This is Freelance Road Trip
I designed Freelance Road Trip to help you build an independent business that will last, whether you work at it part time or full time.
There’s a gap between school and getting a job or freelancing.
And if you’re currently working as staff creative at a firm, agency, or company, there is a gap in how to get from full-time employment to full-time freelancing.
The gap revolves around not knowing what to do. Not knowing keeps you from achieving your goals.
I started Freelance Road Trip for one simple reason: to bridge the how-to gap between not knowing how and getting it done. I draw from my own experience and knowledge, and the experience of others, to help you design your own road.
There are other programs courses help you with specific things like marketing, branding, and launch funnels. Information and advice are everywhere.
What Freelance Road Trip does differently is put the essentials together in one place, from discovering what motivates you, setting up your business, working with clients and marketing. You don’t have to search out 5 or 6 different programs to get the information you need. It’s all right here. It’s proven and practical.
Building any sort of business is kind of like building a house or creating a design. Everything has to work together, and you have to have everything in the right place doing what it needs to do so that everything holds up just works.
And that’s what Freelance Road Trip is about. What we’re doing is putting all the pieces together so they all work to get you to your goals. You’ll have the business street smarts and systems in place to sustain it for a long time to come.
Freelancing is working on your own terms. You get to decide what you want to do, who you want to work with, and where and when you want to work. You’re basically living your life on your own terms.
One of the things about road trips that we can take to heart is that you prepare for them. You don’t just jump in the car and go. You figure out where you want to go and plan your route. You pack what you need on the trip, make sure the car is in good working order, and then you hit the road with your destination mapped out. And that’s pretty much what we’re do inside Freelance Road Trip.
Another thing about road trips is that inevitably you come up on a detour or a pot hole or road block of some sort. And you have to do some creative maneuvering to figure out what your next turn is. If you have a solid foundation for your business, that same foundation will give you the basis for problem solving.
A Business Road Map to fit your schedule
Learn business skills on your own time, as you please. Freelance Road Trip is a membership models where you can learn at your own pace. Upon joining as a Regular or Premium member, you have immediate and full access to the Core trainings, Jump Start trainings, and Long Haul courses. More trainings are in development.
Members of both levels can join the members- only Facebook community.
Premium members can take advantage of monthly Tune Up group coaching, and enjoy special rates on Pit Stops — individual coaching sessions.
About Alvalyn Lundgren
Creator of Freelance Road Trip
I am a self-taught independent creative pro.
My own freelance road trip began right after I graduated from design school. For a number of years I worked full-time in several unrelated jobs to fund my creative work. I picked up part-time freelance gigs on the side.
It was upon being laid of from a full-time administrative position at another art college that I decided it was time to eschew full-time employment working for someone else’s goals and start pursuing my own. So I founded my practice, Alvalyn Creative, and began working with an amazing variety of clients on projects ranging from editorial illustration to graphic design and visual branding. Currently I focus on developing brand strategy and design assets for missional businesses and organizations seeking to rebrand, expand or shift gears.
Many people have called me brave and courageous to be self-employed. They see what I do as something they could never do. Too risky, they say.
As I see it, the real risk is in working on someone else’s terms. As I found out first hand, there really is no such thing as job security when you’re working for someone else. The real security is in working for yourself, building your own business, designing your own road. That’s where the freedom is found.
Since I’ve been freelancing full time, I’ve never wished I was doing something else.
Freelancing in 2020 and beyond
The freelance economy has been growing at a rapid rate. The number of people leaving full-time employment behind and pursuing various forms of freelancing — independent contractor, solo entrepreneur, self-employed — is increasing. The gig economy generates about $204B annually, per MasterCard’s data.
Some entities, including California’s legislature and the US House of Representatives, consider this boom not as an asset but as a threat… the self-employed can’t be organized into unions, they can’t be regulated, they can’t be controlled or monitored in the ways employees can.
The gig economy is threatened by California’s AB5 which was implemented as of 2020, and the PRO Act — HR2474 — which protects the right of employees to organize. Both bills consider freelancing, consulting, and independent contracting to be illegitimate work. Both pieces of legislation serve to undermine the concept of self-determination in how a person earns an income.
The “concerns” voiced by politicians and activists in favor of the legislation is that people have to work 2– 3 different jobs to make ends meed. So labor law needs to change so that everyone can be properly classified as a W2 employee.
This is a new battle we’re looking at here a Freelance Road Trip — preserving the concepts of self-employment, freelancing, independent contractor, etc. While graphic designers and fine artists are exempt from AB5 strictures, most photographers are not. Most writers are not. We believe that both AB5 and HR2474 are fundamentally flawed. AB5 should be repealed. HR2474 hasn’t moved on to the Senate yet, and if it passes both houses, it’s unlikely that it will be signed by the President.
We have work to do to preserve our freedom to work — our right to work — on our terms.
Freelance Road Trip focuses on teaching you the vital business skills you weren’t taught in design school. I believe these business skills will help you pass the AB5 independent contractor “test”. It’s always been my aim to be taken seriously as the owner of a creative business, and to teach others how to easily navigate the business culture. Most of our clients are businesses, after all.
I cannot, and will not, guarantee your success. Your success is up to you. But I will guarantee that my trainings and resources can help you build a business that sticks — one that can enable you to live and work on your own terms.