The tagline for my business is “Take control of your life and start earning money now as a corporate freelancer or consultant.”
This raises some obvious questions: What is a freelancer? What is a consultant?
Glad you asked.
I’ve been calling myself a freelancer and a consultant off and on, but mostly on, since 1992. I’ve never been absolutely certain what to call myself and have been in a mild identity crisis all along.
So today I formally looked up the terms, along with a few others, on the internet, the source of all knowledge.
I found out that:
A freelancer is generally defined as someone who sells services to employers without long-term commitments.
A consultant is an experienced individual trained to analyze and advise clients.
Then there is the independent contractor, who follows an independent trade, business or profession and provides goods or services.
The entrepreneur is someone who has possession of a new enterprise, venture or idea or alternatively, a person who organizes, operates and assumes risk for a business venture.
And then the solopreneur, short for solo entrepreneur.
Over the years I’ve grappled with which title I should use for my own services. I started with freelancer, a term that is often associated with writers and one that I’ve envied since childhood. (It never occurred to me when I was young that adults sometimes associate the concept with unsteady income since to me it signified adventure and creativity. Like a magazine flying me to London to interview the Beetles.)
Then I gradually shifted to editorial consultant, which seemed more prestigious than freelancer and suggested problem solving, whether oriented towards the writing or the marketing aspects of assignments. I like how consultant suggests expertise, in contrast to freelancer, which connotes impermanence.
Now as I develop information resources for “all of the above,” I am somewhat migrating to the label solopro. I mean it as a combination of solo and professional. I like it because as a new, untested word, it comes with less baggage.
On the flip side, no one is using the term. I continue to supplement solopro with the terms freelancer and consultant because very, very few people search for solopro on Google.
This doesn’t even begin to address the problem I face when pressed to label my position within my “organization,” such as when I add myself to mailing lists for trade journals and office-supply catalogs.
As a one-person business working from a home office, I am commanded to click on a title from among those listed. President and CEO seem a bit pretentious. Owner isn’t quite right since I don’t “own” much of anything except a PC, a large mug holding pens and some intellectual property of indeterminate monetary value. Other functional titles, such as marketer or writer, somewhat describe what I do all day but do not indicate my role in the organization.
There’s sole proprietor, but that’s more of a tax-return title than a working title.
Or principal. It means chief or head. Kind of bland but not bad. Except that it revives my fear of the legendary spanking machine in the school office.
When we are self-employed, even the little decisions turn out to be more complex than we had expected. So I ask, What do you call yourself?
Originally posted 1-19-10
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