I’m Now a Full Time Freelancer

3 days ago, I started my new career as a full time Web design pro­fes­sional freelancer…

Well, it’s actu­ally not a new career because I’ve been doing it for over 12 years now. But for a while in the mid 90’s, it did play sec­ond fid­dle to music and work­ing a pro­duc­tion job in a screen print­ing com­pany. But as it became clear I would not suc­ceed pro­fes­sion­ally play­ing in my band, I put more and more time into work­ing and learn­ing the Web design craft. When the band ended in early 2000, I put all my “free” time into the Web work and built my clients base and kept on learn­ing new skills.

In 2001, I got pro­moted at the screen print­ing job into a multi task­ing posi­tion. I worked as a Customer Representative but also worked in the design and draw­ing of mem­brane switch key­board cir­cuits. I spent a lot of time in Illustrator which I’d started learn­ing in 1996. I will keep doing that on a con­tract basis for the fore­see­able future. I’m now real­iz­ing how much the cus­tomer rep work taught me even if it was truly chal­leng­ing for me. I learned how to inter­act with clients, be there for them and sup­port them and real­ized how much eas­ier it is in a ser­vice indus­try like Web and new media design than it is in a com­modi­ties B2B mar­ket like indus­trial screen printing.

I’ve been get­ting a lot of pos­i­tive feed­back on my ser­vice and atti­tude from my Web design clients and it makes me happy I didn’t rush into going into it full time until now. My basic work skills never wor­ried me but I feel like it’s not until recently I devel­oped the busi­ness skills that now makes inter­act­ing with my clients easy and fun.

I feel very excited about this new chap­ter of my life that is just start­ing and, although I’m the kind of guy that tends to worry about a lot of stuff, this deci­sion and move just feel right and I have very lit­tle wor­ries about the future. For now, I have a lot of work on my plate for clients I love to deal with and I feel like the luck­i­est guy in the world. I feel like I just took back con­trol of my life and it feels very empowering…