Book Excerpt: Seeking Opportunities For Improvement

The following is an excerpt from Path Of The Freelancer: An Actionable Guide To Flourishing In Freelancing about transforming one-time transaction client projects into ongoing client engagements. 

Seeking Opportunities For Improvement (SOFI)

SOFI is a proactive drive to discover opportunities for improvement while we’re working on approved projects. It is critical for long-term success as a freelancer. It also helps increase the value provided to our clients. While a customer won’t always want to address them at the moment, when they do, we’ll have the next project lined up before we finish the current one. Business leaders also love the proactive nature of this activity.

Those who are more experienced will easily see opportunities for improvement while we’re working on an existing project. The key is not to just notice them and move on, but instead to document them. I’ve recorded these on a simple notepad, spreadsheet and in the software tool Trello. For more detailed and complex scenarios, I’ll use Airtable to make sense of the chaos.

This documentation is important for when we communicate our updates to clients of what is going on and what we recommend working on next. With the tools in place, we’ll need an effective system for how to capture and process these ideas. The framework I use is called IDEMA.

If you valued reading this book except, consider downloading the free chapter or buying the book on Amazon.