.
Identify (and balance) your business personas
Counter to the popular image of freelancers stooping over laptops in coffee shops, successful freelancing takes more than locking in and completing assignments.
As a freelancer, you’re essentially a team of one. Sales, marketing, and billing are just as much a part of your job as what you actually do. This is where thinking like a CEO becomes critical.
Digital artist Caroline Beavon slips into “boss mode” by channeling her inner CEO into a persona she created since she went freelance in 2009. As Beavon describes it, the executive mindset can be like a hat you can put on. (She imagines hers is probably something like a bowler hat.) She sometimes wears hers while doing business management work like pitching, networking, and talking to clients.
But like any well-rounded CEO, success also means knowing when to switch hats, and switch roles.
“There are some days when I wake up and I am not Queen Bee,” and instead a worker bee, Beavon says. “I do not have the energy, the focus, the time, the whatever, to be all dynamic.” Yes, she could do it if she forced herself. But on those days, she sometimes finds it’s more productive to put her head down and get the actual work done. That balance is key: Lean too far into worker bee mode, and you might run out of work to do. Swing the other way, and you might not have time to finish all the work you’ve secured.
For Beavon, financial management is a crucial tool to stay in the middle. She keeps her freelancing income in a business account and pays herself a set salary each month. By keeping buffer funds set aside, she saves herself a lot of stress during leaner months—making room for the high-level thinking that her Queen Bee, bowler hat-wearing boss persona needs in order to thrive.
Banish the employee mindset
Even if you’ve never held a full-time job, there’s a good chance you’ve come into freelancing thinking like an employee, not a big cheese. That can be a real problem when you’re building client relationships. As Edmond points out, freelancers who think of themselves as employee substitutes often form lopsided partnerships where clients dictate everything like bosses.
Freelancers should act like their own bosses: Set their own terms, prices, and ways of working. The client is the expert at what they do, and freelancers are the experts at what they do.
“We’re working with them, we’re collaborating with them, we hopefully have a really good relationship with them,” Edmond says. “But we’re not working for them.”
Think too much like an employee, and you’ll stifle your inner CEO, reducing them to a demanding, overburdened middle manager, instead of an empowered advocate for what you need. But if you’ve painted yourself into an employee-shaped corner until now, rest assured that you’re not alone.
“Breaking that employee mindset is hard,” Edmond says. “I know people who haven’t done that, and they’ve been freelancing for 15 years.”
No matter what your working life has looked like until now, it’s never too late to rewrite the rules. After all, the chief reason to be a freelancer is in the name: It’s the freedom to choose the working conditions that work best for you.
As Edmond puts it: “You are creating the business you need so that you can live the life you want.”