Most of the questions I hear from people who are freelancing would be answered by a thoughtfully prepared business plan. So why do so few freelancers have one?

In my conversations with freelancers over the years, I have found that there is a pretty widespread misunderstanding of what freelancing means. They tend to view freelancing similarly to job hunting, where we sift through listings of opportunities random clients have posted online, and we apply to as many of them as possible in hopes that we will land one.

By this definition, the freelancer’s career is a series of odd jobs that we luck into over and over again. This view of what freelancing means leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where the freelancer is stuck on a miserable treadmill of uncertainty, stress and "feast and famine" cycles that often lead to failure.