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.

By contrast, many successful freelancers tend to view things from the perspective of a traditional small business owner. They have targeted a niche market with a suite of complimentary services, and they focus on getting repeat business from a small handful of clients. This approach to freelancing means filling their days with billable hours instead of hunting for new gigs. They plan for success, and they succeed because of the plan. This process is covered in great depth in our Freelance Master Course.

Needless to say, we all want to be in this second group. But how do we get there? The answer is simple – a well developed business plan will help us to clarify our strengths and weaknesses, turns those strengths into viable products, and identify a market that wants and needs our products. The plan provides a roadmap for success.

A Business Plan for Freelancing Means Clarity and Focus

Business plans tend to be associated with seeking financing or launching a large-scale business. Because of this, the full-featured business plan templates floating around the internet can be confusing, irrelevant or full of unnecessary detail. But as freelancers, we just need our business plan to fulfill four primary goals:

• Identify our unique strengths, weaknesses, interests and abilities
• Identify a niche market that would benefit from those unique traits
• Package our traits into products that are laser-focused on solving the specific needs of our niche market
• Determine how best to market our products to our niche market

This is why we’ve created the Freelancer’s Business Plan Toolkit, which makes it incredibly simple and intuitive to set up your own business plan in a step-by-step, form-based tool. Once you create a business plan, it’s important to refer back to it and adjust the plan as you build and grow your business, and fine-tune things like your niche market. But committing our approach to a plan like this has the effect of keeping us on track, focused on the right things, and far less likely to take random jobs that don’t meet our broader objectives or get stuck on the treadmill of taking “odd jobs.”