Someone else’s job

When you’re freelance, you can often find yourself the queen (or king) of multitasking. You’re not just the go-to person for your particular area of expertise, you’re also the one who does the book-keeping, invoicing, marketing, filing, re-ordering of replenishables, equipment buying, office (ie, home) maintenance and cleaning – not to mention filing your tax return – and all this on top of answering the phone, replying to emails and following up leads for potential new clients. 

In other words, you’re secretary, clerk/typist, office cleaner, book-keeper and office manager and sales person all rolled into one. If you’ve reached the point where you’ve found yourself turning work away because there just isn’t time to fit anything else in, congratulations. However, it may be time to look into farming some of those jobs out. The idea, obviously, is that you bill more for your time than you’ll pay someone else to do them.

For instance, you could hire someone to come in and clean your house once a week for less than what you charge a client for the time it would take you to clean it yourself.

Likewise, if you spend hours (days?) sorting out your taxes, it undoubtedly makes sense to hire an accountant. The same goes for setting up a website – if you’re not in IT, then it can cost you more in time to figure out how to do it than it would to simply hire someone who already knows how. As for the filing, accounting, invoicing and so on, there are plenty of other work-at-homes looking for jobs by the hour and if you hire someone on a regular basis – say an hour or two a week or month – they’ll soon learn their way around how you work and it can free you up to take on… Yes, more work!