How To Make More Money As A Freelancer
Grab your journals, freelancers. Write out your ideal, realistic day rate. For me, it’s $500. Next, get out your calculators. Multiply that by 263 (365 minus weekends). If your ideal day rate is $500, and you somehow book a project every single day, that comes out to $131,500 each year. If your ideal day rate $350, that’s $92,050 each year.
These annual projections are nothing to scoff at. But if you have a nebulous idea in your brain of making a million dollars somehow, it becomes pretty clear you aren’t going to do it by working on classic day rates.
There’s a cap to how much you can make as a freelancer working on day rates. The way to make exponentially more money is to either specialize in something super niche, or pitch bigger projects.
If you can specialize in something niche, you can offer a specialist rate. Brands will gladly pay 10x-50x the going rate of a creative service if you bring a specific expertise. I saw Jeremiah Davis and Jacob Riglin do this with their video and photo work. Jeremiah’s videos were good and unique, yes, but they weren’t anything no one else was capable of doing. Yet we locked deals with brands at 20x the normal rate because he was the videographer for The Chainsmokers. The brand wanted his specialty, and happily paid for it.
The second way to make more money is to pitch bigger projects. If you’re hired on a day rate, you’re likely only one piece of someone else’s puzzle. But if you pitch the whole puzzle to a brand, the value of your offering increases tenfold. I did this firsthand with Jeremiah Davis when we rolled out TOBK Studios. By opening a production company and taking on bigger productions for brands, the value of our offering grew by 10x. Not only did we add on extra production rates for managing everything, but we also took a little slice from the day rates of each freelancer we hired. This is super common in the world of production to make sure things stay under budget.
There’s nothing wrong with making a solid living on decent day rates. It’s a very simple, highly profitable way to run your business. But if you have goals to make more than that, start getting real about where you need to angle your business in the months ahead.
