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Do you have some apprehension about your marketability? Do you wonder if you have what it takes to do freelance work?

The best part of freelancing is that there is a niche for almost every skill. If you are good the demands upon your skills will be greater than the supply you can produce. Through the use of this book, you can identify your skills and make the most of them for the greatest profit.

Why is freelancing so lucrative? Companies are outsourcing more and more work every year. It is much more cost effective for a company to outsource work to a free agent than to pay and maintain one full time employee. A company can find the right professional for a particular project rather than relying on a few employees who may not have the expertise needed to complete the project.

The people who are making money are those who market themselves and develop working relationships with companies and long term clients.

Who are these freelancers? How do they become rich? How do they find their clients?

In future chapters you will discover how to make contacts and find freelance jobs. The immediate answer is technology. The days of typewriters are gone. The days of waiting for a response from a client by postal service are gone. We live in a world of modern technology. Documents can be written, saved, and transmitted over thousands of miles in just a few short seconds. Words can reach thousands of people instantly. There is email now. In fact, you can chat online with clients on a real time basis. Information is easy to find, store, and send. That is why you can live anywhere you like as a freelancer. You are not confined to any one geographical address as long as some type of internet access is available.

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Your employees don’t want to work for a task-dispensing machine. You do not necessarily have to become best friends with your employees, but you don’t want to remain so distant as to seem unapproachable, either.

Getting to know your employees, and allowing them to get to know you, is a great way to encourage retention that will not cost you anything except a little of your time, and some common sense. Engendering a good rapport between all members of your company – whether it’s just you and one other person, or dozens or hundreds of people – will strengthen productivity and morale, and allow for a creative and welcoming environment.

How can you cultivate a rapport? The most obvious way is to respect your employees, and realize they are individual people with lives of their own. They have thoughts, opinions, and feelings, and they would prefer to share them in the workplace without fear of retaliation by management. Therefore, open lines of communication are essential (as discussed earlier in this book).

Let your employees participate in some of your company’s decision-making and policy writing processes. Give them ample opportunities to provide feedback, both face-to-face and in the form of surveys or questionnaires. Get to know them as people, and try to understand their wants and expectations of the job.

A good understanding of what attracts people to your company in the first place can also help you get to know your employees. Once you understand what they like about working for you, you can then work to enhance those qualities of your business and keep your employees satisfied.

Inform your employees of company changes whenever they are going to occur. Few people enjoy being surprised with unexpected changes that will affect the way they do their jobs, especially if the effect is negative. If you must implement changes that will impact your employees, keep them in the loop and let them know well in advance.

Finally, don’t forget that even the best employees get bored doing the same job all the time. Be willing to cross-train your employees in other areas, or introduce new business elements for them to work with. If you have multiple employees, encouraging intra-company job hopping will allow them to remain challenged enough to keep things interesting, while still providing the security of knowing they can go back to their former job duties if the new ones are not enjoyable.

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As with any professional relationship, it is important to be able to communicate effectively and feel comfortable doing so. However, first thing’s first: you need to be able to evaluate your lawyer’s work ethic and performance.

So now that you’ve hired a lawyer and you’re beginning to work together on your legal matters for your business, it’s a good time to step back to see just how effective their work has been. You will not see overnight results and should not expect to see improvements in every facet of your business; however, you should expect an improvement in organization and financial matters.

During the time the lawyer has been hired by you, what have the results been? Have you benefited by having properly drafted contracts to send out to clients? Have you been able to better keep track of your intellectual property and ensure that your company never infringes on the rights of others? Or, have you been able to draft an employee handbook with an up to date discrimination policy section? Essentially, what you want to see is that your lawyer has done what you needed. They have taken your needs and fulfilled them.

Anything less than satisfaction is grounds for searching for another lawyer.

So far, I’ve made it sound like all of the responsibility lies with the lawyer in order to make a successful working relationship. However, you play a major role in how their work turns out as well.

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As you understand from the previous chapter, there are grants available for businesses at the federal, state and local levels that can be used for a wide variety of purposes. Now we will take a more in-depth look at some of the places where you can begin your search for grants that will meet your specific needs.

The Single Best Reference For Finding Grants

This is the largest, and likely, the single-best reference on where to find grants at the federal and state levels of the grant pipeline.

This website is a portal to a database of all types of Federal programs that would benefit state and local governments, Indian tribes, public and private for-profit and non-profit groups, special groups and individuals. This database gives you information about specific grants, and then you can contact the specific office that is in charge of the grant to learn how to apply for it.

You can narrow your search by looking at their Assistance Programs listings page, or you can do a wide sweeping search of all the programs they have listed. Each topic, for example the Agricultural Research-Basic and Applied Research topic, has a corresponding program number that precedes it, which refers to the federal department that is in charge of the particular grant and the numerical order of grants. They will list the type of assistance offered, in this case project grants, and they will tell you how you can and cannot use the grant money. They will list the eligibility requirements, in this case a non-profit university or college or a non-profit research organization.

It can also give information about how to apply and what their evaluation procedure is for the applications and how they award the grant. You will also see what the deadlines are to apply, and how long it will take them to get back to you and let you know if you were awarded the grant or not.

Some grants also have requirements for after the time you have received a grant, which can include things like reports and audits. You can also learn how much money they usually award, and contacts to ask questions. They helpfully also might list related programs. These are other places where you will want to explore to see if your grant proposal will work for these other programs because they are similar to the one at which you are currently looking.