The Freelance Way with Robert Vlach - a podcast by Mark McGuinness

This week's guest on The 21st Century Creative podcast is Robert Vlach, a business consultant who specializes in supporting independent professionals and business owners, and the author of a new book, The Freelance Way.







Early in his career, he encountered the highs and lows of the freelance life, and as you’ll hear in the interview, when he figured out some solutions for himself, he made it his mission to help other freelancers with the same challenges.



In 2005 he founded Na Volné Noze, one of the largest national freelance communities in Europe and later, in 2012, Europe's first think-tank for freelancers which meets regularly in Prague and other cities.



He has been holding freelancing courses for more than a decade, and has consulted on over 300 business cases with individuals, startups, and companies.







He has now distilled what he has learned from all this into a book called The Freelance Way, a very thorough and practical guide to freelancing, starting with the basics for beginners, and going on to cover advanced career strategies and tools for veterans.



Topics covered include productivity, teamwork, smart pricing, business negotiations, personal finance, and marketing.



Robert lives with his family in the Czech Republic and Spain. He wrote the first edition of his book in Czech, and it became a national best-seller.



When it came to publishing the English edition, rather than settling for a straight translation, Robert took the opportunity to revise it and incorporate contributions by world-class experts David Allen, Adam Grant, Austin Kleon, and David H. Hansson. The new edition also includes real-life experiences and stories from hundreds of professionals in different fields and countries, which makes the book highly relevant to freelancers worldwide.



Robert and I have been in touch via email for many years, and when he showed me the book, I knew it was something I wanted to feature on the podcast. He’s someone with a lot of experience about what it takes to succeed in the sometimes very tough life of a freelancer.



His expertise covers many different sectors of freelancing, so he can see the specialist world of creative freelancing in context, and he has some interesting things to say about the specific challenges and opportunities out there for creative freelancers.



So if you work for yourself as a creative, you should find this a very useful as well as thought-provoking conversation about The Freelance Way.







Robert Vlach interview transcript



MARK: Robert you’ve written a great book on freelancing, and I love the fact that it starts with a story about when you were young, and you swore that you would never be an entrepreneur.



ROBERT: Well that story, I think, made me a freelancer actually. When I was a teenager, like, 1991, my parents started their own company, it was a bakery, and they had lots of employees, and they were going all into their business, and I saw how hard it is actually to run a business. They were working weekends, they were working nights, coming home late, and basically, we didn’t see them. We didn’t see them much at home with my brother for 10 years.



So my idea was that doing business is actually very hard and that you have to sacrifice a lot, and it just didn’t make any sense to me. As a kid, I had lots of creative ambitions, and it just didn’t make sense to sacrifice that much only to earn a living, right? At that time I was studying at business school, which was also related to companies mostly, and so it only confirmed my bias. And I didn’t know at that time that freelancing is something completely different, that there is a way to do business on the individual level without a need for large capital, without going all in,

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