Running a freelance business is a bit like being in the kitchen. You need to have the right ingredients, in the right amounts, added at the right time, and with the right level of quality. Chefs who don’t accurately follow the recipe are often left feeling hungry, and the same thing happens in business.

I’ve now been a professional designer for 15 years, and spent the last 9 years building a successful, six-figure freelance business (yep, six-figure profit). For the last 4 years, I’ve taught other freelancers how I did it.

One of the biggest challenges my students have is that while their creative skills might be advanced, their business skills need work. It’s easy to assume that if you’re great at what you do, you’ll never be out of work. Unfortunately, success just doesn’t work that way. While there’s an entire library of things to learn about successful freelancing (and you can browse that library in The Freelancer’s Pantry), my students all seem to have one problem in common…

If you’ve been following me for more than about 5 seconds, you’ll know that the “Finding Hungry Clients” topic is one I talk about a lot. The most talented designer in the world won’t be successful unless they can find the right clients; the ones who want to hire them and want to pay them what they’re worth.

Successful freelancers intimately know their ideal clients and can identify them from a mile away. Knowing them makes it easier to connect, easier to understand how you can help, and easier to present your skills as the obvious solution to their problems. It means you don’t have to work as hard to persuade them to take you on, you’re doing work you love, being paid the $$ you dream about, and not wasting time on projects that just… don’t.

I understand how hard it can be to identify who’s right and who isn’t, so here are 5 tips to help you figure it out.

There’s something really transformative about niching and doing it well. When your spread of skills is an elaborate banquet of options, it can actually be detrimental to your business.

Firstly, niching establishes you as an expert. When you’re putting forward a proposal for consideration by a prospective client, you can usually be pretty sure that you’re not the only one. When clients have specific problems that need to be solved, being the expert who niches will immediately build trust and elevate you against your competition.

Secondly, niching really helps you improve your skills. When the majority of your workload is in one particular area, it forces you to constantly become better at your craft. The better your skills are, the higher your value, the more sought after you’ll be, and the more you can (justifiably) charge your clients.

Thirdly, niching helps you identify ideal clients by clarifying the problems you can solve and targeting those most likely to face them. By considering which industries, genders, income brackets, location, interests, and personality types are more likely to need your help, you can direct all of your marketing and networking towards the places those people tend to be. It’s also important to consider where your demographic are in their business journey.

What are your rates and how much income do your clients need to be able to pay them?

How successful do your clients already need to be to really benefit from your services?

Are you here to help start-up businesses get things rolling, or are your services and rates better suited to those already rolling in success?

A graphic designer specialising in luxury packaging would benefit more from a major e-commerce conference than a local start-up group, as start-ups likely can’t afford their services.

Niching allows you to really target your marketing without wasting time with clients who don’t fit your criteria. If you don’t already know, ask yourself what your niche is (or what you’d like it to be) and then map out exactly how that looks.

“Tasting the market” is the tapas menu of identifying your ideal clients. When you sample all the different challenges that your demographic come against, you’re better equipped to know exactly how to help.

While I don’t recommend randomly approaching potential clients and asking them to tell you all of their problems, it’s really important to do your own research and understand their challenges and their goals.

One of the secrets to making a sale is showing the client that you understand their needs, and then demonstrating exactly how you can help. This not only builds trust but also gives you an opportunity to upsell and increase the scope of work. Because you are the expert in this area, clients will often rely on you to highlight needs they may not be aware of. This then creates opportunities to either deliver more in the initial project (and, obviously, charge more), or open doors for future/ongoing work.

There are a number of ways you can conduct your own research.

Networking can be a golden ticket for freelancers because you can build trust 1-on-1 and really get to understand the needs of your demographic.

Following your ideal clients on social media (in a non-stalker-ish way) allows you to follow industry trends and gain insight into their business, especially if you keep an eye on comments left by their customers.

If you’ve got a good relationship with people in your demographic (past clients, for example), you may be able to send out surveys that directly ask the questions you have. Just be very careful about who you send surveys to because you are asking someone to give up their time for no perceived reward. Some businesses offer incentives for filling out surveys or answering questions, but only you can decide whether doing that would benefit you.

Overall, make sure you really understand the pain points of your ideal clients. If you do, you’ll be better equipped to know how to help them.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got no interest in pairing pickles with ice-cream or soggy Weet-Bix with bbq pulled pork. I’m sure you can understand why, which leads us to the next important point; try to focus on clients who share your most important values.

One of my favourite things about freelancing is getting to work with a variety of different people. I love meeting new people and learning about all the wonderful ways that we’re different. I learn from them, they learn from me, and we finish the project with a new-found respect and understanding of life outside of ourselves.

While our differences should often be celebrated, there is one area where it pays to be aligned: your core values and ethics.

As humans, we all have values we’re passionate about. This could include parenting, plant-based diets, environmental care, or religious, spiritual, and political beliefs. While securing projects and being paid well is important, there are times where protecting your core values is worth more.

The sad reality is that sometimes, clients will be difficult. They’ll either be assholes (yep, I said it) or there’ll be clashes in personality that are making things harder than they should be. You’ll start the project with love hearts in your eyes but quickly realise that maybe you should’ve said ‘thanks but no thanks’ to this one.

While it’s impossible to see every red flag before you agree to start work (if you want to get better at it, read this), if you already disagree on your most important core values, you can pretty safely assume that the project won’t run smoothly. If you’re a graphic designer who’s also a vegan, don’t agree to rebrand a chicken farm (regardless of how much they’re willing to pay). As I often say to my students, if it costs you your mental health, it’s too expensive.

When you sit down to establish who your ideal clients actually are, make sure you’re also figuring out who they aren’t. Identify which values and ethics are non-negotiable for you and use that to guide you when looking for your next project.

As the official Pricing Queen, I know a thing or two about….pricing (crazy, right). There’s enough psychology behind it to build an entire library of resources (which I have done, here). When it comes down to the nitty-gritty of securing a project, it’s often the final price that makes or breaks the sale.

I need to take a moment and make one point very clear; their budget is not your responsibility, and you should never quote as if you’re the one paying the bill. Creativity is a luxury service, not a necessity, and you should never lower your rates simply because someone can’t afford you.

Having said that, you have a responsibility to yourself and to the client, to ensure they have enough in the budget before investing much time and energy. There are always hours you’ll work that you can’t directly bill for, that’s just part of running a business. However, there can come a point where you‘ve both invested more than you need to, yet this deal is never going to go ahead. This is why, when identifying your ideal client, you need to consider their income.

Look, I get it, talking about money makes people uncomfortable. It can be personal and there are very right and wrong ways to have the conversation. The thing to remember is that this is business. In most cases, you’re not asking for someone’s personal income, you’re simply establishing whether or not this project is realistically feasible. If their budget doesn’t align with your rates, there are alternatives to discounting that can still land you the sale, but you still need to know what their budget can, realistically, allow. Sometimes, you just have to accept that this project just isn’t worth it, and part ways on good terms.

Every so often, an opportunity may arrive that’s worth more to you than just the payment. This can be a tricky situation to navigate, so make sure you understand worth vs value before making any decisions.

Know your worth, know your value, know your rates, then do the numbers on who is likely to be able to afford you. If you’re a fresh-faced creative still building your skills and portfolio, you’re going to charge less than a professional with 20 years of experience. Your ideal clients are likely to be start-ups who don’t have the need or means to hire a senior creative, making them your perfect match.

If you’re a freelancer with a strong portfolio and two decades of experience, don’t invest time into small-budget start-ups. Chase the potential clients who have already built great success because they can afford you and actually want to hire someone like you. These clients are looking for quality over price, which helps to qualify them as your ideal client.

There are any number of things that can make a project turn sour, and mismatched communication is right up there.

Consider what communication styles work for you and add that to your client-qualifying criteria. For example, if you’re someone who prefers communication in writing (e.g. email), you may prefer not to work with people who only want to talk on the phone. Effective communication is pivotal to the success of a project so if communication is mismatched from the start, the project is less likely to run smoothly.

When it comes to communication, it’s important to work with people who respect your boundaries. If your communication hours are 9:00 – 5:00 only, your ideal clients will respect that. I can’t count how many times a project has turned sour because my communication boundaries weren’t being respected. It adds additional stress, additional time, and additional work (that you’re not being compensated for). Your mental health is the most important thing and if the client is costing you that, they are not for you.