Freelancing. The smartest Way to be free and highly Paid

Savings on the rent of the workplace, no need to provide social guarantees and pay for the vacation and sick leave. And, of course, a minimum of paperwork and reporting.

The disadvantages include complexity of controlling the workflow, the problem of protecting confidentiality and the risk of leakage of certain private information, the inability to engage a freelancer in the projects which require access to state secrets and personal data.

Let’s return to the issue of job search and self promotion.

As I wrote in the beginning, job search and self promotion is implemented via online job marketplaces, word of mouth, personal contacts, and other resources. One way or another, the issue of self promotion is quite important and long lasting. But, oddly enough, it seems to be very simple. At the same time, it is really very difficult to explain where to start and how to build your personal brand.

Now I will try to specify the main postulates very briefly. Always be open. Put your photo in your profile, not a virtual image. Share your contacts, and fill in your portfolio with the works that you have completed and that can be absolutely anything, including those made for friends and colleagues. Show yourself and your skills to potential customers as eloquent as possible to the potential customer. Take on only those obligations that you can fulfill!

Participate in industry forums, competitions, and awards: it will allow you to show yourself and your skills. In addition, events of this kind set the benchmarks of quality, the level of professionalism and the vector of development. This is very important both for your development and for the development of the market!

If you want to be an independent, responsible, educated, confident «free artist», a free fighter and a true freelancer – just be the one!

Yours sincerely:

Kirill Anoshin

Founder of multi-profile marketplace for remote work Freelance.ru

Director of The National Freelancers Guild: Freelancers Guild. RF

Producer of the independent freelancers award “Golden spear”: GoldenLance.ru

Introduclion

In April 2011, one of my clients in search for top managers, the international restaurant holding “Arpikom”, asked me to speak at an internal corporate conference “Russian food market outside the home in 2020”.

This took place 9 years ago. My task was to analyze global trends and prepare recommendations for changes from the point of view of the labor market, job seekers and HR services, speak to key employees of the holding company and give recommendations for preparing changes within the company.

I have prepared 17 points. Today I reviewed my presentation once again. And I was surprised to see that 6 of them are directly related to remote work. A third! Another third is indirectly related to remote work.

And only one point did hasn’t come true. Namely the death of a resume.

Yes, a traditional resume remains a necessity if you applying for an office job. What were the other 5 points? To put it short.

The first – you probably already guessed. Remote work. Yes, at the beginning of 2011, this was not a trend. This was the probable future – and today it has come true. Due to coronavirus in 2020, most companies around the world have asked employees to work from home. And some of these employees will definitely not return to the office.

The second point is geolocation. Search for a job near your home.

Only a few years later the leaders among job search websites “Superjob” and “Head Hunter” introduced an opportunity to specify the location of the employer in the job description.

But If you work not in the office, then your geolocation is any country in the world.

The third point is online interviews. Now there is no need to meet in person in the office to find a job and demonstrate your experience. Our recruitment agency “Business Connection” acquired customers and candidates all over the world. If in the very beginning of the new century an order from the Philippines, the Czech Republic or Cyprus was an extraordinary challenge for us, now we understand how to implement it.

The fourth point is changing of the business processes. Remote work creates new standards of communication, managerial competences, task setting and performance control. A special goal arises – to motivate employees you can’t see every day, and their socialization. These are new challenges for HR.

The fifth point is project-oriented activity. Earlier the employers were confident in the stability of sales markets, business processes, and their own invincibility. And they hired people, in fact, to support and strengthen current processes. The new economy, and especially the “Industry 4.0”, expects super results in a short time, clear budgets, clear view of the resources used and the reasonable commercial result from the performers. It is no longer possible to do in the same way as before simply because it was done this way before.

Each task is a project. With all the rules of the project management involved.

And the sixth point, most important for us, is multiple sources of income. Yes. As blasphemous as it sounds, work in large corporations is a legalized slavery. You work from morning till night and have a weekend for your personal life and family.

And a vacation leave once a year to recover and to continue work.

Can you imagine an employer 10-20-30 years ago who would have been positive about what you go freelancing in order to have extra earnings? No. This is a corporate betrayal, an activity beyond the corporate rules.

But what about now? Now this is becoming a normal practice. Employers understand they’re losing their monopoly on you. You become less and less dependent on them. It is unpleasant for them, painful, and causes resistance.

But they can’t change the trend. And those employers who have accepted this and allowed their employees to be independent of them, they get a lot of loyalty and respect from employees.

This is the purpose of the book. To show the possibilities of multiple sources of income and independence from a single employer.

I can give you my own example. I’m an entrepreneur. Main business is search for top managers. These are people with an income between 500 thousand and 3 million rubles a month. In addition, I conduct personnel management seminars around the world. I’m a book writer and get quarterly.

royalties from the book sales in paper, electronic and audio formats. I’m a career consultant. I help you decide on career development, development strategy, tactics for achieving goals, find the ideal employer for these purposes. I’m an HR consultant and an expert in HR digitalization: I help companies attract the best candidates and build the right relationships with employees to increase efficiency and reduce routine. I’m a speaker at conferences. And I get paid for it. In 1999 I started working as a recruiter. He received the money only for the filling in the vacancies. Since then, I have mastered some related industries and other sources of income. The main thing for me is transition to the executive search level, the search for top managers.

You might say that it makes sense for a headhunter to conduct HR training and write career books. Yes, it makes sense. With all this, how many other people do you know who, starting from calling candidates by phone and conducting initial interviews, and getting $150 a month, were able to actually reach a level where one hour consultation is $500 worth?

I’d been going for this for 20 years. But now is the time when it is possible for you to reach this quicker!

I am grateful to each of my customers for their experience and opportunity development.

And especially to the restaurant holding company who asked me to make a one-hour report “Key HR trends-2020”. In the result, I performed more than 30 times with this presentation. At conferences and meetings in Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Ukraine, Belarus, Spain, Azerbaijan, and even in Indonesia.

It’s amazing that, even after making a speech in 2019 with the same presentation in Moscow, where I didn’t change a single slide, I received an ovation and a lot of questions from HR professionals.

I promise that the next presentation will take into account the trends of 2030 and will be altered.

And we’re getting to the point!

Move on to free relocation, income, success and selfrealization!

Chapter 1

Who are the freelancers

Most likely, you have already read about it somewhere. So I put it briefly. In the medieval centuries, this was the name of the helpers to the spearmen, the knights. Those who carried their weapons. Lance is a spear. According to Wikipedia, the term became widely used after publishing of the novel by Walter Scott “Ivanhoe”. The most striking example from classical literature is Sancho Panza in “Don Quixote”. However, Cervantes wrote about this even back there in the 17th century.

It doesn’t matter how or when the term first appeared. The more important issue is what does it define now.

It does define people who can work for multiple employers and are not tied up to each of them by longterm obligations.

A freelancer is a person who offers their services to employers without being employed by them. Which services?

This can be writing texts, design, page makeup, search for personnel, training, programming, translation, photo and video shooting, website creation, mailings, typing, information collection, accounting, legal services. This can be absolutely any work related to mental labor.

What kind of freelancer services do I order myself? These are website promotion, corporate souvenir design, makeup of handouts for seminars and trainings, making of presentations, design of publications for Instagram, layouts of my books, creating covers, designing my YouTube channel and its content promotion, translation of my books to other languages, creation of illustrations for books.