THE FREELANCER PODCAST

David Airey has been a freelance graphic designer for over 21 years. What made his name was when he started sharing his passion for design.
It started with a side blog about logo design he never expected much from. Then the blog became a book deal. Four books later, those same blogs and their best-selling paper offspring are still bringing him clients today.

Lisa Emmington has been freelance since typewriters were still a thing - and she's changed her business almost as many times as the tech around her has. From IT training to e-learning to now mentoring people who want to build their own courses, she's learned to read the shifts before she’s she’s replaced too. We talk clawing visibility back through social media and SEO, pensions, and what it actually means to turn 60 as a freelancer today.

Zoe has never had a ‘proper job’. She went freelance straight out of uni with her company Opal Video. Over a decade later, she's built a career making films that matter. For charities. For heritage projects. For running adventures across entire countries. And there’s a lot of ground covered in this episode!

Émilie Chen will tell you the formula for a freelance career isn't complicated. Reach out to people. Follow up. That's it. It's how a chance contact sheet turned into work with Penguin Books, Faber & Faber and Somerset House. It's how a stalled museum dream is still, quietly, alive years later. And it's how eight women meeting in a theatre lobby grew into a community that gave her the confidence to ask for help in the first place. She talks generosity, persistence, and what happens when you actually knock on the door.

Adrian has been freelancing for 21 years. For the last seven, he's also been an unpaid carer - for not one, not two, but three immediate family members. He opens up about how that changed everything: his business model, his marketing, his ambitions, even how he thinks about constraints. And why he's been fighting to make sure freelance carers stop being invisible.

“I just want to write about fish”. That’s what Melissa Hobson told her mastermind group a few years ago; she was tired of freelancing in PR & Comms. She wanted to follow her passion into marine science.

So she went for it. Diving head first into her niche. Coming up for air now to tell us how she managed to get the likes of National Geographic and BBC Wildlife as clients - how she became ‘The Ocean Writer’.

All good super-heroes have an origin story. This interview tells the series of events that unfurled when an in-house UX designer was bitten by the creative bug. Scratching the illustration itch took him into the world of freelancing for the likes of Marvel & DC.

It's one of the most common questions in freelancing: should you trade under a business name or your own personal name? Steve Folland digs into 11 years of the Being Freelance archive to find out.

Jessica spent 16 years working in museums and galleries. But the whole time, she was quietly craving something else: to make art herself. So she set up a secret Instagram account, and started painting again. Seven years later, she's a successful freelance illustrator whose niche in museums and galleries has made her the go-to person in a world she already knew inside out.