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Home > Articles > Freelance101 > Setting Your Professional Standards and Boundaries

Self-Employed Freelancers & Small Businesses : How to Set Professional Standards & Boundaries in Your Home-Based Business

by Maria Marsala

Summary: Guidelines help us keep our focus! Use these ideas to create your own professional standards and boundaries.

Create Professional Standards & Boundaries for Your Freelance Small Business

Professional standards are strong guidelines for how you treat yourself within your home business or freelance career.

They can include a code of ethics, guarantees, how many hours you work, etc. Professional boundaries are about how you want your clients to treat you within your business. They can include requesting to be paid on time, honesty, how to cancel appointments, how often they can contact you, etc. As each of us evolve, it is common to "raise" our standards and boundaries. January is an excellent month to review your "Professional Standards and Boundaries". "10 Keys To Understanding Boundaries and Standards" is one of my favorite articles on this subject http://www.topten.org/public/BJ/BJ28.html.

Professional standards and boundaries create a professional atmosphere around your small business.

Sometimes they help you attract a higher caliber of clients. Other times they reflect that your time and effort are now worth more than they previously were . Whatever reason you have for creating standards and boundaries, make sure that you can stand by them, no matter what!

Your new or updated standards and boundaries may - and will - annoy customers. You may even lose clients.

Any time you set a new "rule", someone is bound to be annoyed - and they'll let you know, too! You are bound to hear things like "X" does that for free, I'm only asking for 15 minutes of your time, guess you don't want clients, among a variety of other things you'd prefer not to listen to.

Learning to not take things personally maybe difficult, however, it's a very necessary part of evolving. One of the other big lessons of setting boundaries - whether business or personal - is that you don't owe anyone an explanation on the changes you're making. We humans seem to think that when we say "no" we have to explain ourselves. Yet, when we say "yes" we never explain ourselves! When someone asks you why you've made a business change, it's OK to give a simple answer like "it's a business decision" or "it's best for me this way".

If your home-based business is to continue to evolve, then now is the time to review your Professional Standards and Boundaries.

I've set some hefty ones myself within the past 12 months and will share some of them with you as examples, as well as to let you know how my services have changed.

I challenge you to create or update your small, home-based business' professional standards and boundaries this month, too.

• I provide my clients with the highest level of services in a professional manner. And then I come up with ways to make those services even better.
  
  
• I continue to provide one free 30-minute consultation to individuals who are interviewing coaches as part of the process of hiring a coach. I have a new form for individuals to complete at www.coachmaria.com/consultation. I no longer provide a free 30-minute consultation to everyone who requests a consultation.
  
  
• I provide a special page of links to coaching schools, newspaper articles about coaching, coaching referral sources, etc. to anyone who is considering coaching as a career. www.coachmaria.com/business/coaching.html. I do not provide free 30-minute consultations unless individuals are conducting interviews as part of their process to hire a Mentor Coach.
  
  
• As a benefit to my e-zine readers or members of organizations I belong to, I provide between 15-25% off six months worth of coaching-consultation services. Readers also receive 10% off any teleseminars offered that cost over $50.
  
  
• Every teleminar or class taught in 2002 now costs "something". $5 is still something! A complete events, speaker and teleseminar listing has been updated at my site and can be viewed at http://www.coachmaria.com/events/index2.html.
  
  
• For individuals who are "thinking" about coaching but are not ready to hire a coach at this time, I will continue to provide "Free Friday's" a few times a year. These sessions last 15 minutes each. Dates are announced in my e-zine or in press releases and will not appear on my web site.
  
  
• I used to have one fee structure for my services. To make sure that my services are available to the most individuals, I created 7 different types of coaching programs ranging from $40 to $1000 per month. I do provide partial scholarships, however, each person who receives a scholarship provides me with services equal to the scholarship amount.
  
  
• I have been a volunteer for more than 30 years. Now I volunteer less outside my business realm. Instead, I volunteer my services - locally as a speaker or to a client of a non-profit center, free, for a certain amount of months.
  
  
• My clients receive referral fees when they refer my services
  
  
• In general, promoting competitive businesses is a bad marketing tool - unless a business is overflowing with clients! Even in my e-zine, I rarely promote businesses of other life and business coaches or consultants. When I do promote another coaching business, the business usually belongs to my coach (or former coach), my clients, or a student from a class I've taught. Or I may promote the business of a coach who does not coach my ideal client.
  
  
• If you'd like to view the guarantee now provide on my services, go here: www.coachmaria.com/guarantee.html
  
  
• The code of ethics I've been working on is located at www.coachmaria.com/codeofethics.html
  

Professional standards and boundaries help our freelance businesses most often by adding a new level of consistency to self-employment structure.

Michael Gerber, in his book "The E-myth Revisited" says, "The business development process is not static. It's not something you do and then are done with. It's something you do all the time."

This month, take a look at your Professional Standards and Boundaries and raise them to the next level.

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© Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved. Maria Marsala, Business & Life Coach-Consultant. Maria works with successful individuals as they take their success to even higher levels. They're designing their lives - professionally and personally - around what they love to do. Subscribe to "Helping You Grow Professionally" our free weekly online newsletter. http://www.CoachMaria.com

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