Is it your dream to own a business as a millionaire freelancer in the gig economy?

A freelancer is someone who is self-employed and usually works on short-term contracts or “gigs” for other individuals or companies.

Before you dismiss this idea as unrealistic and unstable, there are freelancers who have made it as millionaires in the gig economy. However, there are precautions that should be considered before diving into this type of lifestyle.

Why freelancing?

The lifestyle of a freelancer can be enticing. You create your own schedule and decide how many hours you want to work. You can work remotely from anywhere, whether it be lying on a beach in Spain or sitting in a cafe in Paris. If you own your business, you can make millions in the gig economy.

Why has freelancing increasingly become the ideal lifestyle for the millenial? As a millennial, you might be looking to buy your first home. You might not want to rely on a family member for a downpayment, so you have to use their own ingenuity to find other ways to afford a house, other than working a 9-5 job. More people have also opted to freelance as a result of the pandemic.

The gig economy is booming.

In the book Freelance Your Way to Freedom by Alexandra Fasulo, the author describes how she made a million dollars after some years on the freelancer platform Fiverr. Her success prompted her to run her own million dollar freelance agency.

Fasulo describes her lifestyle as a freelancer as being free from former, outdated rules of work and money. A freelancer would rather do things their own way, and not let anyone tell them that they have to do things like everyone else.

The book is an entertaining read as well as being educational. It teaches you how to freelance so that you can have the freedom to work from anywhere and have time for other things such as taking care of family. There’s also a low overhead to working either for a freelance platform or on your own agency.

The book goes into some of the same principles quoted in The 4-Hour Workweek, and gives tips on how to hire virtual assistants in your business. There’s a lot about social media and current trends, and how to go viral, which contributed to the author’s success as a freelancer. These tips may be geared towards a younger generation. But if you’re not, it pays to be social media savvy. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea though the book does emphasize that you don’t have to do anything or reveal anything about yourself that you don’t want to in order to be successful as a freelancer.

Is the freelancer lifestyle right for you?

A cautionary statement must be included with any discussion about the freelancing lifestyle. Sure, you can be your own boss, but don’t forget that you’d always be working for someone, either a client or for your audience.

You also have to be disciplined. There’s no one keeping an eye on you and your work, so it’s on you to deliver the work as required.

You have clients to please, and to deal with if they are unhappy with your work. You have to develop a thick skin, just like any other business.

Freelancing can also be precarious.

The benefits of financial security and a steady income are oftentimes lacking in a freelancer’s career. It’s called a gig economy for a reason. It can be unstable at times. What happens if there is a recession and your only source of income dries up? What if this forces you to go back to your corporate job?

This is why business owners emphasize having multiple streams of income. The more streams of income, the better. This could be investing in real estate, the stock market, or having multiple products for sale.

Just like being an entrepreneur, being a freelancer is not for everyone but the possibilities can be endless if you have the stomach and the drive for it. The book gives further tips on how to own a business and be a millionaire freelancer in the gig economy.

Creating wealth as a freelancer

Another helpful book about freelancing is The Wealthy Freelancer by Steve Slaunwhite, Pete Savage and Ed Gandia.

A concept that is described in a lot of business books is that when you are working for a salary, you’re trading your time for money. The amount of money you make is limited by how much time you have to work for that money.

However, if you outsource your tasks, or manage to create a product such as a course or membership site, you’re no longer trading your time for money and your income is limitless. The book goes into a lot of detail about how to work around trading your time for money.

Some questions that you must first ask yourself before deciding to jump into a full-fledged freelancer business include: Do you have the right mindset to be a freelancer? Are you disciplined, resilient,  and don’t give up easily? If you pitch a project to a potential client, but they decide to hire a different freelancer, can you take rejection? Are you resourceful at finding ways around problems?

Are you in the right industry for a freelancer?

If you want to work from home, or work while travelling, the type of work you want is one you can do with just a laptop and WiFi connection. Some examples given in both books include writers or copywriters, bloggers, photographers, and web designers. These also have low overhead so it’s easier to get started with.

What is the first step to be a freelancer?

Know what niche you want to work in. You also want to know how to set your fees. You can do this by scoping out the competition and price your fees accordingly.

How do you transition from a traditional job to a freelance career?

Make sure that you have emergency savings if you want to leave your job. Have a plan and an intention in place. This includes a plan for how you will get clients, whether it be through referrals, networking, associations, or industry events. Referrals are worth more than randomly approaching people you don’t know, which is more like a shot in the dark.

If you don’t already have experience, put together a portfolio, which can be a mixed media of written pieces or videos.

It’s also important to nurture your leads. If they don’t immediately buy from you, it might take several weeks or even several months for them to make a decision to do business with you. Until then, continue to keep in touch with them and to send value to them, until they make that decision.

Is there is a high demand for your product or service in your market?

You can’t sell your products or services if there is no demand for it.

Finally, both of these books emphasize that as a freelancer, you must have personal branding. Personal branding is the one thing that sets you apart from every other freelancer, and gives your potential clients a reason to hire you specifically and not another freelancer.

If this convinces you that freelancing is the right path for you, make sure that you have systems set up that can help you focus your business and your mindset on success. Owning a business as a freelancer is possible, though being a millionaire in the gig economy takes time, effort, and a lot of patience.

Further reading:

Fasulo, Alexandra. Freelance Your Way to Freedom. (2023)
Slaunwhite S, Savage P, and Gandia E. The Wealthy Freelancer. (2010)

How to do more in less time

How would you like to work only four-hours per week? or three-hour days? It’s a productivity paradox, but you can do more by doing less.

Any way you parse it, everyone wants to do more in the least amount of time. These days, the preoccupation with accomplishing more in record time is prevalent. The world now works at a fast-paced schedule. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up.

The need to accomplish more in the space of twenty-four hours is a given for anyone who wants to be more efficient and achieve more. Luckily, a few enterpreneurs have found a system that allows them to do more by doing less, a productivity paradox which I will further explain here.

Work less by outsourcing your tasks

The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss is the widely referenced bible for doing more with little time or effort. The gist of the oft-quoted book is to work less by outsourcing your tasks to freelancers. Ferriss recommends outsourcing to workers who live in other countries where the exchange rate is favourable, e.g. in India or the Philippines. The book teaches you to not waste time doing tasks that have a low return on investment (ROI). Outsourcing these specific tasks allows you to do more by doing less.

Focus on the big picture, not the small tasks, to maximize productivity

I was looking for similar books at the local library, and stumbled upon two books published this year which take a similar route as Ferriss’s ideas, 3 Hours A Day by Knolly Williams and 10x is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. All three books claim that the secret to accomplishing more in less time is to maximize productivity by letting go of tasks that will not move your business forward. Rather, you should hire a team or outsource these tasks, enabling you to concentrate on the bigger picture.

Do more by doing less

This system is enticing because it challenges what most of us were taught, which is that the harder you work, the more money you will make. If you stand out among your co-workers by putting in more hours, you will be rewarded with a higher salary and a promotion. I can see the lure of abandoning this model and working less and having a lot of free time to do what matters to you.

A lot of people are sold on this idea. It’s an ideal that most people would trade in their current working life for. Most people would relish the idea of working only 4 hours per week while spending the rest of their time travelling or on vacation.

Change your mindset to make this lifestyle work for you

All three authors of these books claim to work a lot less hours than the average CEO, yet manage to easily rake in millions of dollars in profit a year. This type of system works well with a certain type of personality. Williams says that the people he coaches to use his system are workaholics who wouldn’t know what to do with all that time on their hands.

So it takes a certain personality, mindset, and change in attitude for this type of lifestyle to work. You must have a willingness to trust and invest in your hired staff, as well as good leadership, delegation, and the right people who are good at what they do. There is also the challenge of having a staff made up of mostly remote workers, if you outsource your work globally.

Is it possible to work only three hours a day?

So how can you do more by doing less? The productivity paradox is explained in one method by Williams. Williams manages to shorten his work day to three hours a day by focusing on his priorities and letting his staff do the rest.

However, the book doesn’t go into a lot of detail about how to get the capital in the first place to pay your employees. The system is not really a productivity hack either, as you can still work 4 to 12 hours a day but not get anything productive done. It’s more of a way of life.

Williams says to outsource or hire staff to do things that you don’t like doing, so you can better expend your energy doing things that will move your business forward. You will need to let your team self-govern. You will need to develop leadership skills and know when to step back and when to intervene.

According to Williams, his method has been followed by tons of entrepreneurs who have successfully cut down their work hours while having more time to spend with their families. Once they have this system set up, all they need to do is keep an eye on their remote employees and occasionally do the business development or follow up on sales leads.

It does make sense, by multiplying your workforce you can get more done. But use caution if you want to implement this system in your business. There are several reasons why it might not work for you. For example, you might not like delegating. You don’t want to hire to expand your team. You don’t trust people. You rather do everything yourself, or are a constant micromanager.

Is working at a 10x capacity more efficient?

In the book 10x is Easier Than 2x, working at 10x means you only focus on the essentials of running a business. This frees your mental capacity for innovation and creativity, leaving your team to work on the operational side of your business.

The authors stress that quality rather than quantity is essential to working at 10x. 10x is better than being 2x. 2x means that you’re stuck expending your precious energy doing things that could easily be outsourced.

They also state that it’s easier to reach for the impossible goals because there’s less competition. There’s too much competition for smaller goals. Everyone else is already trying to accomplish the easy goals.

The more specialized your skills, the more narrow your niche is, and the less competition you face. Utilize your individuality, your uniqueness, and you will find that you will never have to compete again. 

Also, because your goals are so far reaching, your way forward is clearer since there are fewer paths that will take you to the bigger, impossible goals.

Dream bigger dreams

The authors state, dream bigger dreams, and do what no one’s done before. Have higher standards. This means choosing only those clients who can afford to pay the fees that you set.

Prioritize the big picture goals and don’t waste time on small goals that will only get you 2x farther than where you are right now. After a 10x jump to your goal, reset your goal every time you accomplish your previous goal.

The authors of these books are hugely successful entrepreneurs with unimaginable wealth. They recommend that by doing less, you are doing more, which may sound like a paradox.

A caveat to this method is that you could still follow their method, work only a few hours a week, but still waste time. But if you go about it the right way, better opportunities will find their way to you. They say that doing the impossible is achievable with their methods. The only way to find out is to try it yourself.

Further reading:

Ferriss, Timothy. The 4-Hour Workweek. (2009).
Williams, Knolly. 3 Hours a Day. (2023).
Sullivan, Dan and Hardy, Benjamin. 10x is Easier Than 2x. (2023).

The rise of today’s knowledge economy has replaced traditional educators. Experts have gained popularity without needing a single credential to their name. They’re “do-it-yourself” experts who flout the old-fashioned rules of getting an academic degree to be granted the status of “expert.”

In the book Millionaire Messenger, Brendon Burchard argues that anyone can be an expert. It takes time and effort, but with the right tools and resources, and motivation for learning, you can call yourself an expert on just about anything. If you’re willing to take on the challenge, you can build your knowledge and master any subject.

However, you might be doubtful as to why anyone would trust you as an expert. After all, why would anyone want to listen to you? There’s too much noise. How can you be heard?

Being an expert means being unique

Yes, your voice can be lost in the sea of experts who are just as equally knowledgeable. That’s why you have to differentiate yourself by being unique. There’s a lot of experts, but there’s only one you. What do you have that no one else does? This is the question that you should be asking yourself to get started.

After all, everybody knows something and has something to say about it. It’s no longer necessary to go to school to be an expert. But an expert still has to be credible. There are many ways to obtain that credibility. If you’re someone who wants to develop your expertise into a profitable career, read on.

What do we mean by expert?

Let’s examine what it means to be an expert. Synonymous with “expert” is “guru”, “know-it-all”, or the person you go to for information and advice. An expert has to know what they are talking about in the subject or topic that they specialize in.

However, it doesn’t mean that you need to know absolutely everything about the topic, but just enough so that you’re more knowledgeable than the average lay person. It works to stay one step ahead of the lay person and predict what information that they are after.

The traditional ways to become an expert

Formerly, to become an expert, you would have to go to school, get a degree, and do well in your career. It would’ve taken several years to reach the status of “expert”.

But these days, people are rewriting the rules and conventions of what it means to be an expert. The fast track to becoming an expert no longer requires you to sit in a classroom. You no longer need to toil away studying for exams to obtain a degree.

How can you become an expert?

The secret to becoming an expert is that an expert doesn’t need to know everything, or at least, not from the start, because everything can be learned.

Sure, certifications and degrees lend credibility to your claim of being an expert. However, many people are successful experts without a single expensive credential to their name.

Now, with the world wide web, you have free resources, ones that won’t break the bank, at your fingertips. You can tap into a well of knowledge that used to be available to only a few people.

In addition, you can get free access to many courses on websites such as Coursera or Linkedin Learning through the public library. All you need is a library card.

Build your expertise by taking action

Do your research and read everything you can get your hands on about the topic you want to build your expertise on.

Also, learn how to speak and write eloquently. Learn how to present yourself like an expert. Examine how an expert speaks. Study their body language and their vocabulary.  Take a few courses on public speaking or on how to craft a written piece with a compelling message.

Evidently, learning is in itself a skill. You have to have a hunger for knowledge and seek it in unexpected places. You don’t even have to like book learning. You can learn from other experts in your network just by having a conversation with them. But you must enjoy absorbing information and synthesizing, or creating something new from the information you’ve learned.

Your message must be persuasive

Your audience may trust you more if you’ve gone through some sort of training or certification. It’s your choice if you want to add those credentials to your name, but this is not always the case.

This is because you can be persuasive at selling your message. Your marketing strategy can make up for the fact that you don’t have the education or qualification. But if you are skilled at knowing your subject inside out, you stand a fairly good chance at making it as an expert.

Why would anyone want to be an expert?

There’s a lot you can do with all of that free knowledge. It’s useful to be an expert if you want to be trusted and listened to.

In fact, being an expert opens many doors to aspiring entrepreneurs. It can give you the chance to start a business based on your area of expertise. Many opportunities can be open to you if you are trustworthy and credible.

What to do with your knowledge

An expert is also a creator and a writer. In the knowledge economy, the business of capitalizing on knowledge, whether it be esoteric or common, gives you the opportunity to monetize education, and there’s a lot of wealth to spread around if you know how to go about it.

As an expert, research and write books, articles, blog posts, or host podcasts, seminars, conferences, and events. Whole businesses are built upon knowledge sharing. Build up your knowledge. If you want to market yourself as an expert and don’t have any experience, create a portfolio of work that you can show your audience. It takes some effort and persistence. Get out there and practice your craft. Give a webinar or start a blog.

How to deal with imposter syndrome

You might think that there are a lot of frauds calling themselves experts. You might even feel like you have imposter syndrome. But take heart. The public is shrewd enough to be able to discern what is real and what is fake. They can immediately spot a fraud from a mile away. If you are authentic, and don’t pretend to know more than you actually do, your audience will know this and appreciate it.

In summary, to do is to know. So, act on your knowledge. Go out and gather a community of learners, and teach them what you know. Only then will you be an expert.

Further reading

Burchard, Brendon. Millionaire Messenger. (2011)