Starting a freelance business isn’t easy. In fact, it’s one of the hardest things many of us will do during our careers. What makes it especially difficult is knowing where to begin when you don’t have any experience.

When it comes to the numbers, how do you know which areas you should be focusing on and what will actually make a difference to your business moving forwards?

Based on my experience mentoring freelancers, I’ve found that the same things tend to come up time and time again. So in this blog post, I thought I’d run through the main things that I’d recommend all service-based business owners make a habit of tracking as early on in their freelance journeys as possible.

It’s a good idea to carry out a business review whenever you feel as though you need to take a step back and reassess your work, goals and priorities.

Perhaps your personal circumstances have changed and you want something different from your business. Or maybe you’ve started offering a new service and would like to take your business in a whole new direction. Either way, by analysing your business’s performance, you can establish exactly where you’re at and what you need to do to get to where you want to be. It’s all about developing the kind of business that aligns with your values and aspirations.

I would recommend carrying out a business review at least once a year, but many freelancers have told me it’s one of those tasks they often end up putting off, whether that’s due to a lack of time, feeling overwhelmed or simply not knowing where to start. In this post, I’ll be looking at all the reasons why you should make carrying out a yearly business review a priority.

If you were in employment, you’d most likely be paying into a pension and your employer would be contributing on your behalf too. But what about saving for retirement as a freelancer? Planning for the future is one of those topics a lot of us shy away from, particularly in the early years. In fact, it’s something many of us don’t think about until it’s too late.

If we ever want to be able to retire, we need to have a source of income that doesn’t require us to sell our time. And the best way to go about this varies from person to person.

In this post, I’ll be looking at two options for saving for the future: contributing to a pension and investing in property.