FB Live Session: Jason Dulay's Freelancing Journey
April 25, 2017
by Jason Dulay
Jason is the founder and CEO of Work from Home Roadmap and VA Bootcamp. Aside from teaching Filipinos how to succeed working from home, he likes traveling, playing board games, and drinking coffee.
Watch this video as Jason Dulay narrates his own freelancing journey.
Find out why he resigned from his 50k a month salary in a BPO and how he started to learn about freelancing. You'll also know how he transitioned from his call center job to a freelancer.
Discover Jason's habits, best practices, and work attitude.
You guys right now who are watching you guys are really lucky because there are Facebook groups, like Work at Home Pinoys. There are free courses like my own free course and paid courses. I have paid courses as well to help you out because at that time I have to learn everything on my own. So if you talk with the senior freelancers who've been freelancing for like five years or more they're gonna tell you that you guys are lucky because you have all these resources.
When I found out about freelancing it was really difficult. Right now I know web design, I know SEO, I know social media, I know all these other skills but at the time I didn't know them. I had to start from scratch and I started doing general work at that time.
I saw these some of these clients are looking for web design work so that's when I started learning web design and I learned about SEO and all these other things so it was just one thing after another. I didn't know initially where I would end up like right now I do Facebook Ads a lot. I do landing page optimization and sales funnel optimization but at the time when I first started I was still doing data entry stuffs.
So it's one step at a time. I noticed that a lot of the newbies, a lot of you guys want to get into this, want to learn how to do Amazon stuff right away and some people can learn and jump right in they can say they're good enough to learn it but for most people, they have to go one step at a time.
Don't worry if you see all these people earning hundreds of thousands of pesos a month or 50,000 pesos a month, you'll get there. May take some years but if you hang in you can also get there.
The best thing about my time in the US is that I interacted with so many different freelancers and I also interacted with clients and I learned from freelancers because in the Philippines we didn't have the freelancing community yet.
I saw how they worked and a lot of these freelancers were top-earning freelancers. I saw their work ethic, their discipline. I saw how they did their business and that's when I really learned how to become a top earning freelancer. I learned the secret to earning really like a lot of money through freelancing.
You have the opportunity to learn from top freelancers well I have my courses that's where I teach more I do provide some help sometimes but like in the work at home Pinoys group there are so many people that you can learn from so that's another advantage that you guys have right now that I didn't have at the time.
Carried with me the same habits, the same business practices and the same attitude that I learned from the
freelancers in the US and that's basically how I got to where I am today.
When I charge my clients' different rates they still find it very affordable. in that five hundred dollars a month I usually just spend maybe four hours a day at first working for them and eventually it becomes like two hours a day and one hour a day and I can get multiple clients so it's pretty easy to scale up once you learn you learn the secrets. Basically, I'd say it's pretty easy to scale up and earn a lot of money in a short period of time.
Jason Dulay's Journey to Freelancing
A graduate of Accountancy but worked in a call center out of college for 6 or 7 years.
He worked at Intellicare, now Convergys, as outbound sales agent, then as customer service and eventually as a trainer to call center agents to manage Quickbooks. Became Team Manager. Transferred to JPMorgan Chase.
By the time he quit he was earning around 50,000 pesos a month
He quit work for a lot of reasons;
He hates the night shift. After few years, working in a night shift takes your toll on your body. You're tired a lot you don't get proper sleep because you're sleeping during the daytime and going to work at night and he couldn't take that anymore.
He felt that he was getting underpaid, although he was performing better than all others. He wasn't getting promotions because of office politics.
Managerial positions in BPO are very stressful. Handling a lot of people is stressful if something went wrong he will be responsible for that.
He didn't like working in an environment where other people were controlling him, he didn't have his own freedom and independence.
Started to learn about freelancing, even when he was still in BPO. During the weekends and after his shift from work, he will do freelancing.
Learned about freelancing in a Cebu online forum, istorya.net, he saw ad about online jobs and got curious. No other information can be found on the net so he had to learn everything on his own, from scratch.
Decided to quit his call center job and went to Singapore, worked there for a year. He didn't like it. It was too stressful for him.
Worked in the States for a few months. He realized that after you go into freelancing, there's so much freedom and there are so many benefits, that if you try going back to work in an office environment it won't feel right and he can't handle it so he quit.
Built up his freelancing business in the States and learned from other freelancers. Adapted the same habits and business practices and attitude that he learned from these freelancers in the US when he came back to the Philippines.
Q&A Highlights
How to get started in freelancing?
Check the FreeVAcourse.com to get the free guide on how to get started freelancing as a virtual assistant.
How did you find out about freelancing and what made you decide to make the transition?
I found out about freelancing just through online forums. I've always been an internet addict. And on a Cebu forum they were people talking about freelancing and online work and I found out this Odesk thing and explored it and that's how I found out about freelancing.
And what made you decide to make the transition? So I didn't really decide on making the transition right away. I just planned for it to be like part-time on the side, extra income. I just realized one day that there's no reason for me to work in an office. And a lot of you may realize that as well if you're doing both at the same time. Try to think, how much time are you spending in the office? How much are you earning from that? How stressful it is? And if you're freelancing you can compare that and say how much time I am spending freelancing? How stressful is freelancing and do I really need to be working in an office? What if I quit my job and did freelancing full-time? So that's a decision that a lot of you will have to make on your own.
When is the best time to quit your job in the corporate world and start focusing on freelancing?
So there are benefits of working in the corporate world, like in my case, I was already earning a lot in the call center as a manager. Now that I'm aware of the benefits of freelancing I'd say the time to quit is when you've really made the decision to freelance and you know what you want to focus on as a freelancer then you can you can quit the corporate world and start focusing on freelancing.
There are probably different scenarios, okay. If you're earning twenty thousand pesos a month or below in the corporate world then I'd say you should start freelancing as soon as possible because it's very very easy to hit 20,000 pesos a month doing freelancing. The time you should quit then should be when you have some savings. You just save some money I'd say at least 50,000 pesos as an emergency fund before you quit your job and you focus full-time on freelancing because it may take time for you to really figure out how freelancing can work for you and that 50,000 pesos is like a buffer and it could be less, it could be more depending on how much you spend every month. You should have that buffer of like three months worth of expenses just to make sure because you will go through a learning process. You won't immediately become very good right away and unlike in the corporate environment where you have trainers to guide you, you'll be learning on your own. So it can take time so that you should just have that emergency buffer for a while and then once you pass through the learning process which could take like one month, two months then 20,000, 30,000 pesos is very easy to hit.
If you're earning like 50,000 and above then you might not be able to quit right away because of how much you're turning in the corporate were like if you're earning 50 to a hundred thousand then it's a bit harder. So that's when you would compare like maybe you're doing freelancing on the side and that's when you would compare the two corporate world versus freelancing and weigh the pros and cons.
When you're making that decision of quitting your job and going into something like freelancing one mindset that you can take is the best case and worst case scenario. The worst case scenario, you can always go back to your original job, original workplace. The best case scenario, if you quit your job and you go into freelancing. how much can you earn? What are the benefits?The best case scenario is you can realistically, in a few years or in like three four or five years, you can make hundred thousand pesos a month and you'll be working at home. You have the freedom of time, freedom of work, what work you want to do. If you compare risks and benefits there are so many benefits to quitting and going into freelancing than staying in the corporate world.
What are your success habits? How do you push through your worst aside from looking back at your goals?
I think I can combine these two questions into one answer. So I'm just going to give you one success habit and that's discipline. One of the most common I'd say trait that is holding the students back from becoming the best version of themselves is lack of discipline. It really is discipline that will hold you back. It really is discipline that will make you succeed. So if right now you're wondering what can you do to best assure your success start building your discipline and that can be done in many ways.
Discipline is continuing to do things even when you don't have the motivation. Even when you're not looking at your goals, even when you feel tired that's what discipline is. So if you feel tired you don't want to go to the gym but you still do that's building discipline. If you can control your spending habit that's building discipline and it's important because the practices
you build will affect your freelancing career. In freelancing, you have so much freedom. you have so much freedom and there are days when you feel like not applying to work, not going to work, that's a really nice benefit of freelancing. You have that freedom but it can also be a con. It can also be the reason why you fail because there's so much freedom. If you're not disciplined then you're just going to not go to work. You're going to play DotA all day and not do anything but with discipline you will still do the things you need to do even when you don't feel like it.
How do you handle stress?
Personally, I'm the kind of person that can really focus on getting things done when I feel stressed. I just focus on the work. I just do the work period so there are no emotions involved it's just work like a machine.
But sometimes stress can get you. You can build up a lot of stress if you don't have any stress relievers. My own stress relievers are things like I practice meditation. Meditation is very good to help you relax in times of stress. Just take a couple of breaths help you focus and it's very healthy for you. I do play games a lot. I play board games and video games, more board games and some video games.
I know other people handle stress differently. What I'm trying to say here is that it's important for you to have that stress reliever because you can get burned out and I've been burned down before. Burnout is when you keep on doing work to say, 'okay I need to earn more I need to get this done, I need to get this done, I need to apply to our jobs' and you don't leave time for yourself. You don't leave time for fun, for recreation, for family, for friends and so on. And just because you're working so hard you don't know it but you have like a limit to how much work you can do you keep on working so hard and then once you reach that limit it's like you explode and then you don't feel like working at all. It's really important for you not to get to that
point so that's why you should have the balanced life.
What are the challenges you encountered in freelancing and how did you overcome them?
There are lots challenges in freelancing. Like I mentioned earlier, one of the biggest challenges was I had to learn everything on my own. I had to do my own research and so on it and it was tough. I guess one challenge that a lot of you will face also is selling yourself. When it comes to freelancing you will have to learn to be thick-skinned. Americans are very used to this. Westerners are very used to being 'kupal' because it's in their culture but for Asian cultures, it's not that common. It's something that we will have to learn and it's a challenge. It's a challenge to freelancing because to succeed you have to sell basically yourself. To sell your services. To tell clients that I'm good, I can do this.
And how did I overcome that challenge? There are ways to deal with clients that you don't need to feel bad when you're selling yourself. Once you're very confident in your skills, once you know that okay this thing like let's say social media or facebook ads because I'm pretty good with that I know Facebook Ads very well and confident in my skills so if I tell a client that I can do this I know I can do it so confidence in yourself really matters.
What's the ratio of available freelance jobs vs freelancers? Is there a lot of demands for freelancers? Are there competition?
When it comes to freelancing there is a lot of competition. That's true. Everywhere you go there is a lot of competition and freelancing is very attractive because you can earn a lot of money while working from home and you will face a lot of competition especially at the entry level. There are a lot of competition at the entry level. So you have to find ways to make yourself stand out. Okay, you will have to beat the competition in some ways and one thing you have to remember is that 90% of most people don't have discipline. Most people will give up. Most people don't have the discipline don't have the hard work in them so that's one competitive advantage you can have over other people. Just continuing to work hard. Continuing to learn. Continuing to persevere more than other people will make you succeed and it's not just me who's saying this. Like if you talk to a lot of successful people they'll say that what matters is you being able to continue even when you fail. Picking yourself up and continuing and just pushing keep on pushing, keep praying, keep going and you can succeed.
Do you have your own SOP when accepting tasks or do clients normally assign them?
This depends on the kind of work that you're doing for clients. If you're like a virtual assistant, then it would depend on what the client assign you. And when you get more experience in freelancing you will probably be able to know what tasks you want to do like SEO, you can be a social media specialist and by that time when you have the experience when you already know what you're focusing on you can have your own SOP. You're going to be the one telling clients that, 'hey Mr. Jones this is what I'm going to do for you,' I'm going to do ABC and D and right now that's what I do. Clients don't really assign me work I tell them what needs to be done. Okay, but when you're starting most of the time you'll have to accept especially when you're not sure what you want to do yet you're going to have clients assign work to you and there's like long period well there's a lot of things that need to be done before you can get to the point where you have your own SOP.
Do you still get rejections?
Yes, I still get rejections when I talk to clients and actually sometimes I like getting rejections and I just move on. At my point is when I bid for work I don't need new work anymore I'm already okay with the amount of work I have so if I get rejected it's like okay fine I'm already okay right now. Back when I didn't have that much work it was more painful to get rejected but you just learn if you can ask the client why they rejected you and just want to get some feedback that can be very useful if the client can tell you why they rejected you. So you can alert and then make changes to how you approach the client and then keep on getting better and better otherwise you just move on to the next client. That's what you have to do you shouldn't let it affect you personally because if you let it affect you and you're going to get discouraged you're going to lose your motivation and then that's the time when you just quit. You don't learn from your mistakes and you end up quitting and going back to the corporate life or wherever so you just have to move on learn as much as you can from the rejection and then move on that's how you handle it.
Jason is the founder and CEO of Work from Home Roadmap and VA Bootcamp. Aside from teaching Filipinos how to succeed working from home, he likes traveling, playing board games, and drinking coffee.
One comment on “FB Live Session: Jason Dulay's Freelancing Journey”
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Hey There. I found your blog using msn. This is a very well written article.
I will be sure to bookmark it and come back to read more of your useful info.
Thanks for the post. I'll definitely return.