This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, friends, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. Got a question today from a solo freelancer, somebody who's just kind of working on their own. And of course, that's a big demographic. We've got lots of people out there who are freelancing one way or another.
And they're struggling a little bit, today's caller. They get a new project and it seems like, in their words, they are reinventing the wheel. They have to go through this whole onboarding process that's a little bit more chaotic than it is calm. And so they're searching for some calm. What can you do when you have a new client come onboard?
How can you streamline that process so that you can just kind of get into the work and do the work and then acquire more clients and do the things you want to do instead of being stuck in this onboarding chaos? Big agencies solve this with playbooks and account managers. But in this scenario, you don't have an account manager. You're a business of one. So what can one person do?
Let's try to give our listener and maybe some other frazzled freelancers out there an onboarding system that runs itself. I love that promise. I'll do my best to fulfill it right after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
Hi there. I actually discovered Side Hustle School after binging your new book on Kindle.
My question is, every time I land a new freelance project, it feels like I'm reinventing the wheel. Scrambling for contracts, discovery questions, file sharing links, all of it. By the time we finally start the real work, I'm already behind schedule. I know agencies have airtight onboarding checklists, but what can a solo freelancer do to make every new engagement run smoothly from day one instead of total chaos? [Music]
So here's my suggestion.
Think of onboarding as a little factory that you walk every client through. Little, like very small factory. The goal is to shift from custom chaos to custom outcome standardized process. Like your process should always be the same. Of course, your outcomes are going to vary depending on the client work.
But so let's give you a little framework here that you can set up once and then reuse over and over. First step is gonna be the welcome packet. Like as soon as a prospect becomes a client, you're like, okay, you send them an automated email that includes a one-page overview of what happens next, timeline, milestones, any communication expectations. Like you could say, I reply within 24 hours on weekdays, just kind of setting your boundary there. Maybe a link to an online intake form built in Google Forms are similar.
That captures the goals of the project, any brand assets, key contacts, before you even draft the contract. So then you have it all in one place. And step two, of course, is to contract an invoice. There's lots of tools that help with this. As a freelancer, you probably already have one of them, HoneyBook, PandaDoc, Bonsai, those are a few.
This will help you merge the proposal, the contract, and the first invoice into a single click-through experience. So this way you don't have to, you know, have a whole bunch of follow-ups. Hey, did you get the docu-sign? Oh, hey, here's the PDF. Oh, a PDF wasn't signed back and forth.
You can just do it all in one fell swoop. Then you schedule a 30-minute zoom, okay? And this is gonna help you kind of get everything packaged into this one 30-minute process. Run through the same questions every time. They're gonna be in your template.
Confirm deliverables, maybe screen share, like a Trello board or something else, like wherever you manage the project. And this way your client kind of knows exactly what's gonna happen. And when the call ends, you drag the first task from that board into in progress. The client sees the progress immediately. You're no longer in these random back and forth email threads.
And then the last step of the process of the onboarding is there's a shared folder and communication hub. This could be in Google Drive. It could be in Dropbox, something else. Share that along with a single Slack channel or email tag devoted to the project. Everything goes in one place.
Future you never wonders about like where those assets went to. This is gonna save you so much time. Over the years, I've seen a lot of freelancers struggle because each step lives in a different tool. It has to be reinvented over and over. But if you package this whole sequence into one welcome packet, intake form, contract, and shared workspace, you're gonna save hours reduced back and forth.
And you're also gonna look really organized, which is great. So let us know if that works out for you. Of course, feel free to modify, adapt, as always. Listeners, let me know what you think. sidehustleschool.com.
You can send a question in from there. You can access any of the other episodes, all completely free, 3,178. New episodes come out every day and can be accessed wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name's Chris Guillebeau.
This is Sidehustleschool. [Music]
from the Onward Project.
