One Year In: What I Can and Can’t Say About Full-Time Freelancing

I consider November 2018 my unofficial start to working independently full-time. Admittedly, it’s fuzzy dating — there was no one ribbon-cutting moment, or a time when the first dollar bill was exchanged. Here’s what I’ve learned so far, and what the universe has yet to reveal to me. 

I can’t say how to get started.

My quest to self-employment was more “organic,” to put it nicely. “Mutant” may be more accurate.

I was unexpectedly let go from my PhD program at the end of the 2018 school year, after which came a summer of scrambling. I looked for regular employment, but couldn’t find a role that would offer me challenges commensurate to the abilities I picked up in grad school. Many of the roles offered the same responsibilities that had caused me to seek a greater challenge in the first place, and at the same pay rate. 

If an entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down, then I am someone who got pushed off a cliff, grabbed a tree root on the way down, and decided to build a plane because he didn’t see anywhere worth landing. This was a difficult transition because, even though I had major reservations about academia, I did appreciate the autonomy and intellectual challenge it offered. 

If an entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down, then I am someone who got pushed off a cliff, grabbed a tree root on the way down, and decided to build a plane because he didn’t see anywhere worth landing. 

I just wasn’t getting that kind of challenge at work, which is why I started the blog so many years ago as a clueless, cubicle-dwelling rookie analyst. Plot twist: the blog became more than a hobby. 

I can say to start a blog. 

To paraphrase the Chinese proverb, the best time to start a blog is before you need to make a career change. Blog posts are like making investments in your career: they seem small, trivial, something you’ll never see again. But look years later and they’ve grown, given you super powers. 

Don’t pay attention to the Blogging Rockstars of the world. They have millions of views of their YouTube videos, with awesome cuts and fades. But you never know what’s going on behind the scenes. I mention Siraj Raval not to pile onto his shaming committee but to offer a case study in the perils of moving too quickly as a content creator. Raval inspired tens of thousands to learn about data science and AI, but was found to have plagiarized a research paper and lifted lots of content for his blog with little to no attribution. 

So, don’t worry about your subscriber count or social media stats. Don’t even worry too much about your “editorial calendar” or making sure you get X posts out a week. If it’s quality content, it will get noticed.

For example, the client I am most proud of working with approached me based on my YouTube channel. I only have a couple of hundred subscribers, but that didn’t matter to this highly sophisticated client who knew quality when they saw it. And that’s the type of client you want anyway — the one that can look through the “vanity metrics” to the core value you are offering. Which brings me to my next point…

I can’t say whether I am a consultant or a trainer.

By and large my client work comes from training. I love training: it’s intrinsically fulfilling, and clients tend to be more educated about what you do and more grateful for the value you provide. That said, everyone knows the cliche: “Those who can’t do, teach.” 

This sentiment falls apart quickly under scrutiny — it assumes that there are no market signals for evaluating the effectiveness of educators, and that there are no benefits to specializing in education. Of course there are — proper training keeps companies operating, and we all know someone who is technically brilliant but lacks the empathy or creativity to share that knowledge. 

To put the final kibosh on this cliche, I’ll throw out another cliche: “Catch a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.“

A-ha! Walking into an organization with that day’s fresh catch of data is of short-term value. On the other hand, showing that organization how to think about data, how to design for it — this becomes the long-term win. If it’s better to teach a man to fish than to catch him a fish, shouldn’t educators get paid more than consultants?  

If it’s better to teach a man to fish than to catch him a fish, shouldn’t educators get paid more than consultants?

A focus of my work over the past year has been building blended learning assets to teach professionals about data analytics. While the work has been done with coding bootcamps and technical education platforms, every organization should be preparing for what McKinsey has called the analytics academy.

This is a bigger job than coming in and building that one report or analyzing that one dataset. It’s about designing the education that each organization’s employees need to stay skilled in a rapidly-moving economy. Those who can teach, have economic incentive to do so.

So, am I a consultant or a trainer? Given what I’ve just written, I’m leaning hard toward the latter. It’s a sentiment that changed after I even started writing this post… 

I can say that it’s a bumpy ride. 

Everything you hear about being self-employed is true, but it doesn’t really sink in until you experience it yourself. 

I go through regular panics of not having enough work. Even at a paid salary job, it was hard for me just to relax when there was no work. I am someone who needs to be productive at any given moment. All the more so when my income has become so intrinsically tied to my own personal efforts.

It is a bumpy ride. Even being a lean, minimalist “company of one,” there is enough uncertainty for business to change on a dime. I call that sinking feeling of several turns of bad breaks as a freelancer, “entrepreneurial Jenga.” Each time, however, the ship has righted itself. Not only that, but the work becomes stronger from the disorder, a la Nassim Taleb’s concept of antifragility. 

As noted before, one of the “bumpiest roads” I’ve traveled yet is what exactly I’m providing with my business. As mentioned, I never set out with a clear plan or objective — it was all “organic/mutant.” Fortunately, I’ve had the help of some great guides and mentors to craft the path forward. That said, “Consultant or trainer?” isn’t the only eternal debate….

I can’t say how Taylor Swift did it.

By that I wonder, how did she rebrand from doing only country music? 

One of the more interesting conundrums of digital life is the paper trail we leave behind us. This usually has extremely negative connotations, such as finding indecent former tweets or Instagram photos. But I have found that even in the totally up-and-up world of data blogging, a paper trail can weigh you down.

If you’ve read the blog for a while you’ll know one of its eternal questions has been: “Is this an Excel blog?” Now the question takes on new life: “Is this an Excel professional?”

I will never pitch Excel from my toolkit, despite the mongerings of some of my data comrades. That said, Excel is only one tool in my toolkit: my skills range from R and Python, to inferential statistics, to research design and methods, to professional development. Regardless, my “claim to fame” remains Excel. 

I have to wonder: how did Taylor do it? Of course, I don’t have hoards of agents and the press on my side. But still, I hold Taylor’s relationship with country music as the relationship I hope to have with Excel: as just one thing I do, and something I’ve evolved from. 

I can say that I still have a long way to go…

Don’t we all? … So I’ll move to the next one:

I can say that I am proud of what I’ve done. 

I am really not one to toot my horn, but if I’m going to list my goals, it’s only fair to list my accomplishments. In my first year of working solo I’ve:

• Wrote the lion’s share of a data analytics curriculum
• Gave my first WordCamp talk
• Developed a course on a highly technical subject for a data science training platform
• Developed assets for synchronous data science and data analytics courses
• Delivered a workshop on R programming at my alma mater
• Launched business analytics courses on SQL and R for a leading publisher
• Gave my first full meetup talk
• Launched a new trade name and branding kit for my business: Stringfest Analytics

So, what’s on for Year 2? I’m looking forward to creating even more new and exciting programs with my clients, and continuing to hone my branding and content strategy. I also plan to develop more talks, and you should see quite an facelift on the blog very soon. 

How long will my freelance tenure go? I’ll never say never to regular employment, but I will say that the sense of personal achievement, domain expertise, and community-building that this year has brought will be difficult to match. 

Thanks for taking this winding road with me, by the way.