Freelancing on the Rise, New Fall Term, Let’s Get Creative and Tips 🎸
Hello Friends and Colleagues,
During our past few lunch breaks we have been busy reading the Upwork and Freelancers Union’s “Freelancing in America (FIA) 2019” study. It is currently the most comprehensive measure of the U.S. independent workforce. The study found that freelancing in America is reaching $1 trillion in income - nearly 5% of GDP - a notable trend for us Independent Consultants to cheer about. The FIA study also found that freelancing is becoming a long term career choice for many skilled professionals. This is a reminder for us at CoSolo to keep on building the Independent Consultant community and finding ways to help our consultants. Upwork has been conducting these surveys since 2014. They really give a good insight on the Independent Consulting market trend. There are many other fascinating findings in this study. Feel free to check out the key takeaways here.
Bottom Line: The future is bright for independent consultants 🤩.
______________________________________________________________
🙌 Accepting Applications for Fall 2019!
There is no other better time to join CoSolo than right now. We are currently accepting applications for our new Fall Term which begins mid-November. If you are serious about building your independent/boutique consulting business and you think it will be beneficial to have other fellow consultants advise and hold you accountable, consider joining us!
You can try us out risk-free for a 3-week trial. Please fill out our application here. This quick form will kickstart the application process.
See what some of our members have to say: "I met my partner at CoSolo, and we closed multiple 5 figure deals.” David Gritz, Startup Consultant
"I got a one-pager template from my team member for free, which saved me many hours of having to build it on my own.” Tyra Bremer, HR Consultant
"CoSolo offers great value. I get high-quality business coaching for less than $50 per week. You can't get that anywhere else." Michael Feyen, Organizational Psychologist If you have any questions, feel free to email tony@cosolo.co, or schedule a call with Tony here.
______________________________________________________________
🎉Live Learning Event - Webinar and Q&A with Paul Millerd
This week, we will be channeling our inner creativity. Come join us Thursday, October 24th from 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM EDT for a special webinar hosted by Paul Millerd where he will be discussing the multiple gigs that exist beyond consulting (how rogue!). Paul is a solo consultant and a course creator & writer. He also runs a virtual community for digital nomads and entrepreneurs, and hosts a weekly podcast called “Reimagine Work.” In this webinar, Paul will share stories of himself and hundreds of people he has met over the past few years who have been able to find the time, energy and motivation to venture into various creative endeavors while still working as solo consultants 💪.
Paul will cover a wide variety of topics including, but not limited to, experimenting and testing new types of creative projects, reframing this so called thing we know as “independent consulting,” and the future of work and how the Gig Economy comes into play. And of course, there will be ample time for Q&A.
Everyone’s at least a little bit creative, but if you don’t think you are, come learn how to be. To register for this event, please follow this link.
______________________________________________________ Helpful Tips from the Community In our members-only Slack community, our members engage regularly to discuss and share knowledge. Ideas, tools, resources, and the like are circulated on an ongoing basis. Below are just 3 of the many interesting items shared over the past few weeks. Hopefully they are as helpful to you as they have been for our members.
📧Optimize Your Cold Email Deliverability: This is a very helpful article if you send a lot of emails or use a cold email campaign. @tony claims it’s gold. After reading it, he found out that his email is flagged or black listed! Too bad he didn’t have this resource shared with him sooner!
📅Scheduling Tool: Multiple members expressed discontent with Calendly as it is a bit awkward from a client’s point of view (“Please pick a time based on my availability”). Additionally, its links are often blocked by email servers, its use cases are very limited, it doesn’t work if clients want to dial-in or participate in a webinar, and if travel is required for a meeting, it is not made clear to the client (if you are a devoted Calendly user, sorry for the bashing 🤭). However, after some more detailed discussion, a great alternative came up. Hubspot has a free scheduling component that integrates with multiple calendars. It is prefered over Calendly by multiple CoSolo members. Do you have any valuable input about scheduling software? Join the convo!
💰Accounting Software: A new accounting software called WaveApps was just brought to CoSolo’s attention. One member was trying to create recurring invoicing for his clients and wanted some input on people’s preferred software. WaveApps is super easy as the UI is great and there is no monthly fee. It’s definitely worth looking into as it is a cheaper alternative to Freshbooks and Quickbooks.