How I made $100K as Excel Freelancer - 4 life lessons + 4 tips for you

thirty seven thousand five hundred twenty one dollars in 2019 five thousand two hundred twenty three dollars in 2020 and fifty three thousand six hundred ninety two dollars in 2021 that's how much money i made as an excel freelancer in the last three years that adds up to a total of ninety six thousand four hundred and thirty six dollars or roughly one hundred thousand dollars so in this video i want to share how i made around 100 000 as an excel freelancer i want to start off this video with three disclaimers and then we'll get into the good stuff the number one disclaimer and this is the most important one i'm not trying to make this video to show off how much money i make or anything instead i want to kind of have a conversation out there so that some of the mystery or the enigma around how the whole freelancing world works kind of goes away when i started i had a lot of this so i thought you know putting this out there is a reasonable way for people to come in with the realistic expectations and get started and enjoy the process and the second thing that i want to highlight is freelancing is not the only way i make money as you can probably guess i make money through running training programs conducting live in-house training programs for corporates selling some products a little bit of money through the youtube channel so everything adds up and at the end of the day i have enough to support my lifestyle so while freelancing could be a profitable and fruitful way for somebody to make a living for me freelancing is one of the many sources of income and the third disclaimer that i want to highlight is the hundred thousand dollars figure that i'm quoting here is for the last three years so it's not an annual income or anything because as i said freelancing is not the only way i make money so uh hundred thousand is just for last three years if i add up all the freelancing money that i made since i started my chandu.org journey in 2000 late 2009 early 2010 it would probably add up to more than four hundred thousand dollars or something like that so i don't really know exactly how much it is because we moved countries and all of that so on that note let's get into the good stuff just as every superhero has their origin story my journey into excel freelancing also has its origin story it all began on the christmas eve of 2008 and obviously it's a holiday so i was kind of lazy and randomly checked my email and then i had this email from a gentleman from denmark asking if i provide any excel services for hire i didn't know what to do i read the email and i was kind of hesitant because by then i was already running my website and sharing excel related information on the website but it was just a hobby because i have a full-time job and i was pretty happy with where i am in the job but i thought why not just give it a try so i replied back to the gentleman and then said yeah sure i will do some consulting work for you and that's how it really began [Music] that brings us to the second problem second story which is the hourly rate problem so as soon as i reply to the danish gentleman i didn't know what to charge them what the real work is so i emailed john feltier one of my mentors and a very kind of i consider him a guru so i emailed john and i asked hey john what is it that i should charge for this kind of a work and john provided me some outline and suggested that you know this is how much you can charge if you want to do consulting work but this is all back in 2008 2009 so whatever advice john gave me in those days is probably not relevant in 2022 or 23 whenever you're watching this video so i'm gonna kind of fast forward that and tell you what is an appropriate rate to charge when you are doing your freelancing work i'll first tell you how much i charge and then kind of give you the rationale behind it these days i charge anywhere between 120 200 and 50 160 us dollars per hour for consulting work if you go and search online in any of the freelancing websites like fiverr or upwork etc you will see that there is hourly rates for excel people all over the place probably as low as five dollars an hour to all the way up to 100 and 150 200 per hour so depending on your skill your prior experience and your comfort level you may want to choose an hourly rate that works best for you now let's fast forward the whole thing to 2016. this is when we as a family decided to move from india to new zealand and start life afresh here that also means i don't no longer have any of the contacts or friends or any of that network that i built in india when i was doing some of the freelancing work so i had to literally start afresh when i moved to new zealand and so i can kind of relate that if you are starting a you are trying to become a freelancer then probably you would be in the same place as i am back in 2016 when i had to start afresh in new zealand as i got here i emailed some of the people that i have previously made contacts with jeff and few other people that i knew in new zealand and i asked them hey let me know if there is any opportunities for me to do some freelancing work or contract or consulting work and that's how it kind of became another thing for me in new zealand and i started getting more and more opportunities because i reached out to people so that that is another important thing especially if you are starting your own journey then you know you need to ask people to hire you or show you an opportunity if you don't ask if you just sit in your own room and think that you know something is going to come your way you're not going to get it so that's that's the story number three and that brings us to story number four before moving to new zealand i have done no work zero work in the human resources space all my prior work experience has been in the data analytics for large corporations as well as insurance and financial services so that's really where my speciality was but after coming to new zealand one of the very first consulting engagements that i got was to do some hr reporting for a government ministry here i didn't know anything but i told them this at the interview level i said that hey i don't know much about hr but i do know a lot about data sql excel everything so i can do the work there i will probably take a little while to learn about the hr side of things and then after doing that project and then a couple of other projects i became the hr specialist so now anytime there is some sort of a deep hr related reporting scenario some of the recruiters or some of the consulting agencies they reach out to me and then say hey are you able to do this for them because i have done that so this is another valuable life lesson for everybody who is out there even if you do not have prior experience in an industry you can quickly gain it and in a span of three to five years you can become a reasonably good level of expert in that area i'm not saying world class expert i'm nowhere near that but i feel very comfortable in a situation like hr where i had no prior experience now i can get in and then solve problems using excel or power bi for them so that's the story number four my first suggestion is ask your network because when you want to become a freelancer you have all the will and thought and everything but you don't know how to get started how to get your first few projects because those are the confidence boosters so this is how i have done when obviously the initial project came to me by email but later i started enjoying the work so i would put an email out or i would reach out to some of my contacts and then say hey i'm doing this would you be interested so that's how i got work reach out to people who have professionally experienced you so maybe you're working as a data analyst in the organization so reach out to your colleagues who moved on to other organizations or your previous bosses who are now working in different scenarios in the company or somewhere else and then tell them that you are doing freelancing work now and ask them if they have got any projects for you the second suggestion that i have for you is figure out your true hourly rate let's say you you get sixty thousand dollars as salary that's your current annual salary so for sixty thousand dollars typical working situation would be you work 50 weeks per year every week you're working five days and each day you're working eight hours so that adds up to two thousand dollars and sixty thousand dollars is your salary so your hourly rate in the job would be 30 dollars per hour so if you have to replace at the bare minimum your entire salary with your consulting or freelancing money then you need to charge 30 dollars per hour but this is where things get tricky in in a job you just show up and you have the work it's not your job to find the work when you when you get into the office the work is already waiting for you whereas as a freelancer it is your job to find the work and then do it so you will have to spend a lot of time just finding the work you know writing proposals reaching out to people building on projects and all sorts of things so this is where that time you are not going to earn anything so conservatively we can estimate that maybe that is 50 of your time so in a year if you are working 2 000 hours 1000 hours you are just finding the work and the other 1000 hours you are just earning it so that means you need to earn 60 000 in 1000 hours so probably 60 dollars an hour and that's a good starting hourly rate for you now at this point you might be thinking oh sixty dollars an hour that's a little steep who is gonna pay me that much when i have no experience and this is where the third suggestion i have for you comes in which is think of your first several projects not even one two but first several projects as your learning experience okay don't think of them as this is how i'll make money think of them as these are the projects through which i'm gonna learn how to be a better freelancer a better free consultant so one way i would view these things are i'll charge them maybe 10 15 20 whatever whatever it is that i can get i'll charge them that but if i work maybe 200 hours on 10 projects essentially i am getting 200 hours of experience and i'm also getting paid for that so i'm learning and then i'm getting paid for that this is like going to college and the college is paying you a little bit of money so essentially you're going to the freelance college learning all the mistakes all the wrong things that can that you can do and in return someone is paying you money so you view the first few projects like that this is also where if you have a job then maybe doing doing freelancing on the side would be helpful like a side hustle for for a few years or few months whatever is your comfort factor and then once you have the confidence once you have built your profile once you have got everything ready that's when you can go and you know go and do freelancing full time so this is where uh using a website like upwork or fiverr would be very helpful i've got some links for that so that's the third suggestion and the fourth suggestion is if the work finds you you will be in a better position you can negotiate for a better rate you can ask them whatever you want and they will pay you for example many years ago microsoft excel team microsoft itself asked me hey are you willing to build some excel templates for us right this is really big like even today i look back and i think oh my god that was like the opportunity of my lifetime so i am i immediately said yes but even though i immediately said yes i also told them clearly what my hourly rate is in fact i kind of almost quoted them hundred percent more than what my current hourly rate at that point was and they were still willing to pay me that much simply because the dynamic there is that they are asking me for work rather than me asking for them for what so i i had the bargaining chip i said he simply said yes i will do it for you but this is what i'm charging and they were happy to pay that they got quality work i got a really good experience of working with microsoft so this is where if you build your profile as a freelancer that will put you in a better position so that the people can find you and ask you to do the work so maybe have a good website or have a youtube channel or something else where people can perceive you as as the expert in the industry for a certain topic or two and then that will put you in a better situation so i always encourage freelancers to have their own web page at the bare minimum and then start talking about the technologies that they are passionate about this way people will find you oh yes this person knows what they're talking about let's go and get them to do some of the work for us so that's my fourth practical suggestion for you hi my name is chandu and my mission is to make you awesome in your work thank you so much for watching this video and if this is your first time here a big hearty welcome to the channel i do give a free excel tips book to all my viewers so feel free to check that out the link for that is on the video description i'll catch you again somewhere else bye

Channel: Chandoo

Views: 690,535

Keywords: chandoo, chandoo.org, Excel, how to become an excel freelancer, excel freelancer, freelance data analyst, freelance data science

Id: FHEPx4KjlG8

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 21 2022