Young Entrepreneurs : Take a taste of Freelancing as your door to new ventures!
On : September 22nd, 2014By : Shivya Gupta
Most college graduates enter the fierce world of work and business, and plenty of them are longing to to pursue an entrepreneurial lifestyle that makes them dream of giving birth to a blockbuster business venture, right after they put away their books , degrees and graduation robes!
Well, there is absolutely no doubt about the fact that this idea seems as tempting and flamboyant in its theory, but it certainly isn’t the most realistic one in its being. The journey of young graduates turning into young entrepreneurs is not as short a route as imagined or hoped to be. In fact the speed breakers in between might just make quite a few turn back half way.These young buds are often confused about the field of business they want to get into , and are pretty much alienated to the atrocities of the outside world as well. So , why not have a small teaser of the work-life mode before you switch to the entrepreneurial way of leading life. For all of you fresh graduates and youthful ambitious future entrepreneurs of our country ,there is another option aside from immediately taking the leap of faith of forming a company: become a freelancer.
Let us throw some light to this piece of advice. Why should you actually take a taste of freelancing before taking the entrepreneurial plunge:
1. Test your market
Explore your talents and the market simultaneously to enlighten yourself to the pitfalls along with the opportunities that come your way as a freelancer. It shall better prepare you for the market and make you receptive towards the loopholes that shall be faced by you during the beginning stages as a young entrepreneur.
2. Client Generation
Freelancing provides you with a great chance to create some fruitful contacts that prove to be quite lucrative when you require actual business for your firm. As a startup it might take some time for you to gather clients , but if your work and performance has already reached the market , client generation becomes much easier.
3. Time Management
Freelancing makes you accustomed to effective time management. You have specified deadlines and you self train yourself to meet the needs of clients as per their requirements with respect to time.
4. Competitive Advantage – Boon for a Young entrepreneur
As a freelancer you work as an individual , but as a future entrepreneur you think like the latter and absorb the competition for yourself in the future. It helps you grasp all the necessary information about your would be competitors and mould your venture market policy accordingly.
The next question that arises is that , how does one excel at freelancing in order to create a building block and stepping stone to your career as a young entrepreneur!
1. Be Realistic about Deadlines
While you can certainly try to “DO IT ALL,” at some point you will be unable to fit everything in your inflexible schedule.Eventually , everything apart from your work , to social , personal life shall start to suffer. Make sure you don’t take on more than what you can manage in a week. Set the fixed amount of hours you will dedicate to freelance and defend your free time.
2. Do not Underestimate yourself
Stay away from the philosophy of underpricing yourself to attain more clients. You may get a lot of work from a client but if you set your rate too low you may come to loathe the pay rate and the work after a point of time. You would gather that you aren’t being paid as per your potential and not even being given enough credit that you deserve.
3. Make yourself stand out
Making yourself stand out can be quite tough when there is no dearth of people willing to do the exact same work everywhere around. You need to create your own integrity and niche in the market not only as a freelancer but as a young entrepreneur too, compelling clients to prefer you over others.Whether you do it by making your work different from others at a platform you know competition cannot reach or your service , precision , reliability in your working style that sets you apart making you a hot property.
4. Set the right amount of expectations for your clients
The most important thing to do when freelancing is communicate to your client about expectations and extract their level of expectations from them as well..it is extremely important to be vocal about the potential limitations of the given assignment ,as well as being very traditional about probable hours it will take to finish a project.
If you are still studying and looking at yourself as a future young entrepreneur , why waste your time. Start freelancing right now through reliable platforms like www.taskr.in . It is free to register yourself on ,to post your services , to get noticed , to generate clients , to recognize your own potential and to give rise to an extra income even before you leave those college gates.
