If employed experts do all the work that a defined market needs done, what are bosses even for? If you ask employees, answers will typically span planning, financing, wearing a suit, and inane busy work that has to do with filling out paperwork, etc.
Then, you get self-employed, and it turns out that being able to do your craft is not enough. It’s enough if your only goal is to produce something and put it on a shelf. Turning your skillset into actual money requires at least three completely different additional skill sets.
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A need is not the same thing as a want. All of the world’s smokers could buy nicotine gum, but most don’t want to. Turning needs into wants can roughly be called marketing.
A want is not the same as demand. If I want to buy a Tesla but don’t have the means to, I’m not generating demand. Turning wants into demand is, again, roughly, sales.
And administration… makes the world go round.You can fight me on this, but Uber is a triumph of innovation in the application of legal code. The tech guys would have gotten stuck long ago if the legal team wasn’t able to clear a way for them.**
It varies with industry, but most self-employed people have up to a third of their week as billable hours. So 2/3 of the work, or more, is reaching clients and making sure they pay. Turns out, the majority of the work is not what we would have called “work” while employed. Ouch.**
So, what’s the answer to this?
Whatever your craft or field of expertise is, its value is not easy to show off unless you deliberately learn how to do that.
In the podcast episode launched last Friday, Filip Zolota and I talked about that, as well as how to know if your pricing is, despite everything, working for you.