Dining & Entertainment Professionals: Finding Freelance Clients Online

Within the dining and entertainment industries, there are easily hundreds of different professions and types of jobs. Anything from a wedding photographer to cooks to singers are all jobs that most people rely on in their daily lives. Unfortunately, a lot of people that choose a career in one of these professions won’t make a great income working for other companies.

The Internet has helped to change that fact. Professionals in these service industries can now earn double or even triple their normal wages by creating their own business and working as a freelancer. There are a lot of different websites that can be utilized to help you start this side hustle and turn it into a full-time income. This guide is going to discuss four of those websites to get you started.

Freelance Business Advantages

When you are working for other companies in the dining or entertainment industries, your hourly pay and annual income are both limited by a few factors. First, your boss wants to maximize company profits, and employees are a major expense for any business. The easiest way to maximize profits is to minimize what each employee costs the business. For this reason, you’re getting paid as little as possible when you’re working for someone else.

Both labor laws and your employer will also limit the amount of hours you can work. Most service employees are paid hourly, so bosses really won’t want you to go over 40 hours each week to avoid overtime pay. To be on the safe side, a lot of them will cap full-time hours at 35 per week. It can be really tough to earn a living this way, especially when the ability to work another 10-20 hours each week could drastically improve your financial situation.

By running your own side hustle and finding your own freelance work, you cut out the middle man. You will finally be the one that pockets the profits instead of getting paid as little as possible. This lets you make more money per hour than is likely possible at any job in your industry. On top of that, you get to choose how much you want to work each week. If you need extra money, just pick up extra work. When you want time off to take a vacation with your family, you don’t have to ask anyone permission either, and you won’t ever get forced to work another holiday again.

GigSalad

GigSalad is a freelance website for local services that are usually related to entertainment and dining. Bands, singers, solo musicians, actors, public speakers, entertainers for kids, dancers, comedians, DJs, circus performers, impersonators, magicians, artists, makeup artists, cooks, bartenders, servers, photographers, wedding services and even more professionals can find work on GigSalad.

There are a few different membership options to join this site to find work. One of them is free, so you can get started without having to spend any money. However, if you find that the site is working for you and helpful to grow your business, the upgraded memberships can bring you even more exposure and other additional features on the site that can be useful.

This site is currently limited to residents of the USA and Canada. There are likely other sites that offer the same types of services in other areas, and there may even be other sites in the USA and Canada that do the same thing. However, GigSalad is the most popular to use in those two countries.

One perk on this site is that you can get an upfront deposit for your work. This is especially useful if you need to buy goods to be able to provide your service. As an example, a caterer won’t have to pay for the food out of their own pocket since they can get the client to provide a deposit that will cover those costs. The remaining payment will be completed after the event is finished.

Craigslist

In a lot of ways, Craigslist is old news, but there are actually still a lot of local areas that heavily use the site. There are actually a wide variety of side hustles that you can run exclusively on this site or by combining this site with others to maximize the number of clients you attract.

Some of the largest cities on Craigslist will have restricted areas of their site that cost money to post to them. However, most areas of the site are free to use. This can make it a more attractive option for some people, since you won’t have to pay a percentage fee on each sale that originates from this site like you would on freelance websites.

Local services like cutting the grass or doing handyman work can use this site to offer their services to find new clients. There’s really no limit to the types of businesses that can use Craigslist to find clients, so it can potentially be combined with other websites discussed in this book.

HireAChef & EatWith

Cooks, chefs and even event organizers can turn their skills into a part-time side hustle or a full-time business. There are a number of websites that connect customers with chefs and event organizers that can be used to start this type of business. Two of the most popular of these sites are HireAChef and EatWith.

HireAChef is a site exclusively for hiring personal chefs. Chefs must be a member of the USPCA (United States Personal Chef Association) to be able to create a profile on this site. Membership is currently $400 for the first year and $325 per year for renewals.

In general, work on HireAChef will involve going to someone’s home and cooking for them. This could be a luxury meal for a special occasion or it could be preparing meals for an entire week to store and reheat. It’s also possible to offer private cooking lessons through this site.

EatWith puts a different spin on this same industry. This site doesn’t require you to be a member of the USPCA. Instead of only offering private cooking, this site also allows you to host events. This could be a meal that you cook in your home, or a private event at a location that you rent with meals catered by chefs you hire. This is ultimately where event organizers should focus their efforts to build their business.