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Welcome to this week's edition of Freelance Fuel, where, as always, we share curated content that can hopefully inspire your business, or be the starting point to get started.
Today we look at how you can more easily buy leverage in your own business, the 5 best side hustles and a back catalog that raises your personal finance game, how to invest in case studies, and an exercise in writing your own obituary.
Let's get started.
/Jannik from Factofly
❤️🔥 Leverage
As a solo cowboy, for better or for worse, you are the boss of it all, and it can often be frustrating to have the feeling that you don't have enough hours in the day to manage everything from customer follow-up to maintaining your own website.
If you have a moment to reflect on your business, you can use the above matrix to help you identify where you should consider buying some leverage to get things running smoothly.
It probably has a fancy name, but I've long since forgotten that.
❤️🔥 In the four fields, the first and absolutely delicious one is: what you do and also like to do. Here it is business as usual.
🎬 Number two is what you enjoy doing, but right now you are not busy with. It must be started.
👋 In the third field you will find the really heavy topics. What you currently spend time on, but don't enjoy. It could, for example, be accounting. Everything in this box you have to outsource or eliminate completely, as it steals the joy of the independent life to that extent.
⚰️ Finally, there are the things you don't do and don't enjoy doing either. For me personally, it is e.g. to smoke, which I neither do nor enjoy. Here it is also business as usual, but with a watchful eye that there are no things here that sneak in above the "doing" line.
The matrix here can hopefully help you create an overview of which elements in your business provide energy and which drain the batteries.
It is simple but very effective.
🔥 The 5 best side hustles
The level of creators on YouTube continues to blow me away and I recently got to know Nischa who shares her experience in the investment world and talks about personal finance.
In the freelance world, the income, especially at the beginning, goes up and down a bit, and you can often experience the dry periods as extremely hard.
What resonates best with the newsletter here is her take on side hustles, but the rest of her back catalog is definitely worth your time when it comes to managing your hard-earned cash better.
🎥 Invest in your case studies
The best way to create new business is by giving potential customers an opportunity to dream into a world with your solution in hand.
And the very best way to do that is by building some rock-solid case studies your customers can mirror themselves in. Investing in building bulletproof case studies is one of the most important investments you can make in your business, as it will help you break through to new customers.
It's ultimately about making it easy for them to choose you!
There are various elements in a good case study, including storytelling and visualization of data. One of the best guides I have found is the Freelancer Map.
🤝 30 years of loyal service
This week I saw a LinkedIn post from an old colleague who could now celebrate 30 years in the same company.
We are all different, of course, and I'm not going to preach one path that is better than others, BUT if you've found your way to our newsletter, there's a 98.7% chance that you too are feeling the gravitational pull of the independent life.
And how should the life where you are the captain be lived?
You can do like Codie Sanchez and write your own obituary. That's what it's like to get your dreams one step closer.
