How this freelancer built an IT business that’s lasted a decade

Starting a freelance business is easy: all you have to do is decide that you’re open for business and start looking for clients.

Sustaining the business, and keeping the income coming in, however, is a totally different story.

But Mr Syed Anees Khan has managed to do it for the past 11 years, since 2008.

Under the business name Getcha Solutions, Anees offers freelance services in web development—or as his website states, “almost anything IT”—to established businesses, start-ups and even schools.

Some of his previous clients include Singapore First Aid Training Centre, Trinity Medical Group Singapore and theAsianparent.

Here’s a list of skills that Anees offers:

Anees doesn’t work in a stuffy office either: the 45-year-old works from home. His meetings with clients (and interviewers, like yours truly) are held at the residents’ corner at the foot of his block. Talk about convenience!

Oh, and he also reports making a cool $7,000 every month.

But what Anees treasures most from running his own freelance business isn’t the convenience, or even the amount of moolah that he’s making. Nope.

Instead, the reason why this married man with 3 kids has “always” wanted to be a freelancer is actually the time freedom that comes with it.

Being in full control over his schedule, Anees has chosen to start his work day bright and early at 6.30 am.

But Anees doesn’t have a specific time where he ends work. He allows himself to knock off once he’s finished all the project tasks that he needs to finish that day.

When that happens, Anees gets to spend the rest of the day doing what he calls “secondary tasks”—anything that he’s written down as something to do in his free time.

(On the flipside: if Anees is busy with his projects all the way to midnight, then he doesn’t do any secondary tasks.)

Such a flexible schedule may make him the envy of employees, who usually work a fixed 9-to-5 schedule (excluding any overtime they have to clock). But getting to where he is today was no mean feat.

I sit down with Anees to find out how he’s succeeding in running a freelance web development business for the past 11 years.

Finding his freelance niche

1. Discovering his passion and honing his skills

It was a one-day course in university that changed his life forever.

Anees was actually enrolled in Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to get a mechanical engineering degree. But in his second year, he chanced upon a one-day website creation course conducted by the NTU Computer Society, and went for it.

For sure, creating a website is currently pretty easy, what with all the website-building tools available now. But at that time, about 20 years ago, Anees found the process of creating a website “very magical.”

Anees was amazed at being able to control the appearance of his website, such as adjusting the font sizes of its text, until he was happy with the outcome.

No more just looking at others’ websites—now, he could now make his own!

Of course, a one-day crash course wasn’t going to be enough to teach him all he needed to know about web development.

To learn more, Anees turned to library books (the Internet wasn’t an All-Knowing source of info yet) and tried out what he’d read for himself.

2. Sticking to his strengths

As Anees’ web development skills improved, he started taking up paid jobs for clients while still in school.

This kick-started his freelance journey. But because his freelance earnings were less than the salary he would get as a full-time employee, Anees joined a educational games company full-time after graduating from university.

As a full-time game developer for the company, Anees was paid around $3,000 a month. At the same time, he continued taking freelance jobs on the side.

This went on for 2 years, until the fateful day where his company chose to change its server framework to the .NET framework. Anees, who was stronger in the PHP framework, decided that it was time to take the leap.

“You can do the same thing with many technologies, so you can’t be going around here and there [learning different programming languages],” says Anees.

“If you go this way, then you cannot grow this [other] way. So you have to pick one [programming language] and grow from there.”

At that time, Anees was only “50% ready” to quit his job—in the sense that his freelance income hadn’t matched his employee salary yet. But that didn’t stop him from making the “half-gamble, half-stable” decision to start Getcha Solutions.

Anees told himself that he would try things out first. Then if he didn’t succeed, he would go find another job.

Attracting and working with clients

1. Getting clients with the power of Google

Happily, Anees has made it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today!

So, I ask him where he gets his work from.

Anees candidly shares that he doesn’t have much of a network to tap on for work. And over the years, he’s tried various marketing methods like:

• Google Ads
• Facebook marketing
• Even classified ads

“So far, almost all [of them have] failed,” he says ruefully.

Instead, where Anees has managed to reliably get clients from is Google.

Anees doesn’t actively do any SEO (search engine optimisation) for his website. Despite that, he says his website still shows up when people Google for a programmer in Singapore.

So I put his claim to the test. I Google “freelance programmer singapore”:

I was also able to find Anees on the first page of Google for these searches:

• “freelance web developer singapore”
• “freelance software developer”
• “freelance app developer singapore”

So yep, I’m convinced!

2. Having a process to get his clients’ requirements

When he’s snagged a client, Anees talks to them about their wants and needs.

Then, he pulls out his secret weapon: a specs document, which he fills in with the client’s requirements.

“I have a process to process their input [into] a proper technical way,” shares Anees. “Then I tell them, ‘Is this what you want?’ and they change a bit maybe.

And then I tell them again, ‘Is this what you want?’ and [this process repeats until] they say okay.”

It’s only after this “translation” process is settled that Anees will start work.

This process has worked well for Anees. He generally doesn’t face miscommunication or other “human issues” when dealing with clients.

But sometimes he has clients who try to to ask for more than what had been agreed upon.

If this happens, Anees’ practice is to “give in to a reasonable amount.” Beyond that, he charges for the extra work.

3. Taking progressive payments

For Anees, getting paid for work is “generally not an issue” as he takes progressive payments.

This means that:

“No work starts until the first payment [is made]. This is something that I don’t compromise [on].”

Clients then make further payments as the project reaches certain milestones, until it is completed.

Such a payment arrangement isn’t a problem for most of Anees’ clients: they’re smaller companies with more flexible payment policies.

But what about bigger companies, which may insist on only paying 30 days after receiving the final invoice?

Well, they aren’t going to get any special treatment from Anees! If they can’t accept his payment terms, he won’t take up the project.

This doesn’t mean Anees hasn’t had to turn down much work though.

Amusedly, he shares that after he tells big companies his payment terms, “their finance [department] will somehow find a way” to pay him the way he wants to be paid.

Overcoming the challenges of the business

1. Managing project timelines

Anees is a very, very organised person.

To keep track of his tasks, Anees enters them into his trusty organiser: an Outlook calendar that’s synced on both his computer and phone.

So Anees doesn’t need to spend much time thinking about what he needs to do every day—he just checks his organiser for that day’s list of tasks.

“My organiser settles everything.”

Sometimes though, there isn’t enough time in the day to finish all the tasks he has set for himself. In such cases, Anees reschedules the task to another day.

(To him, that’s a valid way of clearing his to-do list too.)

If he is at risk of missing a project milestone though, Anees will put in even more hours or even work overnight to play catch-up.

The result?

Anees has never missed a final project deadline.

2. Keeping his skills up-to-date

Another challenge that Anees shares is the need to keep up-to-date with the latest technologies and trends in his line of work.

While Anees first started learning about web development through poring through library books, he doesn’t do so anymore. He finds such books outdated.

For the same reason, he doesn’t see the need to attend university courses either.

Instead, Anees gets his news from Google: he Googles what he wants to learn and reads the best articles that pop up.

There aren’t any websites that he visits regularly for information though. He believes just sticking to his favourites will cause him to “become obsolete” if a better website comes along.

“Google is the main [source of information]. You must start from Google.”

“[Keeping yourself up-to-date] is a challenge, but not a problem as I like IT,” says Anees.

“So I like to ‘purposely’ know new things.”

3. He’s never bored

Looking at how Anees runs his business solo from home, you might wonder if he ever gets lonely, or feels like he lacks social interaction.

To this, Anees says no. He doesn’t have that issue because he gets to spend a lot of time—”more than enough”—with his family. (He’s at home all the time after all!)

What about having friends to spend time with?

Anees admits that because he isn’t an employee, he doesn’t have colleagues that he can talk to. But that doesn’t mean he feels bored.

That’s because he has “so many things to do”, from client work to his own side projects.

“When time is taken up and you feel engaged, it’s not boredom.”

Anees’ advice for others who want to start a freelance business

Anees is supportive of the idea of starting a freelance business right after graduation.

That’s because as a fresh grad, you may not have as much to lose. Then if things don’t work out, you know it’s time to look for a full-time job.

However, things are trickier if you already have a full-time job, and you’re thinking of quitting to go full-time freelance.

After all, you might potentially lose your main source of income if your freelance business doesn’t get off the ground quickly.

So if you’re planning to start a freelance business, Anees has the following advice:

1. Don’t quit your job without a source of clients

Anees believes that you must have a source of clients before you can quit your job to freelance full-time. This means that if:

• You currently don’t have any clients; or
• You have clients but very infrequently,

Then it isn’t safe for you to quit.

For Anees, Google was his steady source of clients for many years, which helped him feel secure enough to leave his job.

Also, if you think that a certain type of marketing will help you get clients, Anees strongly suggests that you actually try it out before you’ve quit your job—and not only after.

That’s because if you think that putting up Facebook ads will “suddenly” help you get clients, Anees says it won’t happen.

This comes from his personal experience of trying to get clients from sources apart from Google, and getting zero clients for his efforts (see above).

So if you try X marketing method and you get zero responses, Anees advises that you don’t quit.

If you get a very good response on the other hand, then you can consider quitting your job.

2. Organise your tasks well

Anees lights up when sharing his thoughts on being organised—not just for freelance work, but also for life in general.

To Anees, having the discipline to get things done “is nothing but writing down what you have to do.”

In other words, write your tasks down (whether in an organiser, calendar or elsewhere) and plan to do them.

Then, just do them.

One by one.

One after the other.

Until you’re done.

Although seemingly easy, Anees sees that this isn’t commonly done.

Instead, people keep their to-do list in their head, “then they get stressed about this and that, when they only have 5 things to do.”

Also, Anees focuses on his tasks one at a time.

When he’s working on one task, he doesn’t think about others. As a result, even though he may have many things to do in a day, he doesn’t feel stressed about it.

For example, Anees regularly takes on major projects which may seem too much for one person to handle. But his secret to doing them well is breaking down what needs to be done into smaller tasks, and then doing these tasks one day at a time.

He shares that by the end of some projects, he’s actually forgotten the work that he’d done for them in the previous weeks.

But when he looks at the final product, he himself is amazed at what he has managed to achieve.

Anees believes that once you organise your life, you’ll be able to do more than what you thought you were capable of.

And looking at how he has managed to run a successful freelance business for the past 11 years and counting, it’s clear that this system has worked for him very well.

—

Want to be the next featured freelancer? Get in touch.

Work with Anees: Leave a message on his website | Email: khan@getcha.com