Welcome to guest writer, Jo Ann Sweeney, who explains the seven areas where a mentor can make all the difference to our freelance business.

We all need a fresh perspective in our work, someone to help us think laterally beyond what we do day in, day out and provide fresh perspectives.

In almost 20 years as a freelance consultant I’ve met hundreds of people like myself – self-starters, good time managers, high energy, assertive, good at multi-tasking, not afraid to take risks, embrace change, can cope with ambiguity, like being our own boss, the list goes on and on.

What I’ve noticed is that some people establish successful businesses quickly; others take many years.  I’d put myself in the second category. It took six or seven years before I was doing well financially; which was fine because I had young children and wanted to work school hours only.

I’ve just written a report for a major technology consulting company detailing the learning and development it delivered to its employees over the past 12 months. The staff there have access to all kinds of learning opportunities to enhance their professional development – from instructor-led activities, virtual classroom sessions and e-learning modules, to DVDs and online books.

As employees, they get all this training for free. But as freelancers, we have to pay out of our own pockets when we want to learn new skills. However, it’s important for us to keep learning new stuff if we want to remain competitive.

Luckily, with so many instructional blogs, YouTube videos, articles and free e-books out there, you can access all kinds of valuable information for free. I usually set up searches on Twitter for the subjects I’m interested in, so I get alerted when new posts/articles etc appear.

As I mentioned last week, today is National Freelancers’ Day in the UK. Back in September, Ed Gandia, Pete Savage and Steve Slaunwhite launched International Freelancers Day which was the biggest-ever online conference for solo professionals.

The conference actually took place over two days – I signed up to it and got FREE access to 24 video presentations from leading experts on some great topics such as marketing, social media, productivity etc.

Why am I telling you about something that happened two months ago?

Well, the other day Ed Gandia and Pete Savage emailed me to tell me about their brand new International Freelancers Academy.  It provides great-value content to freelancers – just like their online conference did – but now on a weekly basis.