5 key learnings from my first year full-time freelance consulting

2024 was my first full-time year as a freelance consultant in which I learned a lot and saw some hypotheses fulfilling themselves. As I was recently inspired by the transparent posts of Johanna Geisler about starting her own company for Recruiting & Employer Branding, I'm also sharing some of my personal learnings.

These points could help those of you who are interested in, or already in the course of starting your own (freelance) business:

📢 Do all the free sales & marketing activities you can even when it seems like the pipeline is full enough.

It’s still possible to use a disclaimer based on availability. In the best case one can choose which project to work on while it’s basically impossible to make a project appear out of nowhere. (This doesn’t count for acquiring retail sales partners for consumer-packaged goods, though, where one has to be able to deliver everything ordered on-time and in-full [OTIF]).


💰Earnings are only made once the money is on your bank account.

Take conscious decisions when you take a “risky” client by evaluating whether you can afford the engagement without being paid and whether it is still worth it besides the monetary compensation e.g. as a “sales and marketing effort” with a reference project or to widen your network with recommendations.


📝 A need is not yet an economic demand that organizations are willing to pay for.

For example, most food start-ups have large needs to streamline their daily operations to be able to deliver reliably and become profitable, but they haven’t considered yet to invest externally in order to solve their problems.


🤝It is worth it to take the time to apply for state-support, e.g. “Gründungszuschuss” and the connected sparring before the full-time start.

Any fixed income stream both increases the runway and reduces worries. I always had enough liquidity readily available to avoid additional stress symptoms. In addition, the necessary creation of a business plan and financial model and the application of a “viability confirmation” help to identify (potential) issues and prepare the business much better than only thinking about it alone.


🛜 Don’t start full-time without a strong network in your market.

Almost all of my projects were incoming sales either directly from people who already knew the quality of my work or recommendations from people I’ve been working with before. Unless you have a product with an amazing value proposition and are incredibly good at sales, I wouldn’t start a business in a field where I can’t expect incoming sales or have good existing contacts for easier sales and recommendations.


❓Are you interested in starting your own business or becoming independent? If yes, what would you like to know before starting❓

In case you consider building up a food start-up or an effective purpose-driven organization, check out the linked pages where you can also download basic playbooks for these cases 😊