Being passionate about your business nowadays, in my opinion, is essential! To continue doing something day after day and year after year, you must love what you are doing. Following Philip’s observation, I would include collecting money among our “tasks.” Not always simple, but doable. In the ten years I’ve been doing it, I’ve been fortunate to have only had one non-paying client. It was insufficient to sue them in court. But I won’t conduct business with them ever again. Live and learn, I suppose.

Seriously thanks for Sharing such useful information with us. I have tried so hard to achieve success in the affiliate marketing field and I’m so frustrated with that. But in the end, it turns another failure for me.

Thanks to your article now I know what should I do, to establish a stable business. Your post’s like a life changer for me. And I mean that. Keep posting like that. 🙂

I am taking the next step to start my online business. I didn’t know it was so easy!

For over a decade now I have been providing a website development and design service to loads of different clients across the globe. I started it as a hobby at first as I was inexperienced in business and I was working full time in a bar at the time.

One of my first lessons though was to use a contract and ask for a 50% deposit. I got a rather big job via an acquaintance from the bar I worked in for a Hip Hop Music and Merch Website. I spent 2 to 3 weeks building it, coding it and testing it. One of the features it had to have was for the sites visitors ability to upload a video to the site and post it automatically to the site owners YouTube channel.

I launched the site and was really happy with the result, Everything worked in all the browsers and the upload YouTube feature was really easy and simple enough so the time had come to get paid. I asked my friend to let them know and after a few days I was told they would not pay my the two grand citing that the YT upload feature was not simple enough. Lesson Learned there methinks. Funnily though the site was all under my control, Domain and Hosting. I took down the site and put up a simple page that read: Site not available to to none payment of debt or something similar. And the logo of the site was called: Pay Ur Dets TV. 😉

That site is long gone now but it was funny at the time, will have to look it up on the wayback machine. Another lesson learned is never Assume, always read the small print and that the Status Quo can change dramatically, especially when it involves the law and banking. This lesson was learned this week incidentally.

Last year I was a Ltd company and had been for quite some time. However work had died down somewhat (I like to blame this Brexit debacle, had to get that in somewhere Erik ) nearly 25% from the previous year. My accountant suggested that I should take the company off companies house and continue as just a freelancer. I dully paid my £12.99 and struck the company off the Companies house register.

At the time I had a free online business bank account from Starling Bank (The UK’s best bank it seems ). Last Tuesday while having a business lunch and with no warning they froze my account with a nice amount of funds in it. You can imagine my horror not being able to pay my tab off (Of course I did with my personal account). I assumed that I could still continue to use it as a freelancer, Of course I know much better now. It seems that when you dissolve a company here in the UK all assets and funds automatically become the property of The Crown.

Two quite expensive lessons learned there I am sure you would agree Erik. All that said though I still love being an entrepreneur and a freelancer and although people will be excited to start on this journey they need to realize that its not a straight road and expect bumps while on the journey. My advice is to simply Hurry Up and Fail.

Best,

Phill