Caroline's Do's and Don't-s of going Freelance

So, you’re going into work day-in, day-out, working for the wo/man, feeling a little too trapped, a little under-stimulated, and getting paid a little-to-little? Catch yourself looking over the picket fence at other jobs and seeing the brown underside of that greener grass? Wondering if shattering that glass bubble and walking out with naught but your scheming brain and your last check would just solve, well, everything?

I’m not going to say it won’t solve everything, because it might. However, the gilded mythology about walking out of a job and going freelance is frequently not the experience had by its attemptees. As someone who did this 8 years ago and ultimately landed on top, I’m more than ready to dish out a few very important lessons that I learned in the process, and would be delighted to see you succeed with a greater rate of success than I did, more quickly. I’ll open up to some of the most obvious and more lurking pitfalls of the process - things I normally wouldn’t talk about without 2-3 hours at a bar with you, and bring in 20-20 hindsight that I’m no longer embarrassed to admit now that they’re (*ahem,) totally behind me.

Caroline C. Blaker is a local web developer and founder of Petroglyph Creative, a single-person web shop in Albuquerque, NM.  She has been independent of full-time employment for 8 years and only succeeded with a lot of help and stress, but it was all worth it, she swears. Caroline is a volunteer co-Coordinator in ABQ WebGeeks, has a husband and a 3-year old son (and dogs and cats and fish,) is a volunteer for the Young Survival Coalition, and a fascination with spirituality and the paranormal. If you find out how weird she is, she probably likes you