Creating and Reviewing Our Annual Freelancing Goals

To continue our celebration of reaching an entire year as professional freelancers, I’d like to review a post we wrote fairly early on – Setting Goals for Your Freelance Business. In this post, we shared the goals we put in our business plan. At that point, we had not yet even hit the three-month mark, so all of these goals were things we aspired to in the future. Shall we see how the Berry-Brewer Freelance Agency did?

Three Month Goals

Create an LLC: Not completed. We still occasionally discuss the need to change to an LLC to keep our personal assets protected. The additional cost is fairly minimal (I think it’s less than $200), but we’ve yet to decide if a good, solid contract to use with our clients might be an adequate substitute.

Set up our new bank accounts: Completed. We actually addressed our experience with our local bank here on Freelance Parent. We can’t stress enough how helpful it’s been to have separate accounts for checking, online transactions, and tax savings.

Have our promotional materials ready for clients: Completed. Thanks to the great skills of Billie over at Rainmaker Marketing, we have some really awesome-looking notecards we send out at the completion of each project. Although we originally meant this to include things like brochures and fliers, we’ve since discovered that we don’t really rely much on the type of marketing that requires them…yet.

Earn at least $1,000 each month: Completed. Now that we’re sharing our monthly income, you’ve seen this firsthand.

Have our basic website up and running: Completed. Originally, this meant the website my husband built, which it seems no one loved very much. We’re happy to have our polished one up now – in fact, we can chalk up quite a few of our new clients to its existence.

Introduce our husbands: Not completed. How weird is that? We live about a mile away from each other and chat on a daily basis. Yet we haven’t formally introduced our husbands yet.

Six Month Goals

Have five clients outside of the web: Completed. As with the promotional materials goal, we really thought that local clients were as good as, if not better than, web clients. We now know this is false (unless you live in a city like New York) and that you can make a perfectly good living solely on the web. Still, we do enjoy working with the occasional local client.

Polish our web site: Completed. As I mentioned above, we heart our website.

Earn at least $1,600 each month: Unsure. I’d have to go in and tally the averages to see if this is correct or not. Thanks to the feast or famine aspect of freelancing we’ve come to recognize and accommodate, these numbers are never guaranteed.

Set our writers’ standards for subcontracting: Not completed. We originally planned on subcontracting out our work fairly early on (thereby making ourselves an “agency” in the fullest sense of the word). However, we have yet to really explore these goals of ours – mostly because we are just now reaching the point where our workload exceeds our desired number of hours.

Create a typical bidding process: Completed, in a sense. Although I haven’t really formalized the process, I have a pretty good stock of templates, samples, and query letters. I certainly spend much less time bidding on work now than I used to!

Become part of the BBB and the Chamber of Commerce: Not completed. I’ve discovered that the BBB is actually a little costly, and that there are some negative connotations that go along with it. It’s still something I’d like to explore, but it’s not on my immediate to-do list. As for the Chamber of Commerce, I’d again like to fall back on the excuse that our local interests are much fewer than we anticipated.

One Year Goals

Have set policies and procedures: Not completed. This had more to do with bringing on other writers as subcontractors than anything else. We wanted a sort of company manual to make sure that everything was consistent, legal, and fair.

Hire Travis to the company: Not completed. My husband has a degree in marketing, and we had hoped that we would be making so much money by now that we could pay him to find clients for us (again, mostly on a local level). However, I do not think I could work with him on a daily basis without eventually causing bodily harm. ‘Nuff said.

Create a standard delegation process for assignments: Not completed. Once we had all our subcontracted writers, Lorna and I were going to be more about management and less about writing. Lorna still looks forward to this eventuality, but I really enjoy the writing. We’ll see what the future holds…

Regular salaries for Lorna, Tamara, and Travis: Not completed. Our financial plan was to build up a steady income and savings account that would allow us to create a monthly “salary” that we could count on as a consistency. It wasn’t necessarily going to be a huge salary, but it would at least remove the guesswork out of what we were going to make for the month. This might still be a good idea. We’ll get back to you.

Review business plan and goals (annually): Not completed – yet. We’ll be meeting here in a few weeks to do just this.

Feel confident with a stable of writers to subcontract: Not completed. I hate to beat a dead horse, but this was supposed to arise as a result the “agency” side of our agency. Perhaps next year…

How Did We Do?

Well, we technically got only 7 out of 18 completed. However, I don’t despair – most of these are the visions of a pair of writers with incredible dreams for the future but no real idea of what freelancing in today’s market is like.

Hopefully, our next year’s goals will be much more in line with the realities of freelancing. (Although I still think we’ll wax optimistic – it’s sort of our thing.)