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If you are a freelancer, contractor, consultant, or coach, then welcome home. The Freelance CEO’s podcast is for you. My name is Matt Casner, and each week I’ll take you behind the scenes and share proven tactics and strategies for turning your valuable skills and talents into a purposeful and profitable business. Are you ready to go? Let’s get started. I’m so glad you’re here, and hopefully this will be the first of many times where we’ll be able to get together. I want to just basically use this first episode to let you get to know me a little bit, for me to share a little bit my background, and then tell you about what you can expect here in the future. Now, a little background about myself. I’ve been freelancing now for well over 20 years.
I got started as a high school student doing Freelance jobs for friends and family. At the time, I really didn’t even know they were Freelance jobs. I was just trying to get work and do work and share the gifts and talents that I had with others. Didn’t become a full-time freelancer until much later in life. Back in my my thirties, I stepped out, and that’s been a journey. I’ve been a full-time freelancer now for about 15 years, and I have loved every minute of it. Not to say that there hasn’t been some struggles or some lessons to learn along the way. There certainly have, in fact, I have stubbed my toe proverbially more than I would probably care to admit. But the journey that I’ve been on really is what has made me what I am as a freelancer.
So this is just an opportunity for me, someone who’s been in the trenches, who has built a business where there wasn’t one and am succeeding. I have a, a family of four, and we are paying the bills and everybody has clothes, and everybody has food, and we take vacations and we do the things that you should do as a person, as a professional, as a family. And I am excited because there’s a lot of things that I have learned, and I want to share them with you. I want to kind of let you take a peak inside my mind, and that way you can benefit from my experiences, my struggles, the hard lessons that I’ve learned. About a year ago,
I started thinking as I was doing some planning for the future and, and sitting down and just trying to understand what the next five and 10 years would look like for my Freelance business. And I’ve achieved a lot of things that I’m very, very proud of and just wanted to continue moving forward. And so setting goals is something that I believe in, something that I,
I I love to do. And I was kinda at a crossroads. I had to make a decision. Did I want to grow my Freelance business business, make it bigger with more responsibility or not? And I, if you’re like me, you know, becoming a freelancer, we can become freelancers for, for a lot of different reasons. But for me,
it’s so that number one, that I can have the freedom to, to do the work that I want to do for the clients that I want to work for, and enjoy the freedom and the, the joy that comes with owning your own business. And maybe you’re like me, I’m not sure, but that’s something that I didn’t want to lose. I,
I love the freedom. I love my family. I love spending time with them, and there are lots of things that I am passionate about, and honestly, I don’t want to give less to them as I get older. I just want to give more. So I, I need to find a way to, to, to express and grow my Freelance career, but still be able to enjoy the life as a freelancer. And as I started thinking about that, I started thinking about as I, as I was a kid and I was in college and even as a young professional who had graduated. And I was thinking back to that time, and, and I, I really didn’t know at that time that Freelance was something that I wanted to do.
I knew I loved helping people. I knew I loved serving people, and I loved the ability of, of going out and, and doing things on my own and figuring things out. But the word Freelance really wasn’t my vocabulary back then. But at the same time, I was still trying to figure out a lot of small business issues. If you’re a freelancer, you’re not just sitting in a cubicle doing the work. You’re, you’re selling the work and you’re budgeting and you’re, and you’re, and you’re providing customer service and, and you’re, you’re collecting the, the money from your customers and your, your, you know, there’s lots of other things with taxes and vacation and, and benefits and stuff like that that you have to worry about.
And, you know, back when I was younger, I was trying to figure all this stuff out, and I really didn’t have a good resource. I really didn’t have a friend or anyone that was, that was already freelancing that I could kind of, you know, go up to and say, Hey, let me buy you a cup of coffee.
I’ve got a list of questions and some things that I’m really trying to work through, and I could really use some advice. I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t have anybody in my circle of influence that I could tap on and get some wisdom from. So I pondered on that for quite a little while. And, you know, the realization hit me that, you know what, I’ve been very blessed in what I have been able to achieve as a freelancer. I’ve, I’ve been able to grow and been able to collect a, a fabulous list of clients that I just absolutely love serving. And I, I look back and I think, you know, if, if I could have gone back in time and spent a few moments with my younger self and tell him and explain to him what I have learned over the course of this last 20 years, man, how valuable would that be? So I just took that as, as a, as a sign that my next step as a freelancer is, is to continue growing my business. I don’t wanna stop doing that, but I wanna see if I can help some others.
I wanna see if there are any others that were out there that were like me when I was in college, when I was a young professional sitting in my cubicle looking at four walls going, man, could I do it? Could I, could I support myself? Could I find enough clients? Would it work?
And you know what, guys? You can do it. You just need to know how, and you need to have the confidence to go out there and do it. So what more can you expect from the podcast? Well, that’s a great question. What I want to do is I want to be able to share with you questions that come into me as a Freelance coach, and there are a lot of them that people, people deal with every day. And I wanna provide some insight, provide some, some resources. I wanna share with you tips and tricks that I’ve learned as a freelancer to increase productivity, to increase your bottom line tips in estimating and pricing and, and everything that goes into the, the Freelance lifestyle. I even wanna show you how to have fun as a freelancer.
It’s not, shouldn’t be a drudge, it shouldn’t be working all the time. As a freelancer, I wanna show you how to have fun, how to turn the computer off, turn the cell phone off, and go do something that you love. That’s, that’s part of it too. I’m gonna have guest speakers and other freelancers and a variety of different disciplines, and they’ll be sharing their, their insights and their experiences and their tips. And it’s just going to make everybody smarter and wiser, because we’re gonna be able to, to grow on the shoulders of all these great freelancing folks. So I am just, I’m excited that you’re here. I’m excited for the days and months and Lord willing gears to come. But every great journey requires a first step.
And so this is step number one.