Episode 43: Earn Over $700/Hour on Upwork (Interview with Adam Palmer)
Today I’m interviewing Adam Palmer. Adam is an Upwork expert who has earned over a million dollars on Upwork. He went from earning $12 to $15 an hour in a previous job in restaurants to running a successful agency on Upwork.
He's worked with some really big brands, and he's going to share with us today what he has learned about how to get clients on Upwork. And more importantly, not only how to get clients, but how to get high paying clients. He’ll share how to form a real business that can bring you the income you want. We’ll discuss everything from writing the right proposals to how to structure an interview.
He's also going to share some good tips about what kind of jobs you can start out with when you don't have a lot of specialized skills yet, and how you can change that over time. Adam’s field is digital marketing. He's an email automation expert who does a lot with Infusionsoft copywriting but he didn't start out there.
He changed his specialty over time to eventually get to the point where he could command $750 per hour on his Upwork profile. How did he do that? He's going to share with you today. And of course, Adam is a dad, and he's gonna talk about how Upwork has saved his life and allowed him to be the kind of dad that he wants to be and put his family first.
Chad:
Welcome Adam!
Adam:
Hey, how are you doing?
Chad:
Good. Thanks so much for coming on. You are a master of Upwork. I get a lot of my business from Upwork and I'm really excited to talk about Upwork today. Having an Upwork expert is not something I've had often on the show.
Upwork has changed my life as much as it has changed yours. You have a whole brand called “Upwork Saved my Life”. And so we want to know, first of all, how did Upwork save your life? Obviously I'm sure that's not a super simple answer, but can you give us a quick recap of your career journey so far, what led you to Upwork, and how you got into that? Have you been doing it for a while? What did you do before? Give us a bit of a summary.
Adam:
Sure. It's funny because the people I talk to about Upwork often say that it saved their life too in a sense. The struggles I was dealing with are probably the struggles that are quite common. They were as common five years ago as they are now, if not even more.
For me, the struggle was that I needed money. The business I had a job at evaporated, and it left me unemployed and stuck on the west coast. Previously, I'd moved from the east coast and I was in restaurants before that. I was a decade into owning my own restaurant and did a career shift and everything.
That put me in quite a predicament and I questioned what skills I even had. I thought, “What can I leverage?” That's kind of a long story short, I guess. But yeah, I was trying to get another job and I was just not finding the outcomes I wanted. Whether it was a salary that was just crazy low when you factor in all your after tax expenses or other reasons. Thinking about how much take home pay was per hour was depressing.
Then I was thinking about how much per hour I was making at my own restaurants and that seemed low, too. And I just thought that this stinks all around. Add in the fact that I couldn't even imagine having to commute every day and having a normal boss, and all that, it just didn't seem like it was the right thing for me. I had more of an entrepreneurial mindset in a sense, but I needed money. If the business isn't producing, you're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Previously before this issue, I had been leveraging talent on Upwork for my business. Whether that was outsourcing stuff for my restaurants, data entry, or other small stuff. I was captivated by the fact that I could get stuff done virtually by other people. Digitally, you can get stuff done just by doing the work behind the scenes. I was always fascinated by that.
This was back in the Elance days like 10 years ago. We were even doing stuff with Mechanical Turks. So through this time I was also working with web pages and stuff like that. I was getting fascinated with all of this digital world.
Fast forward, and I thought, what if I leveraged some of these talents on Upwork myself and see what I could do?
I had spent some time in digital marketing and had those skill sets that I acquired throughout just running my own businesses and learning things. So I decided to devote a weekend towards finding work. My brother thought I was crazy. He didn’t think I could find work on a weekend and that I should wait for Monday. Blah, blah blah. But I told him there were people out there looking for work and I needed the money. I need to do it, I need to pay rent. I had things I needed to do.
At the time, I needed to get to Europe. It was a pretty funny story, but I just decided that I was going to make a kick ass profile. I was going to really market my skill set, get a video going, and do all these things that I know can work in the digital realm.
Once that was done, I started searching out the stuff that resonated and going with the different platforms that I knew, and that type of thing. I wouldn't say I was able to quickly find someone, but it wasn't that long before I met my first like great client. That was like a $45 gig that turned into basically a $14 or $15,000 gig. I quickly discovered the power of this thing.
After that, I couldn't see myself ever applying for a job again. And from the start I knew I could almost gamify this for myself and compete against myself. Especially when it came to my rates. I thought I’d start at $45 an hour. And that was awesome.
After I completed work and got a good score and a great review, I figured that was a great anchor point. I gave myself an atta boy pat on the back and then gave myself a raise. And I knew that it would be fun. So I spent the next several years just basically giving myself pat on the backs, learning stuff, and giving myself a raise.
I just knew that there weren’t a lot of people in this system that were willing to figure it out when they didn’t know what to do. There's so many people that were just like, “Oh, I don't know this, sorry. It's not my department. Good luck.”
And then they’d fight about the money and whether the client owed them for the time that was wasted or not. But I came at it differently.
If I said yes to something, I determined that I was going to do it. I think that was just a rarity on that system. I also think that the way I set up my contracts early on to be based more on time helped me not to get stuck in the woods of the small gig realm. That’s where you're competing on price and losing faith in the system, because you think you’re going to have to do all this work for 50 bucks, and things like that. Adam:
It all kind of fit into the gamification of it. Growing this as a business, and not just as a freelancer. I'm a freelancer, but really we're all business owners. I think the word freelancer is funny these days, because it really represents an organization. The reality is that we rely on others just for our own individual businesses to run and function.
So here we are, six years later and we've just been still leveraging the hell out of Upwork. I think it's still the best place to source awesome clients. We're setting our sites more on the agency side of things now and scaling that up. We’re also practicing what we preach in terms of digital marketing and automating certain aspects of the business. I’m working to do less trading time for money.
If you are just getting started, so many people tell you not to trade your time for money. I think that's crap. But your time is worth something and I'm sure you can make that work for everybody. I think that's a great start to get your stuff in motion, you know? You can figure out passive income later.
Chad:
Yeah. Thanks for sharing that story, and I love how you highlighted how this can become a legitimate thing where you are running a business and earning the income you want to be earning. You're not just in a game of trying to compete for these quick, small little gigs, and you feel like you keep getting undercut for the time you're putting in.
There are real, large clients on Upwork who are looking for freelancers, who are looking for businesses to partner with. It can become a legitimate source of leads for your business. These clients are there, ready to hire someone like you. Sometimes I've had clients from LinkedIn and elsewhere, but a lot still comes from Upwork because the clients are ready, and the sales process is quicker.
I like how you highlighted how you kind of tested it out and gave yourself a raise. It's a weird experience at first to just try things and go from $45 to $60 and see if you can get a client a little bit higher, or if somebody sees you as being worth that. It really rewires your brain from what you're used to as an employee when it's someone else telling you what you're going to be earning. You might be able to have some negotiation there, but it's a very different kind of playing field.
What did you do on Upwork to start? What was your service that you provided?
Adam:
I think I mentioned earlier that I was doing some graphic design and helping with running ads. Early on it was a little more in the design realm, like designing creative ads to use for Facebook. That was the first couple, but the other great client that I met early on had an InfusionSoft project. I'm not sure if you're familiar, but it's a marketing platform kind of like SalesForce, but more for digital marketing.
He needed a sequence set up for his emails to get sent out at a specific time. It was such a simple project. Really, it was. But the problem was that everyone was so afraid of updating this platform themselves because it looked so complicated. They called it “confusion soft.” It was a funny story.
To rewind a little bit: when I was hiring on Upwork, we hired an InfusionSoft consultant. At the time, we paid this guy $100 an hour. I remember thinking “I can't believe this guy is tinkering around with some software online from God knows where, and he's charging us $100 an hour, and we're paying him, and it's worth it.” Our whole business kind of relied on the CRM to work because it was managing all of the customer database and order management and providing the checkout experience and all of these things.
So if that thing's down, you're losing possibly $500,000, $10,000 an hour, with it being down. So you’re just like, sure. A hundred dollars an hour. That's a bargain. Get us back up.
But I remember thinking how crazy that was. So after that I decided I needed to learn InfusionSoft. So it was just really funny when I got hired for that later. I made it super nice and pretty for him to show him that I would go above and beyond. Yeah. It's $45. But I know I can do this quickly and confidently and just provide him with the end result.
He saw it and he was blown away. Then he was like, “dude what's your hourly rate?” And I was like, “I don't know, $45?” So that was like one of the first couple gigs I got on Upwork. So it was mostly design type stuff. I was using Photoshop a lot at the time.
Honestly though, I was willing to take pretty much anything. I had a pretty wide skill set. I wasn't an expert in anything. I'm definitely not the best designer, and I'm definitely not the best writer. Definitely not the best technician, not the best coder.
People say, “Don't be a Jack of all trades” type of thing, but I don't know. I think it's kind of different in the freelance world because you're providing such a valuable service to clients. And when you're able to do different things, they don't have to look for other people, and they like that.
For the InfusionSoft client, I was doing video editing, audio, InfusionSoft. I was doing all these things. I was just like, okay, I can learn this. And I was watching YouTube at night, just to figure stuff out. I figured, if this guy is going to pay me for my time, then I can take some time and learn this. So it was kind of fun early on because I was really adapting my skill set and learning. All of this information is available out there, if you're willing to really learn it and practice it a little bit.
And now you're in an environment where you can put that practice into work and be compensated for it, which is just unfathomable. It's really amazing stuff. You can be honest with them too, and tell them that you’ve never done anything like this. But tell them that you’ll figure it out on your own time, and tell you if I feel okay about it. And nine times out of 10, they're going to be like, sure, take a crack at it.
You're saving them a lot of time because people don't want to think about doing things. The idea of posting another job and hiring people is a lot. People don't want to do that. They don't wanna run an agency. That's why we're here.
Chad:
Yeah, thanks. So for the freelancer who's just getting started on Upwork, what's the best way that they can find those first few clients? What is your system? What do you teach people about? Should they be submitting a certain amount of proposals per day? What kind of jobs should they be applying to?
And ultimately the biggest question I get is: how do they convince someone to hire them if they don't have any reviews yet on their Upwork profile?
If they don't have any past clients, how do they position themselves and convince clients that they’re worth hiring?
Adam:
Yeah. Some good questions there. I think when you’re just getting started, the biggest thing is make sure your profile is dialed in, because everything stems from that. That's your storefront, that's your everything. So make sure it has everything that you've ever done in the past that has anything to do with clients. I would figure out how to present that.
Especially like you said early on when you don't have a lot of those objective reviews coming in from the system, it's really important to provide that in your portfolio in a way that can outline some stuff that you've done in the past.
Now, if you haven't done anything in the past and you're just trying to kind of see what's good, or what a really entry level gig is, you can get into something simple.
I tell this to people I coach all the time: figure out how to save time for the client. The most expensive resource is the client's time. So if you can figure out how to chip away at that, that’s the perfect way to get started.
Everybody knows things like Gmail or G suite or maybe spreadsheets. These types of things. If you can help organize and streamline, that’s great. I think that Virtual Assistant avenue is great. People also need social media assistance and things like that. It's all part of this vein of “virtual assistance'' because often when people run businesses, they don't just run one.
A lot of times they run many and they're dealing with a lot of different channels of people notifying them and different areas of the business. So I think just becoming familiar with different help platforms, different email platforms, and different CRMs, if you can.
We have this CRM that we white label on our agency side and we've made so many VAs out of people that didn't have a clue about anything digital marketing related. Maybe they knew Gmail, but they'd never had any experience on Upwork. I didn't care.
I was looking more at whether they were good, honest people. Can they do what they say they're going to do? Because I can teach how to use these CRMs. As I was saying earlier, a lot of these businesses live and die on these different types of platforms and they can all be learned in a couple weeks.
So it more or less comes down to if that person you’re hiring will do what they say they're going to do and will they show up? And by showing up, it's showing up on your own time. A lot of times it's, you know, it's asynchronous. It's not like showing up at 9:00 AM Eastern.
It's showing up just by executing what your tasks are. And then being able to say, “I did this every week”. Once you do that, there's going to be work for you. It's just going to take you again, setting up a decent profile first and then once that's set up, you can be proactive in finding work.
You can start to seek out some of these platforms that you are familiar with. You can start with something like Gmail. Maybe you can raise your hand and say, “Hey, I see you're doing this, I know how to do that. Let's get on a phone call.” It can really be that simple.
There's so many people that do these long winded copy-paste, crazy proposals where they seem like a robot. As a client, no one wants to read all that. They just want to know if you’re a real, decent person. And if you can do this one thing that they’re asking you to do.
So if you can just raise your hand, then clients can look at your portfolio, and will often give you a shot. Message them quickly, and offer to jump on a call. That's the flow. And like you were saying earlier, Upwork is so rad because there's not a lot of tire kickers. These people are ready to go.
It's not like LinkedIn where they're trying to just network and shake hands and work out like some future deal. No, it's like, they have a broken business or broken website right now that they need help with. Or their checkout isn't working, or they need this email written, or they need this graphic done, or they need this voice. You name it. It's stuff that's immediate and can be hired right now without any kind of verification with the company. It's push-of-a-button, and the contract's done. There's never been anything like it.
Chad:
Yeah. Sometimes people complain about the fees on Upwork, but really what you're doing is you're hiring Upwork as a salesperson to help find leads for your business. So it makes sense that they're going to charge for that. They're cutting down that sales process, making it so much shorter. So it's worth the fees. You just have to build that into what you're charging clients and make sure you're still earning what you need to earn. But absolutely worth it.
You mentioned how those shorter proposals are best. That's how I submit proposals. I also have a team of freelancers that I hire on Upwork and it's the same deal. What are some key things that people should include in their proposal that really will help them stand out and get noticed by clients?
Adam:
Yeah, you're right. A lot of people do have a problem with the fees, but okay. Let's say it's 20% on the high side. It goes down to 10% after $500. So ultimately I don't even think we should be saying the 20% because mostly all of these relationships will make more than $500. And that $500 cutoff is for life too.
For example, if you get another contract with that client and it goes beyond the $500, you’re now only charged 10% and then eventually 5% if you earn enough with that client even over multiple contracts. So at 5%, that's like almost credit card processing fees at the end of the day. You can really bake that into your costs. So yeah, I always push back on people that complain about the fees. This saves me so much time and energy and work and maintenance.
Anyways, things to include in the proposal. I hate putting out rules because I want anyone listening to not fall into the trap of doing the same thing every time. I really think that you have to read and absorb what they're asking. There's a way of confidently saying something and I think that’s key. You need to communicate that you understand their needs and then tell them that you’re here to chat and ask them to get on the phone.
I guess the one requirement is that if you're not doing something very small scope like just changing a logo or something like that, then you need to get on the phone with them. If you're doing serious work, then the call to action needs to be to set up a meeting with that person because you're gonna want to jive with them.
You're interviewing them almost as much as they're interviewing you. You want to have a good partner in this. I think that's what people should look at also, so they're not stuck in any traps with awful clients. But the nice thing is that these days, Upwork makes it really simple to schedule right through their platform.
You can just set up a schedule and let them choose a time. And if you're accepting an invite, you can do that also, which I think is really cool. But I would say that's the main thing, because you're trying to show that you're a real person. You're showing up, you're serious about providing this service, and there's no shenanigans going on.
So even from a digital marketing perspective, if we're trying to sell a product or something like that, we're trying to break down any type of resistance.
So you, you want to break down the resistance and show that you know what you’re talking about. That's why the portfolio and these types of things help. And then the other big thing is trust. There's nothing better than a conversation in person to build trust, but zoom is the second best thing. So do a zoom right over Upwork. I think that that's your one-two strategy right there.
That will probably break you out from 90% of the people applying to jobs because they're robots. They didn't even read the thing. They're sending canned responses. Like I show people in my channel, there are bad proposals and good proposals from the perspective of a client. And yeah, you can tell who is reading these things and who is just sending canned responses. I'm sure you see something similar, right?
Chad:
Yeah. Yeah. It's very clear when somebody actually reads your job post. I totally agree with keeping your proposal short, and that the client doesn't have time to read through these huge things. If you can tell them why you're valuable in just a couple of sentences and then get them on a call, that's where you really convince them to hire you.
Don't try to convince them to hire you through their proposal. You just pique their interest. And then as they're on that call, you're like you said, you're able to gain that trust. And that's what ends up leading to them hiring you. That's what a lot of freelancers get wrong on Upwork when they're sending these huge big essay proposals where they're reiterating stuff that's already in their profile. Thanks for discussing the importance of being conversational, simple, and real with it. That’s a lot of value.
Adam:
Yeah, that redundancy thing. A lot of people do that and it doesn't make any sense. If you do the workflow from the client side, if they’re interested you want to keep them on your page. Because you can get hired right from there. So there's no reason to send them anywhere else. Back in the day, I think it made sense to get them off site and get them connected with your calendar or something.
So yeah, you want to have that as your path: pique their interest, get them to click into your profile, and let them really absorb what you're about. Watch your video, if it's there, see your portfolio, and get excited about you. And then sell them from the conversation you’re going to have on the phone as your call to action.
Chad:
That's great. Thank you for that. How has freelancing and Upwork helped your life overall? How has it helped you create more work life balance and how has it affected your family life?
Adam:
Oh my goodness. So I'm gonna do a little plug. Okay. I wrote a book called “Upwork Saved My Life.” My dedication says, “I dedicate this to my son because I honestly don't think he'd exist without Upwork and being able to freelance, because his mom lived in a completely different continent.” It's just allowed everything.
Even after him being born, just being able to not stress, and not having to leave him, and not having to worry about balancing him and work. Although he’s four now it's challenging to get on a zoom these days because he wants to be part of the action and all this stuff. But I think it's such a cool time where everybody's comfortable with the fact that we have families. So what there's a kid in the background of a zoom.
Chad:
Well and everyone working at home in the last two years because of the pandemic and all that totally changed the perception of that.
Adam:
Perception. Right. And it couldn't have happened at a better time. We were kind of used to it as freelancers, but then I think the world caught up and it was even better because it allowed them to be more comfortable with it.
A lot of the people on Upwork obviously understood this paradigm shift. There wasn't a lot of education on the client side of things. I didn’t have to spell out that I have work life balance, but there've been many appointments that I've had to break and change to roll with the punches of being a dad. And I'm so blessed that I'm able to make those decisions, and cancel those meetings, and still be able to provide and do all these things. And I think it's just an amazing world we're living in. It's also really great for these kids to be able to have dads not too far away. For me, it's allowed me to work from around the world and be with him. So it's awesome. It goes hand in hand with my entire existence at this point and his ability to have a dad.
Chad:
Yeah. That’s so wonderful that you can have that control freelancing and running your own business from home. Or like you said, you can put family first and you won't lose your job because of it. And you can manage that and make sure that you're still delivering to your client.
Ultimately you have more control over choosing when you can show up to a meeting. Freelancing has totally transformed my ability to be there for my kids. And yeah, it’s a forever choice for me as well. Like you said, I can never apply to a normal job. You really can't go back once you get into it. There is no going back, you become unhireable as an employee.
Adam:
And, you know, I think back to when I was a kid. I had to wait for my dad to get home at like 6:30 and it was just like everything was on pause. And now, for my son, I can just go to the zoo with him in the middle of the day and do these cool things. Have you ever had a client get upset that you couldn't make a meeting because of your child? It doesn’t happen. It’s great. Do you have a son or daughter?
Chad:
Yeah, I have three now. I've got a six year old boy, a two year old boy, and a four month old girl. And, I think we're done. We are done, but yeah, it's been fun.
Adam:
Wow.
Chad:
Very cool. Well, thank you so much for talking with us today. Can you please share how we can learn more from you and where we can connect with you? I know you have a YouTube channel and you've got your site and your book. Please share where, where we should go to connect with you.
Adam:
I made a bunch of things available for everybody for free. You can grab the book as a free ebook download if you go to FreelanceKing.com and to the tools area, I think it's slash tools, but if you just go to FreelanceKing.com, you can see everything there.
And then that will link to the book. And if you want to just go directly to the book, it's UpworkSavedMyLife.com/book, and you can download it there. And yeah, other than that, there’s the YouTube channel. I'm trying to come up with content all the time, a lot of Q and A stuff. So if anybody has any other questions, feel free to DM me or email me. It's adam@automatscale.com or adam@upworksavedmylife.com.
Thank you so much for having me. This has been a pleasure. It's always fun to talk about this stuff. Looking forward to chatting more in the future.
Chad:
If you enjoyed that interview with Adam, be sure to go check out his free resources and his website to connect with him and learn more from him about how to master the business of Upwork.
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