Wow, episode 20 already…!

And on this episode, we talk about How to build a freelancing business with Matt Inglot.

Matt helps freelancers to get paid quickly and more, so they can focus on growing their freelancing business!

So here it is, the Podcast with Matt Inglot

Daniel: Today, I have a very special guest. I am really excited to have him here with us, I am here with Matt Inglot, the owner, and operator of freelancetransformation.com. Freelance Transformation helps and teaches freelancers to get higher paying clients and projects to work less and get rid of the stress. Sounds good, right?

So let’s continue talking with Matt about Freelance Transformation, and how you can use a freelancing business to create freedom in your life so you can live a lifestyle with more flexibility and income as well. Matt, welcome to the show!

Matt: Thanks so much for having me, Daniel.

Daniel: Very happy to have you, Matt. I’m excited of course, we were talking before the interview, and you’re right now in Alberta Canada. So, Matt, would you please take a few minutes and tell us a little bit more about you and share a little bit of your story if you could?

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Since university, I have been a web developer, I have been running my own web agency, and it’s something that I started because I was originally working for a start-up and that startup went bankrupt. I found myself suddenly needing work, needing to support myself, and I started building websites. And it went for me building websites on my own to me eventually hiring a team, and then me deciding to get an office, and then realizing that I had actually really created a job for myself, of really kind of a 9-5 prison, instead of 9-5, it was more like 99.  And then in 2011, I rebuilt that completely, and I transitioned the business and made it in a way where I still have the agency but now it’s remote, I’m able to live where I want. I don’t have to work crazy hours, I mean, it’s more of like a 20, maybe a 30-hour a week position now. And it allows me to have the free hand to be able to shape my way, to shape my life the way that I want to shape it.

Daniel: Very nice, Matt. Tell me a little bit about what is the part of your freelancing business that you enjoy the most?

Matt: That’s a great question. I think the thing that I enjoy most is that everything I do has a positive impact on someone’s life. I’ve got my agency, and there we’ve helped a lot of our clients really grow their businesses, and to actually make a meaningful contribution there, and then get compensated accordingly, which is nice as well. And then with Freelance Transformation, it’s the same thing, we’ve been able to help people get started with freelancing, we’ve been able to help people become better freelancers, higher-earning freelancers, less stressed out freelancers, so being able to do that kind of work and being able to wake up every day knowing that you are actually having some kind of impact, and that you’re not just getting up and sitting down in front of a computer and punching keys on a keyboard because your employer tells you to – that’s incredibly rewarding.

Daniel: Yes, definitely, it gives a little bit more meaning to your freelancing business for sure and in your life of course. Matt, how or where did this idea for Freelance Transformation came from?

Matt: I started Freelance Transformation back in 2015, and I had been thinking about it longer. It basically came from my own story and from everything that I saw with the mistakes that I had made, and then talking to other freelancers I realized that a lot of them were making the same mistakes, and going down the same path and having the same sorts of problems such as suddenly finding themselves working 60 or 80 hours a week, and having the types of clients that they don’t want to have, and not really earning the kind of income that they wanted to be earning. Freelancing comes with a lot of promise of freedom and flexibility and being able to earn good money on top of that, but the realities, of course, are more complicated. You can achieve all those things but there are things that you have to do in order to make that happen, and nobody teaches that stuff in school. You don’t take a class in freelancing, so a lot of us end up learning through the school of hard knocks, and that’s tough. So, here I was in 2012-2013 traveling the world, I got to spend two months just taking a trip around Poland and Ukraine, I got to spend a month living in Croatia and rock climbing every morning with my wife – that was amazing. And I was having these experiences where a year or two before that, I was just kind of stressed out and life felt hopeless, and it was like, wow, so it IS possible to make a change, it IS possible for things to be different. And then, naturally, I just wanted to share that, I wanted to share that story, I wanted to educate others, and I also just wanted to try something new. I have a podcast called Freelance Transformation, so it was an opportunity to start podcasting, learn how to podcast, have amazing conversations of amazing people, it was a chance to build a very different kind of business than the one I had built, and I like reinventing myself, so it was a chance at something new.

Daniel: Really nice, Matt. Let me ask you something, here in Wake Up To Freedom, we try to always talk about ways that you can achieve that freedom, the one that you’re talking about, so you can travel the world, do whatever you want, and still work, let’s say, on your own terms. Now, to achieve that freedom, sometimes we decide to do maybe some drop shipping, maybe having a podcast, you know, having your own brand, affiliate marketing, and so on. And one of those ways that you achieve freedom is freelancing. Would you help me to make it more clear to our listeners or audience what freelancing means?

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. With freelancing, what’s amazing is that you can take a skill that you already have, so, let’s say you’re a web developer like me, or let’s say you’re a designer, let’s say you’re a writer, there are lots of other things that you could be doing, and instead of deciding to go and get a job as a designer at an agency or some company and having to wake up every day at 6:00 in the morning, get ready and feed the kids, and all that fun stuff, and then spend an hour commuting to work, and then sit in a cubicle all day, and then commute back, and know that this is your life, you get to go and find your own clients and use your skills in order to earn money working for them. And what’s really important about that is what that actually gives you. So, you talked in your question about freedom and about being able to make choices. Well, in order to achieve freedom in your life, or to achieve more freedom in your life, what you really want to do is, you want to give yourself more control over your situation – that’s really what it comes down to. Everything that you’ve listed, like drop shipping, affiliates, what-have-you, those are all ways of being able to do things where you have control over your situation. But there are other aspects of your life where you want control. For example, control over your schedule. The fact that I’m able to set my alarm clock eight hours from the time I go to bed is amazing. I get eight hours of sleep almost every single day of my life because I don’t have to be anywhere super early, and that’s amazing. So, that’s freedom of scheduling, there’s the freedom of being able to take time off when you need it. That’s huge. My wife and I just moved to a new house, I took a lot of time off because having a new house is a lot of work. There are all of these different dimensions along which you can have freedom. When you have your typical corporate job, there’s a lot of things that you don’t control. You have to be there for that job every single day and so on. And your salary is kind of predetermined to whatever you negotiated it to. There’s a lot of things you don’t control, whereas, with something like freelancing, you certainly get to pick what type of clients you work for, what kind of work you like doing. I did work briefly in a cubicle, and one of the things that I absolutely hated about that is my boss would come up to me and he’d give me a task, and that’s just what I’d have to do. And I’d have to do it whether or not I agreed with that task, whether I thought it was beneficial to a company, whether it was something I frankly wanted to do – it was just handed down to me. Whereas if someone comes to me and has a project that I don’t think is a good idea, I can just turn them down. Or, if it’s an existing client, I can steer them in a different direction. If I want to earn more money, I can work for more clients, or I can raise my rates. Or, if I want more time, I can work for fewer clients, and suddenly, I have more time on my hands. So, there are a lot more variables that you control just by being a freelancer. And what I love about freelancing is, it’s very easy to get into, whereas some of these other things, like selling products, I mean, I have a product that I sell, it took a long time to build that product and took a long time to market that product, versus a freelancing, where you could find a client by the end of the