The freelancer in you that wants to be FREE

Do you sometimes as a developer/freelancer/company owner have the feeling that you are being used? Not adequately paid? Treated like a resource?

That considering all the effort, time, investment, the school you went through you should earn more and live a happier life?

How many things do you know and use in your daily job? Try to list all of them. Here is my list:

• Ruby
• Rails
• SQL (with different flavors that you need to know)
• DDD
• Git
• Devops (networking stack, investigating, handling fuckups)
• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript (old and new flavors + constantly evolving browsers API, and non-browser node.js API)
• Webpack

And that’s not even everything. I bet the list for you is very similar in length (no matter what is your main programming language and whether you are frontend or backend dev).

You want things to

• be done on your conditions, not theirs
• better projects, better leads, better customers
• select people, you work with, and to be able to do that
• you need to have a better reach, reputation, and authority

You don’t want to stress over things every time.

Most of the people finish their job after 5, go home and don’t give a fuck. I’ve been learning every week since 8 years after I finished studying at the university. I bet you are as well crunching knowledge on a daily basis. Educating yourself and improving your skills.

With the impostor syndrome so prevailing in our industry we always feel behind, we need to know more and we spend so much time and money and energy reading and educating in the ever-changing landscape of technologies.

And what do we get for it? A-holes who tell us that our estimations are too big, managers who try to micro-manage.

In the meantime, other programmers earn 2-10x more, work with nice people, on nice projects, for companies that make money, can spend time with their family and have a much happier life.

What went wrong?

Let me tell you what usually goes wrong in a situation like this.

We invest 99% of our time in tech skills (do you remember the long list a moment ago) and 1% of our time in business/sales/soft skills. Boom!

Want a better life? You need to start attracting better clients into your company. Nicer people, happier people, successful people that will respect your authority. People who treat collaboration with you as an investment into their company, not as a cost.

How to do that? The Independent Consulting Manual will help you find answers.

It will teach you how to:

• Better qualify your clients
• Grow an audience using podcasts
• Productize your consulting offerings
• Say no to bad work
• Properly structure your sales website
• Write proposals using options
• Multiply the value of your services
• Establish your fool-proof positioning
• Automate your sales pipeline
• Transition to value-based fees
• Plan actual minimal viable products
• Send effective cold outreach emails
• Use winning email & phone scripts
• Faster fulfillment with processes
• Cope with entrepreneurial stress
• Start and run a professional Slack
• Master consulting’s emotional game
• Travel as a business owner
• Use social media to get new clients
• Maintain a healthy work/life balance
• Run your business from anywhere
• Effectively use facebook ads
• Avoid late payments & get paid on time
• Handle overdue invoices
• Most importantly, you’ll learn how to make more money.

And when you balance your skills to 80% tech and 20% business you will be truly an independent, happy consultant.

This book will be available as part of our Smart Income for Developers Bundle next week.