Self-employment

I’ve been thinking about my post-academic career for many months now. What exactly lies ahead isn’t yet clear, but I’m pretty sure of one thing: I want to be self-employed. I am already, really—taking a break right now—but I haven’t been making it work for me. For most of this year I was giving freelancing a go, trying to see if I could sustain myself working project-to-project, and with an on-going part-time gig. When I did the math at the end of the summer, though, I came up far short in the finances department. Despite my best efforts, I was being paid too little and billing too few hours to cover my expenses. I decided to spend more time looking at job advertisements and other resources. And I did. And I still am, but in a different way.

Now, I know much more about what I can do, what I want to do, and how I want to do it. I also know more about the freelancing life in general—reading some books (like this one) and doing lots of internet searching helped a lot. I realize that I really was being paid too little, and I know why: because freelancers make more per hour than full-time regular employees, and for good reasons. This seems so obvious to me now, but it wasn’t before! I used to think, “Ok, how much could I reasonably expect to make doing what I am now if this was a full-time job,” and then divide an annual salary by 50 weeks and 40 hours. Doing so would lead me right back to what I was being paid. It was frustrating.

But freelancers don’t figure out their rates that way. My equating of freelance rates with salaried wages was all wrong. Freelancers are hired on an as-needed basis: they aren’t full-time employees for a reason. They aren’t even employees, and therefore don’t put employers on the hook for things like benefits. In addition, self-employed people are businesses themselves, and being a business requires spending time managing that business. Out of a 40-hour work week, a freelancer might only be able to bill 20-25 hours. This isn’t because of laziness; it’s because things like bidding on contracts, preparing invoices, tracking expenses, updating a website, making cold calls, etc. take time.

There are lots of things to consider when setting rates—or figuring out other ways of being compensated for work—but at base I was making the wrong comparison. Now that I know not to do that, self-employment (once again) seems potentially feasible. I just need a better idea of what kind of self-employed person I’ll be.