I had a call the other day from an old friend who has decided to make the move and leave a long time position with a State department for a new freelancing role. Basically he will contract the majority of his time to one organisation and pick up smaller contracts opportunistically, good move.

Anyway he rang for some advice on resources to help set up his business. After sending the email I decided I should share these resources here on the eco2oh blog for any extension people who might consider starting thier own consultancy or start doing some NRM freelancing. Good luck if you have decided to make the move.

Some Resources

Freelance Switch
A great source of strategy and tactic on becoming a freelancer often quite tech based but you can ignore those parts. Definitely on the coal face regarding new tools and applications
http://freelanceswitch.com/

Billing Manager

From the folks who make Quickbooks a free online invoicing system you can have the system email invoice or print them and post them yourself. They even have a fee for service option to allow you to accept credit card payments

http://billingmanager.intuit.com/billing/welcome.url

Skype

This will save you a bucket load on your most common phone calls especially when you get your colleagues on Skype too (that makes your calls free), you can purchase Skype credit to call landlines or mobiles (for STD telstra or a mobile cap can be competitive). You can get a Skype in number (a capital city number) for about $40 / year that allows people to call a brisbane number and you can take it on your laptop or computer wherever you are, you can also get an extension like hot recorder to record calls (it’s easier then taking notes). Skype is great for doing conference calls to a combo of skype users and landlines. Best of all Skype is free to downoad and free to call any other skype user.
www.skype.com

iGoogle

Google has a swag of free tools so get a gMail account (almost unlimited storage space) use your iGoogle page or google reader to subscribe to blog feeds like freelanceswitch.com and betterburnett.com, use google docs to share collaborative documents online, get a google calendar and keep it on your iGoogle page

Some Advice

• Do invoicing on time! So important putting this off for a couple of days can cost you big bucks
• BP Mastercard saves 10% on fuel get one before you resign
• Don’t print anything you can avoid printing it’s bloody expensive
• Do lot’s of research before buying a printer there are 3 variable (cost of the printer, cost of the cartridges, cost per copy) cost per copy is the one to focus on it is very easy to get lured into buying a cheap printer with very expensive cartridges or cartridges that only do a small number of copies
• Check out http://www.gettingthingsdone.com/ for incredibly simple but effective strategies for managing your time and info. Wish I knew about this 2,3,4,5 years ago I just got the book and audio book
• Think about an Apple computer if you don’t have a computer already they are designed with freelancers in mind
• Get yourself out there get a website (preferably a wordpress blog), a twitter account, a flickr account, a facebook profile, etc interlink them all and use them as your online portfolio
• Think like the boss and not the employee (I still find this tricky)