1. It’s very difficult for one person to manage different aspects of being in business.
Being a freelancer means being in business for yourself. And being in business, obliges you to look after mission critical tasks that any business must deal with: production, marketing, sales and administration, to name a few. If you don’t look after all of these areas, parts of your business will invariably suffer. Each business area is usually a job unto itself.

E-myth author Michael Gerber reminds freelancers and people starting out owning their own business to work “on” their business instead of working “in” the business. Most professionals that go solo tend to like the production aspect of their work and so other tasks like marketing go undone. That’s a big mistake for obvious reasons.

2. It can get lonely at the top.

The first couple of months as the CEO of You, Inc., without your foul-smelling boss and without those annoying colleagues that irked you so much can be great. But as time goes on, most people get lonely. If business slows and you begin to face adversity, this is when you really begin to feel it. It is much easier and better to deal with this adversity as part of a team. By yourself it’s really tough. But as the old saying goes, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” But it’s easier said than done.

3. Your business grows in slow motion.

Good ideas come more slowly and most projects take longer to complete than if you were working for the man. Why is that? It has a lot to do with team work. When you work with other people, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Ideas flow more freely and develop more quickly based on the synergy that is established among members of a team. And obviously the work is gets done more quickly since more people are there to do it. Productivity also is enhanced since people tend to specialize in what they are good at and so the work gets done even more quickly.

A seminal work that deal with synergy and team work is Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

4. You might work more and get paid less than you did at your corporate job.

This stems from number three. Since you are doing all of the heavy lifting in your company, and all of the administration and all of the marketing and all of the sales, well, you end up working more. When you average your income per hour worked, that means you get paid less. The worst part is that unless you have a lot of cache, a personal brand and lots of contacts willing to pay you handsomely once you go into business for yourself, it is hard to charge the same rates that would give you a salary equivalent to your corporate job. Your potential clients have to value your services to pay you top dollar and building that brand equity is an uphill battle.

5. You may dislike your clients more than your boss.

Most people going into business for themselves have to build their client base from the ground up. One of the difficulties you may find is that you are forced to take projects from low-quality clients, i.e. ones that don’t value your services, don’t pay on time or at all, or simply are difficult to work with. This can be one of the more unsavory aspects of being in business for yourself. And you just can’t fire them because you need the income. So you grin and bear it.

If you can deal with these and other drawbacks from being on your own, then perhaps freelancing is the right choice. And there are some jobs or professions that naturally lend themselves to freelancing, such as writing.

If you do decide to go for it, make sure you try to establish some strong client relationships before doing so. A good rule of thumb is only to go in business for yourself when they have lots of contacts and one or some of them are going to pay them at least 50 percent of a salary on a monthly basis. If you have those relationships in place, then you might be ready to venture off on your own. Good luck!

Our vision is to give owners of very small businesses and self-employed professionals like accountants, lawyers and architects cutting-edge identity design and marketing support via a supremely simple online platform. While we’re at it, we want to help new entrepreneurs, self-employed professionals and freelance designers learn business skills by sharing our own experience launching and bootstrapping an online company.

One principle of business (and life) that many leading commentators and entrepreneurs discuss is the idea of having a vision or a road map for your business. One of the earliest evangelists of business success, Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, calls it “imagination”. Stephen Covey, author of the perennial best-seller Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, says that in all of life’s endeavors—in order to be effective—one should “begin with the end in mind.”

Most people seem to agree that having a vision for your business before you start is critical. Perhaps that’s why the idea of writing a business plan, even if it’s just one-page long, has become the norm.

The general wisdom regarding how well-defined and how big your vision should be is mixed, though. A lot of people recommend spending time writing a thorough business plan since it helps you analyze the many aspects of your idea. Other people recommend putting your goals on a sheet of paper and just getting started on your prototype, business or whatever. They argue that ideas and businesses usually change once they get started.

At Stylomate, we like both ideas so we’re trying them simultaneously. I am writing a business plan that outlines the particulars of our business and strategy. At the same time, my business partner in Stylomate, David, along with some freelance professionals we have hired, are building the prototype. I’ll let you know over time which approach is working better for us. Right now, both are working.

People also seem to disagree about how big your vision for your business should be. Some say “think big.” “Don’t limit yourself.” The idea here seems to be that bigger the goal, the greater the likely results. If you set the bar too low, then you’ll definitely achieve lesser results.

The other line of thinking is that your vision should be like Oakham’s razor: very simple. Have a modest, simple idea and go for it. If it grows into a $100 million business great. If not, that’s great too. An exponent of this is Jason Fried, the founder of 37signals, the Software as a Service (SaaS) company that makes online, productivity software like Basecamp. Jason argues that most big businesses started out with modest ambitions and just grew from there: Nike, Starbuck’s, Microsoft and Apple.

Again, I think both views are correct. Probably a unifying principle that reconciles the two views is that you shouldn’t try to hard to control the results. Have your idea big or small but don’t be too wedded to a particular outcome. Why? Because ultimately you can’t. There are too many variables in life to be able to control them all. And better yet, providence might have different and better results than you could have dreamed of on your own.

In sum, aim high, make a simple plan and enjoy the ride.

As designers, we are generally not known for our business acumen. Generally, we’d rather be designing someone else’s project than figuring out how to make more money for ourselves.

Here is a fascinating interview via Mixergy.com with a bootstrapping design entrepreneur who built WooThemes into a $2+ million annual business. WooThemes, is a blog template, or “theme,” developer and is known for clean designs and code as well as extraordinary customer support.

WooThemes’ cofounder, Adriaan “Adii” Pienaar, recalls how his father, in addition to business studies in college, caused him to search for ways of making “passive income” and turning design into a product as opposed to a service.

Passive income refers to earnings that are not attributable to a service one provides in exchange for a fee. Examples include things like:

• Ownership in a business
• Dividends on publicly traded stocks
• Rental income from properties
• Royalties from publishing a book or from licensing a patent
• Earnings from website advertising income

The Internet has been a boon for designers in many respects as—at long last—it has created a way for design professionals to earn passive income streams by building and reselling templates, for example.

In this video, one of the pioneers tells his story. You gotta love this guy’s humility.