Luan Wise is a marketing consultant and author with 15 years of independent practice. Steve Folland is the founder of Being Freelance, the long-running community and podcast for people working for themselves. Ayo Abbas is a strategic marketing consultant at Abbas Marketing, specialising in the built environment sector.
In this session, all three covered the parts of going freelance or fractional that tend to get skipped before you make the jump: what to call yourself, how to find clients, how to price your work, and how to run a business when you would really rather just do the work you love.
Table of Contents
- What to call yourself (and why it matters)
- How your first clients actually find you
- Setting your rate
- The business side nobody prepares you for
- Why multiple clients is a protective strategy, not a bonus
- How AI is changing what clients expect
What to call yourself (and why it matters)
It is not vanity. The title you choose shapes how clients read you before you have said a word.
Luan Wise settled on consultant 15 years ago and stuck with it. Ayo Abbas went the same route, adding a niche descriptor (built environment) before recently dropping it to signal a shift toward broader strategic work. Steve Folland leans into freelance because that is the word the people who hire him actually search for. Marketing 101, as he put it: orientate to the customer.
Fractional is the newer addition to the mix. As Luan pointed out, it barely existed when she started. It also comes with a nuance worth understanding early: fractional arrangements can sit close enough to employment to create complications under IR35, which she returned to later. The more immediate point, from Steve, is simpler. Whatever title you choose, you have to realise what is behind it. You are a business. That reframe changes how you approach almost everything else.
How your first clients actually find you
Ask most experienced freelancers how they get work and they will say word of mouth. Which can feel circular when you are just starting out. The real question is how you build the kind of presence that gets mouths talking.
Luan’s transition was unusually smooth. Her MD suggested the shift and became her first client. A board member became her second. Her first external client came from a contact she had kept in touch with since her placement year at university, who remembered her name in a meeting over a decade later. The pattern is consistent: people who already know you are your best source of early work. Telling people what you are doing is a form of marketing.
Steve’s advice is to think about visibility before you need it. Show up consistently, whether on LinkedIn, at events, through a podcast, or through writing. Ayo has run a monthly LinkedIn Live for five years. Because she works in a specific niche, she can focus her energy on rooms where almost everyone already understands what she does. One thing that came up from all three: other freelancers and consultants are not the competition. They are often the people who end up referring you when they cannot take something on.
Setting your rate
Almost every freelancer, no matter how experienced, still feels a bit sick when they quote their rate. That is Steve’s observation after years of conversations on the Being Freelance podcast. The room clearly recognised it.
Luan started with the figure her former employer calculated as a fair day rate equivalent, based on her salary plus the real cost of employing her. She added to it. Since then she has increased her rates significantly, taking into account the type of project, how much admin it will likely involve, how much she wants the work, and what she needs to earn as a baseline. Steve’s practical addition: build rate reviews into long-term client relationships from the beginning. If you tell a client upfront that you put your rates up annually, it feels like part of the arrangement. Three years in, a sudden twenty percent increase feels like a shock.
If a client tries to negotiate you down on price, negotiate the scope instead. What can you deliver for that budget? That keeps the relationship intact without eroding your sense of what your time is worth. And as Ayo put it, drawing on advice from her own coach: if saying your rate out loud does not make you at least slightly anxious, it probably is not high enough yet.
The business side nobody prepares you for
Everyone on the panel said some version of the same thing: the actual work is the part they love. Everything around it takes real adjustment.
Contracts, scope creep, accounting software, copyright clauses in client agreements, keeping records thorough enough to survive an HMRC review. Luan is going through one right now. She described the detail required: income streams, billing arrangements, how the business operates day to day. It is a useful reminder that going freelance or fractional means running a business properly from day one.
IR35 is worth understanding early. The legislation prevents organisations from treating freelancers as employees in all but name, and it matters especially for fractional arrangements that start to resemble a role rather than a project. Luan and Steve are both ambassadors for IPSE, the organisation that advocates for independent workers and lobbies government on their behalf. On scope creep: define it clearly at the start, price by value rather than time where you can, and include a completion date. When scope expands, go back to the original brief with a revised cost. Approached factually, it does not have to be a difficult conversation.
Why multiple clients is a protective strategy, not a bonus
Steve told a story worth sitting with. When he went full-time freelance, he had a regular gig covering almost his entire income. A month into his notice period, that client restructured and the work disappeared overnight.
The lesson he took from it was not about growth. It was about exposure. The moment you have a single source of income, you are vulnerable in a way that employment rarely replicates. Multiple clients is not just a nice position to be in. It is the structure that keeps things stable when one relationship changes, which it eventually will.
How AI is changing what clients expect
The conversation on AI was honest and grounded. Steve’s approach is to know the technology well enough to speak to both what it does well and where it falls short. In his work, AI is useful for improving audio and generating transcripts. But AI-generated clips tend to look like everyone else’s clips. His positioning is as someone who knows how to use all the available tools, including AI, to create something better than a purely automated workflow would produce.
Luan’s framing was straightforward: AI does not have knowledge, experience, stories, or critical thinking. What it does is give clients another voice in the room. Consultants need to be ready when a client says they asked ChatGPT and it said something. The job is not to argue against it. It is to respond from a place of genuine expertise, understanding where the client is and what they actually need.
For anyone working independently, that expertise is the thing AI cannot replicate. The relationships, the judgement, the years of accumulated context. Going freelance or fractional means betting on that. And by the sound of this conversation, it is a bet worth taking.
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