To Find Freelance Work, Look at Full-Time Job Listings

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Hey, hey, what's up? Thank you for joining me today. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School," a daily podcast all about creating personal freedom through the form of an income generating project. I've got a really interesting story for you today.

It points to a creative strategy that you can use in lots of different fields. The story itself is about a social media manager, social media strategist. He gets creative. He finds a way to, in the course of about a year, bring in $10,000 a month. Like within a year, he's built his business to a $10,000 a month level.

And a short version of this strategy, what I really wanna talk about here, when companies post job openings, they're not necessarily committed to hiring full-time employees. Like they're posting a job opening because that's what they're used to doing. But ultimately what they want to do is accomplish a certain task, get some responsibilities taken care of, achieve a certain outcome. So in this story, the social media strategist who happens to be laid off, he loses his job and then decides to go apply for some of those job openings, but in a freelance capacity. So in other words, he applies for jobs, but says, I don't actually want to work there.

We'll dive into the details in a moment. And then in the end, I'll spend a few minutes considering some other fields that this strategy might work with. It could get somebody thinking out there. If you're trying to think creatively, if you're trying to figure out what can I do that's a little bit different, well, perhaps this story is for you. We're going to call it to find freelance work, look at full-time job listings.

That story is coming up in just 30 seconds. [Music]

Damien Taylor began his social media career after joining a startup. It was one of the first YouTube multi-channel networks. He was responsible for tracking data and setting strategies across YouTube and other channels to grow the company's audience. But unfortunately the company shifted their strategic direction and he was let go.

Damien took on freelance contract work in the meantime while looking for a new job. As it so happened, he was quickly hired by another startup, but something had changed. Now he wanted to make sure he wouldn't worry if he ever lost his job again. Having picked up a few side projects while unemployed, Damien held onto those contracts. Not only did the gigs bring in extra cash, they also allowed him to test new strategies.

This had the side benefit of making him look good at the office, since he stayed current on the best ideas. In 2019, a post on the Next Door app caught Damien's eye. A local business was looking for someone to manage their Instagram and Facebook pages. This was right up his alley, and it turned out that all they required was for someone to post content they already had. Damien applied for the gig and received a reply almost immediately.

For $500 a month, he would manage the business's social accounts. It was shaping up to be a standard freelance contract until he blurted out that he would offer the client a $100 discount each month for every client referral she sent his way. He doesn't remember now why he made such an offer since he didn't need to, but it turned out to be a career-changing move. The client was so impressed with his first month of work that she immediately spread the word to her friends, earning her several referral discounts. By the third month of their arrangement, she had sent Damien two clients, bringing his earnings from his side gig to $1,200 a month.

This was quite a sum of money, considering that he didn't have to dedicate much time to the effort. He had been pricing his services at $100 an hour in his mind, and that $500 a month figure that he charged his clients was based on the amount of work he thought he'd have to put in. He didn't face any pushback or difficult negotiations, as he says most people don't know how much social media management services should cost, and they were happy to pay him what he asked, as long as it seemed reasonable. Breaking that four-figure barrier was exciting, but Damien didn't celebrate. He now had the confidence to be bolder.

Now pay attention. To get new clients, he turned to LinkedIn and started searching for job listings for social media managers. But instead of applying for those jobs, he emailed the job poster and offered his service as an alternative to hiring a full-time employee. His pitch was simple. That business would see cost savings as a result of contracting the workout.

It probably helped that he had used social media as a way to generate leads for himself, thereby proving he could do the same for the company that contracted him. Damien also signed up for LinkedIn's Marketplace, where the platform allowed users to pitch and bid on jobs by companies. He saw that the clients posting there were much more willing to pay than the ones you might find on a site like Fiverr. Word of mouth and LinkedIn outreach might sound simple, but in Damien's case, it worked to perfection. Within nine months, he had gained enough clients that he crossed the $10,000-a-month milestone he'd been striving for.

This was enough for him to go full-time, since it not only covered his expenses, but also allowed him to grow his savings. By December 2020, just over a year since he landed his first client, he's been able to count an advertising agency, two TV networks, and a market research company among his clients. In fact, business has picked up so much that he's had to let go of clients who only wanted social media management. Instead, he now trains the teams of his clients and consults with them on best practices. This has allowed him to significantly increase his revenue.

He says that anyone who has the skill or background in parsing out data insights should be able to do this kind of work easily. For someone who wants to head down a similar path, taking the time to master each individual platform really pays off, since users behave differently. Of course, you'd also have to keep up with the latest developments since social media is an evolving space. Damien, for example, has had to pick up TikTok and Pinterest lately, even though he started out only with just Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. But the reward is worth it, because now that he works for himself, he can't be fired.

[Music]

So again, that interesting strategy of going to LinkedIn and looking at job listings, I guess it could be something other than LinkedIn, but the point is, you know, looking at those job listings and pitching to say, you know, maybe I can do this better, or I could do this in a way that doesn't actually require you to have a full-time employee for it. So I think the question is, all right, what else could you do this with? Obviously, this applies to anybody who's interested in social media management, but I think it goes much beyond that because, you know, it really depends on the company or field, but ultimately it works with anything that could be outsourced. So anything that could be outsourced, either done in-house or by somebody else, it could be bookkeeping or accounting, computer programming, design, advertising, even strategy or operations, in some cases. Not everything will fit, of course, and it's also important for companies to be smart, and, you know, you're often hearing how outsourcing is, you know, the solution for everything.

Whatever your core competency is, I don't think you should outsource. Like if it is strategy or operations, then that's not something you want to outsource. But the point is, there are a lot of things that could be done by somebody else. So point to those benefits when you pitch. Make sure you point out, hey, I'm going to save you money in doing this, and maybe there's some other things that are going to be easier or better for the company.

So I always admire a creative approach, and this is certainly one of them. Good work, Damien. Listeners, I hope you take something from this story. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1536.

I'll include links to anything I mentioned in the episode, perhaps some other resources as well. And I hope you'll continue to listen. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.