How To Quit Your Job And Freelance On Upwork Full Time

Are you looking to start freelancing, quit your job, and you're not quite sure when to do this. People are telling you “oh no, don't do this”. You don't know if you're going to have enough income, you don't know if it's safe, you're not going to be able to pay your bills. 

Well, in this video, we're going to discuss how to exactly quit your job if you're looking to start freelancing, especially on Upwork, and also other platforms. And when it's safe to do so how to get enough clients, and, generally, the structure, the strategy you can follow that is the safest bootstrap method to start a business or freelancing career. 

So why am I qualified to talk about this? I've been freelancing and running a business since 2011. I've been helping people since 2014 do the same and I’m currently working with 200 freelancers and agency owners. Here's a link to the client results page on my website. 

So let's dive right into this. What do you want to do is you want to start freelancing while you have a full-time job for 20 to 30 hours per week on top of the full-time job. So if you have a full-time job that is 40 hours per week, if it's a really, really full-time job, not like 30 hours or 25, of course, it's going to be closer to 20 hours, so that your total work hours are going to be around 60 hours a week, which is very manageable for around three to six months, before you're at risk of getting burnouts or anything like that. Now, if you're in your 30s, and you have a bunch of kids, that changes a little bit, it's a little bit tougher to get this to work, perhaps you'll want to switch to a part-time job to do this. But generally speaking, if you can work 20 to 30 hours per week on your business or freelancing career on top of the full-time job, then you should be fine. 

The way to do this is you go to Upwork and Fiverr and other freelancing platforms. But those are, you know, really the two big ones. You don't really need to be on anymore. And you create a profile based on the current, in-demand skills. Here's a link with the video on how to find those skills and how to get your first job on Upwork. You can click and watch it here after reading this article. 

So what you want to do is get those jobs, which are freelance jobs, and at a rate that’s above $25 per hour, or a fixed contract. Now, the thing with fixed contracts is it's quite complicated. So if you're a complete beginner, it's better to start with an hourly rate. And it's not really a job, we call it jobs because that's how our work calls it. But these are projects. You're working on projects with clients. You're looking to build an asset for yourself, which is your profile, which allows you to get enough projects on a monthly basis. 

So here's the interesting part: when to transition from running the business or freelancing career part-time in the job full-time to running the business or freelancing career full-time? When to transition to this full-time business ownership, there is a safe way of doing this. And there's a risky way. I don't recommend the risky way at all, the risky way is just jump into it and start business full-time now, quit your job, and reduce living expenses as much as possible so you don't go broke. That's the risky way.

The safe way is 20 to 30 hours per week on the business until you have 2 to 3 contracts running in a single month period that are at least $1,000. Once you have that track record, once you have the proof of concept, this may not even replace your full-time income yet. But once you have that proof of concept, what you do is then you switch to running a business full-time because you've proven that in 20-30 hours, you can run a business and make several thousand dollars per month and you can get clients. That means when you switch to 40 to 50 hours full-time business ownership and quit your job, you're gonna have more time to scale the same thing that has worked for you to get those $3,000. And what usually happens is people grow, they're not suddenly like “Oh, I have all this time, I'm suddenly going to perform worse.” 

Now there's another part to this, the very important second part is, what happens is not just an increase in time that you can commit to your business, but also an increase in focus. And once you have this increase in focus, you really can grow the business and focus on how to make its work at a level that's beyond a couple of thousand dollars per month. And what happens then is usually people go from three to $4,000 per month as a part-time business owner to $8,000-$15,000 per month as a full-time business owner. 

Now I do recommend that you enter an industry where you're not having to sell your time forever, that you can get staff and build an agency. And I have another video about that right here on how to get started as an agency owner. But, basically, what you need to do is replace yourself so you're not just selling your own time. While you're doing all this on Fiverr and Upwork, what you're doing is you're building a reputation. You're building a list of case studies and a track record and a bunch of credibility, video testimonials, like your profile video and so on. And what happens is people trust you more and they trust you with bigger contracts. And once you're there, then you can work on really interesting contracts, not just the beginner-friendly, easy stuff.

This is about 6 to 8 months down the road, if you do things properly. Watch the video right here, which is an Upwork algorithm video that explains how to get started in Upwork based on its search engine for jobs. So click right here, watch the video and then create your profile and you can get started with your first contract relatively soon if you follow those steps.