5 Ways to Stay Focused as a Freelance Graphic Designer

Does your freelancing career feel like a roller coaster: thrilling ups, terrifying downs, and mostly out of your direct control? Are you landing your ideal clients and making the money you always knew you could?

It’s hard to do it all — keeping your existing clients happy, marketing for new leads, and running the backend of your freelance business. And, of course, doing all of that while still having time for your friends, family, health, and hobbies!

Freelance work doesn’t have to be a roller coaster. With a bit of useful information, you can stay focused — and you will succeed! Let’s get started.

There are 5 key areas to look at when you want to stay focused as a freelance graphic designer. In this article, we’ll outline the steps which will ensure your freelance business will grow:

Assessing your freelance business
Where to focus your energy
Organizing the business backend
Habits for success
Visualizing the future

1. Assessing Your Freelance Business

Here you are…you’ve started down the freelance graphic design journey and you’re wondering what to do next. You want to be focused and successful, without chronic business struggles.

After all, you didn’t start freelancing to struggle — you started because you knew being your own boss could be an amazing way to earn a living.

Where are you at today? There are several basic stages to freelance business development according to the small business experts at the Harvard Business Review:

Existence
Survival
Success
Take-off
Maturity

Think about your business. What stage is it in at the moment? Is it hard for you to tell? Are you so discouraged that you’re not even convinced you have a “business”? Are you just thinking about starting, maybe?

Likely, you know right away where your business fits in these five stages of small business development. Take a gut guess and go with it.

If you’re really unsure, you might benefit from our Freelance Starter Kit course. Our kit provides instructions and directions to follow, so you won’t be tempted to give up on your wonderful dreams too soon!

2. Where to Focus Your Energy

Now you’ve identified what stage your freelance business is currently in, whether at the start-up stage or maybe survival mode….or maybe you’re already at the success stage and beyond! (And, if you aren’t, keep reading and you’ll find the blueprint for getting there!)

Once you know what stage your business is in, it will be easier to identify how to focus your hours in helpful ways. One principle that long-haulers in the freelance world focus on is going from strength to strength. That’s a small phrase with a powerful effect.

To do this, start with looking for where your current strength is. This is the point you’ve already reached and feel pretty confident about. Maybe you are naturally good on connecting with people on Instagram, or maybe your strength is that you can make amazing logos – even if you haven’t had a single freelance client yet.

Don’t worry if you have to backtrack a bit to find that place of relative strength. The process of evolving requires time to regroup and internalize the lessons you’ve learned so far. There is no success without failure, period. So all of your past attempts are, in themselves, part of your success!

Now think of that point of strength you have attained, and that’s where you’ll grow from — from strength to strength. You don’t want to leap ahead. You want to proceed from this place of strength to your next.

Look over the small business stages again in the bullet points earlier in this article. What is the next stage, after the one you’re currently positioned in? That next stage is your short-term goal.

You’ll move forward from your current strength to a new strength inside of the next stage. (Don’t start doubting your ability to assess your business’s stage and strength. Go with your gut and trust your intuition – remember, you are the CEO here!)

With your short-term goal, it’s important to think about practical realities:

What is your monthly “burn-rate” (the money you spend on everything, including your home and office expenses)?
What is your target annual income based on your dreams? Have you written this down to make it real? Is it reasonable? If your goal is super ambitious, it’s a good idea to set a one-year goal that is achievable though hard work and doesn’t require serendipitous luck.

Do you have a place to work (an office, a regular coffee shop, a home set-up)?
Do you have all the tools you need (and can afford at this point in your business growth)?
What is your biggest business impediment right now? Who do you know who can help you conquer the issue, even if it’s a relatively small issue?
Do you need to take a course, maybe in small business or design, so you feel more prepared and can present yourself as an industry expert?

By the way, if you feel you are at the survival or success stage in your freelance graphic design business, you might want to consider our Academy’s Level Up Kit to help you move from your current strength to your next stage of business growth.

3. Organizing the Business Backend

To review, you now know where your business is at (in terms of development stages), and you have established that you’ll take a close look at what needs to be done to move from strength to strength. What’s next, as you refine your ability to stay focused on your graphic design business?

Take a good look at the “backroom” of your business. This is sometimes called the “backend” or administrative side of what you do, and it is essential. It can also be avoided (for a while, anyway) and it’s often detested, but eventually you will need to face it and get organized.

When thinking about the backroom, ask yourself some honest questions to evaluate your natural skills:

Do you enjoy the admin side of what it takes to keep a small business organized and running smoothly?
In your personal life, how organized are your finances and health records?
Do you file your papers neatly and always know where your passport is safely stored?

One fun way to think about this concept is to picture the backseat and trunk of your car. Is it neat-as-a-pin, or scattered, full, and (though well-intentioned and even convenient) a bit of a mess? Could you take a carload of passengers suddenly, or would you have to clear off the seats first?

As a rule-of-thumb, those who maintain a clean car are ‘administrative types,’ and those who aren’t….are the majority! So what should you do if you don’t love the thought of organizing your business’s backend?

Outsource. Find people who will work with you to keep you organized. Don’t buy more services than you need (if you find it hard to know what you need, our Aventive Academy courses can help show the way).

If you’re just starting out, think about swapping services with another freelancer in a complementary industry (like a virtual assistant, a bookkeeper, a webmaster, a social media coordinator, etc.).

There can be a lot of false guilt, and even shame, regarding the things we know we should do (and which only we can “see”) but that we have been ignoring or avoiding.

If you’re feeling this way right now, think about reaching out with a simple first step. Aventive Academy offers a quiz called Do You Have What It Takes to Start Your Own Freelance Business? You can access it here, so take a deep breath and start your journey of discovery. Along the way, you’ll learn more about how to stay focused and organized!

4. Habits For Success

Habits are a fascinating part of business (and personal) growth, but they deserve an article of their own. If you want to know how successful entrepreneurs have stayed focused, you will want to find out their core habits.

You’ll want to emphasize developing effective habits of your own too, and you’ll find an accompanying article on our website that will show you how to use habits to build focus and success.

These are the short notes from the article:

Type up a document that has your goals and your mission. You need to know what you are focusing on!
Plan your weekly schedule. If you don’t have enough clients yet, figure out how you will use your down-time to develop your business.
Maintain a daily calendar (Google Calendar works!) so you’ll stay organized when you get busier.
Start your day with a written to-do list (this is the most important step in staying focused!).

5. Visualizing the Future

Visualizing your business’ future is critical for your growth, success, and ability to stay focused day-to-day. There will be days when everything will seem to be going wrong, and you’ll have trouble remembering why you started.

On those trying days, you can take a look at the picture you’ve created of where you want to be and you’ll find the energy to carry on. (This goes back to your one-pager that lists your goals and your mission… why you do what you do and where it’s going to take you). You’ll be able to ‘stay in the game’ and break through to the other side of temporary troubles.

Without a map, you won’t get there. With a map, finding your way will be surprisingly straight-forward. And a map doesn’t mean you can’t take interesting and unexpected detours along the way! But it will remind you of the important things as you move from your present strength to the next level.

If you already know what your future looks like and you’re looking to land more clients as a freelance graphic designer, follow the link below to receive our free guide:

9 Simple Ways to Grow Your Graphic Design Business

Distractions surround us, and running a business is difficult. There are chores you never expected to have to do and unexpected twists and turns that have you scrambling. There is a time before you learn the secrets to success. Today, you’ve learned about the top 5 ways to stay focused as a freelance graphic designer.

Once you’ve shifted your attention to these critical areas, you’ll be amazed at how focused and energized you’ll become. You can start actually enjoying your freelance work instead of just trying to get by.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed right now and don’t know how you’ll get yourself focused, go back to the top and start with number one. Then look at number two again. And so on.

Remember, when you first started reading this article, you didn’t know where it was going to lead. Re-reading from the beginning can give you a greater sense of clarity and focus for how to proceed from here.

We’d love to hear your stories. Drop us a line on IG @aventiveacademy and let us know how you are focusing on your freelance graphic design business and achieving your dreams!

Reference Sources:

https://hbr.org/1983/05/the-five-stages-of-small-business-growth (Harvard Business Review)