Best Practices In Managing Your Freelance Or Professional Practice

In early 2015, a Working Trends survey among small and medium businesses found that 31% of the participants’ workforce is now composed of freelancers, compared with just 25% in 2011. This figure is expected to grow to 40% by 2018. The surveyed business owners and managers have cited efficiency as one of their reasons in shifting toward freelance workers, as opposed to hiring more regular or contractual staff. Meanwhile, professionals who leave full-time work for short-term contracts say they are earning 275% more than they were in full-time positions, so it’s a win-win situation.

Being output-focused, teams have better work and personal relationships, and are more driven toward success. This trend is helped by the availability of highly-skilled workers, as well as platforms for collaborating, in which geographic and other challenges are overcome with technology solutions.

Cloud computing, for one, has empowered businesses in better scaling and automating their enterprise-oriented applications. Coupled with enterprise mobility, both in-house and freelance workers can enjoy access to the same levels of service while working remotely, thus being productive even outside of the traditional office or full-time employment setting.

Of course, big businesses are not the only ones that reap the benefits. The cloud – in particular software-as-a-service models – have also led to emergence of new thriving markets, in which even small-scale businesses, private practices and freelance professionals can benefit from low  barriers to entry, cost-effectiveness and scalability. It’s only but reasonable: because small practices often dispense with traditionally necessary business units like the accounting, finance and IT departments, they will need to access these in the form of third-party services.

Focus on what you do best for increased productivity

Unless you are running a full-fledged ERP, you most probably won’t get all the applications required to run your business in just one platform.

For the most part, an independent practice will require a communication and collaboration platform that enables the professional or staff to work on documents and communicate effectively as a team, regardless of spatial or even time zone limitations. For this purpose, platforms like Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps for Business are a good start. Both solutions offer rich document-management platforms, with Microsoft actually providing both web-based and local-software versions of its popular Office suite. Both also come with powerful instant messaging and presence applications, which provide text messaging, voice chat and even video conferencing tools. The two solutions also have efficient calendaring systems, which provide support for scheduling even across time zones.

To keep work on track, you will need a cloud-based platform for tracking accomplishments and improving productivity through timekeeping, invoicing and workflow tracking, like Due. These can then be augmented by applications that facilitate invoicing, accounts receivable and an interface with the payment or online banking facility, so your team can get paid easily.

Small businesses and freelance practices will also need an application for managing relationships and communication with existing customers. Insightly and Zoho CRM are free customer relationship management tools for small businesses, which are good alternatives to Salesforce, perhaps the gold standard of cloud-based CRMs.

Tying together apps within the digital ecosystem

However, the question now is this: does it mean you are limited to the major players in managing your enterprise application needs? Are you limited to choosing only one application as the sole platform for managing productivity?

Perhaps the best answer to this is “no”, because there is no one-size-fits-all approach in enterprise productivity platforms. Especially if you are running a small outfit, it will make more sense to choose several platforms that “talk” with each other in building the most appropriate application ecosystem.

What’s important here is that applications can interface with each other within their respective digital ecosystems. This enables small businesses to essentially automate many of the administrative and technical aspects, enabling professionals to simply focus on core competencies.

Citing the examples above, Due efficiently interfaces with popular project management platform Basecamp to better keep track of tasks and man-hours worked. Insightly interfaces with both Google and Microsoft platforms to integrate customer data into their respective document, email and cloud storage apps.

App ecosystems work best when applications seamlessly integrate with one another, sharing data, enabling the user to access information from within a common interface.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that being a freelancer or small business owner does not mean that you cannot access enterprise-grade services to facilitate business operations. Cloud-based productivity applications are scalable and extensible, helping you manage your practice without the need for expensive software and tech savvy.