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Things you should concentrate onMake A Plan : Unless you’re incredibly lucky (or just exceedingly well-prepared) it’s unlikely you’ll leave permanent employment one day, and begin a busy freelance career the next. The reality for most freelancers is that work builds slowly over time. So if you have unavoidable financial commitments, it’s wise to plan your freelance career carefully about what you can offer and to whom, and tentatively sounding out future clients before you’re ready to go.It’s also a very good idea to start saving up before you give up the security of a regular income, so you have a comfortable financial buffer should you need it in the first few months (and there’s a very good chance you will). If you can save up enough to cover six months of basic expenses – fantastic! But even a couple of months of fall back funds will make your new career less heart-in-throat at times.It’s also a good idea to think carefully about your freelance identity – your business name and logo – and research some cost-effective ways to market yourself (or if you know anyone who may agree to a skills trade with you to get them for free).Find Clients : We’re already touched on this, but one thing EVERY freelancer needs is clients. And you won’t get very far in your new career if you don’t know where to find them. So start thinking seriously about who is going to hire your services, and where they are.The first and easiest pool of potential customers is people you already know – from your current and previous bosses, old colleagues and even past clients who liked your work. Don’t be afraid of getting in touch with them to let them know you’re planning to go freelance, and asking if they may have any projects you can help out on.Once you’ve got in touch with direct contacts, think about who you may know indirectly. Do any of your friends or family have useful contacts? What about connections on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google +, etc? (You can read seven simple rules to create a perfect LinkedIn profile here.) Speaking of social media, remember to update your profiles with the relevant information to let everyone know you’re going freelance, and exactly what you do. Don’t miss any chance of attracting the attention of a potential client.Get Good At Networking : If you want to be a successful freelancer, learning how to network may be unavoidable. Unless you’re lucky enough to inherit a full set of loyal, regular clients from the start, you’ll need to branch out beyond old work contacts and friends of friends at some point. And that means networking.These days, networking has many guises. You can choose to make new connections at face to face events – from local networking groups to larger national events – or virtually through social media platforms like Twitter.If there aren’t many appropriate networking meetings near you, or it’s not feasible to attend, you may find that social media is your best source of clients. If you’re not already, get good at Twitter. With the right skills, it’s easy to quickly build an engaged following on Twitter, and showcase your expertise or talents. Learn how to schedule well-written tweets with links to your blog or website and you’ll soon find that some of your followers can be converted into new clients.If you prefer the idea of meeting new clients personally, look for local or national networking clubs to join, and start going to meetings. Or search Eventbrite for relevant events you can attend.Work Out How Much You’re Worth : One of the trickiest aspects of going freelance is deciding what a decent rate of pay is. Obviously you’d like to earn as much as possible, while still being competitive and offering good value.A good place to start is to take your last full time salary, work out your day rate and add around a third (to take into account the lack of holiday and sick pay, and the time you’ll now spend on admin and finances etc). Generally freelancers earn more than permanent staff, but don’t necessarily work as often (or get paid holidays and bank holidays) – leveling out the pay playing field somewhat.If it’s not appropriate to base a figure on your past salary, try researching what other freelancers in your field charge. If you know someone you can ask, great (most freelancers are usually quite friendly to each other and happy to help out). If not, try asking Google. At the end of the day though, you need to find a figure that you’re happy with. If you have a sum that you feel your time is worth, and are happy to work for that amount, then base your quotes on that number. And remember that you may be quicker or slower than another freelancer, so basing your work on someone else’s hourly rate isn’t necessarily the best idea.Say Yes When You Can : In the beginning, you may get offered jobs that don’t seem that attractive. You may not like the work, the project might be too small or junior for your liking, or the client not exactly right. But, barring any instincts that tell you to run screaming or an already-full workload, it’s generally a good idea to say yes to most jobs that come your way.While that particular project in itself may not be terribly appealing or well-paid, you never know where it may lead to. Your client may love what you do so much, they offer you a much bigger, more exciting project later on. Or they may recommend you to a colleague. It’s always important as a freelancer to remember that if you say no to a project, that client will need to find someone else to help them instead. And it may just be that next time a job comes in, and every time after that, they call that freelancer first – and you could miss out on a LOT of work. So, as a default, it’s always wise to try and say yes to as much work as reasonably possible.Keep Track Of What You’re Asked To Do : In my experience, most clients are honest and fair. But difficult freelance clients do exist, and it’s wise to take sensible precautions with every job you do, just in case you encounter problems later on. So make sure you keep a paper trail of any instructions given to you by clients, as well as all quotes they accept. So if, for any reason, a client queries an invoice, you can prove that you are owed the money. To this end, ensure that you keep any emails with instructions or quotes in them, and if they were given or accepted verbally, follow up with a quick email confirming the agreement and asking the client to acknowledge you understand everything.Get To Grips With Admin : Much as you may HATE paperwork and accounts, unless you can afford a PA from day one, they’re a necessary freelance evil. The trick is to stay on top of your admin and not let it pile up. So try to set aside an hour or so a week, and half a day a month just to keep everything up to date.Make sure you keep track of jobs as they come in, the amount you’ve quoted and the work or hours you have completed. Then each month, invoice for work to date – again keeping a record of the date and amount of your invoice.Once you’ve sent out each month’s invoices, check for payments received, and chase any late payers. If you have regular bad payers, it may be a good idea to spend time crafting a standard email you can send out to chase payments (although in our experience, a firm but polite phone call asking for an exact payment date usually works better). And remember to keep track of any expenses too. Try to dedicate a specific place (even just an A4 envelope) to collect all your expense receipts as you receive them. Then once a week, make a note of how much you’ve spent and what they’re for. That way you won’t be faced with trying to decipher a heart-sinkingly large pile of mystery receipts at the end of your business or tax year.Hire An Accountant : One the big advantages of being freelance is that you have more options to structure your finances and be clever about money. And an accountant can not only help point you in the right direction, but take away all your tax and national insurance headaches.A good accountant will make sure your freelance business is structured properly (whether you’re a sole trader or limited company) and that you’re taking advantage of every possible tax break, while staying within the law.You can opt for a local accountant, or choose a cloud accountancy firm like Crunch. Both will help you take proper care of your finances, and offer help and advice at the end of the phone when you need it.Invest In Good Equipment : While a good workman never blames his tools, you don’t want to be crossing your fingers every time you save a document, or waiting ten minutes for a file to download. To do a good job as a freelancer you need to have the right equipment, and you have to be able to trust it’s in good working order. So service any current equipment you have, and invest in anything new you may need. Think about both hardware (a good computer, mobile and printer are basics for most freelance businesses) and any software needs (what online tools or apps will help make running your business easier?). The good news is that as a freelancer, you can offset the expenses against tax!Find Other Freelancer’s You Can Trust : There will be times when, with all the will in the world, you can’t take on a freelance project. You may be too busy, planning a holiday for that time, or just unable to manage the client’s needs. However, you still want to keep your client happy (and loyal). For this reason it’s good to find other freelancers who do similar work to you that you trust. So you can ensure that you have a reliable person to send your client to if you need – helping you to look good with your client, and hopefully protecting their loyalty to you. Another benefit to having one, two or more freelancers you know and trust, is that they too can pass projects they can’t work on your way too, spreading the benefit of your network to you all.

Slack is yet another unprofitable unicorn headed for IPO, following on from Lyft and Uber earlier this year, right? Yes, but that’s about the only thing Slack has in common with the more famous consumer Unicorns. Slack is a very different kind of company, operating a cloud service rather than in the physical world, with a B2B sales model.It’s always good to consider why a company is doing an IPO now, rather than some other time. In the case of Lyft, it’s because they needed the money: they’d have been out of cash by July this year otherwise. Slack doesn’t have that problem. It has raised $1.4Bn from investors, and still has most of it ($841m) in the bank and invested in bonds. Slack has no pressing business need to go public, and preparing to become a public company has caused it to incur a lot of additional finance and legal expenses it could have avoided.Accel and Andreesen Horowitz, Silicon Valley VC firms, first invested in Slack in 2010, when it was called Tiny Speck and a games company. VC funds typically have a 10-year lifespan, so we’re right on schedule for Accel and Andreesen to be wanting to close out those funds and make returns to limited partners. Slack’s IPO will make those particular funds very successful.There’s also market timing: no-one is quite sure which way the market is going to go with Trump’s China trade war and Brexit in Europe, so going public when the market is up maximizes returns. Finally, it also makes it possible for the exec team and employees to make some money from the stock – though the Slack founders and other execs have been selling shares to investors and have already made >$13m from their stock.With that, let’s take a look at the good, the bad and the weird of the Slack S1 filingThe goodRevenue growth of 81% (from $220m to $400m 2018->2019)Paid customers grew 49% to 88k, but paid customers > $100k grew 93% to 575.Gross margin of 87%R&D spending growing far more slowly than revenue (12%, to $158m)Sales & marketing spend growing somewhat more slowly than revenue (66%, to $233m)Engineers – Slack’s core user base – love the product: 10m daily users, 90 minutes average usage per day, 1Bn messages sent a week, 500K registered developers.Net dollar retention rate is 143% (i.e., growth less churn is positive to the tune of 43%)A base of ~500,000 organizations using the free product that can potentially be turned into paid organizationsSlack’s earlier growth came from “bottoms up” conversion of free accounts into paid accounts, which is why it has continued to host free Slack accounts at a loss. It has converted about 15% of that base into paid accounts, with the result that it collects relatively small ASP (Average Selling Price) from a large base of customers. Out of ~88k orgs paying for Slack, only 575 spend more than $100k a year. This customer mix is expensive to manage and grow (as we’ll see later) so Slack is investing heavily in an outside sales team to grow its >$100k customers – that’s why sales and marketing expenses are climbing.If you’ve ever worked with engineers or other technical folks, you know that they love Slack. And no wonder: it was developed by engineers at Tiny Speck for themselves and became the salvation of the company when their game had serious problems and flopped. Slack is based on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a 1980s open source technology that has long been popular with engineers. The customer case studies in the S1 show that initial adoption was in the technical staff of those companies, and that means other functions also end up on Slack if they want to message those people in real time. This kind of viral adoption is a strong positive for Slack.More than 450,000 Slack integrations (with other software) were used per week in January 2019. This is important because the more systems that are integrated with Slack, the harder it becomes to displace it. Also, over time, Slack becomes what every B2B product wants to be: a platform for other apps. When you have a community of third parties all developing extensions to your product, you don’t have to spend your own engineering dollars developing those and you start to gain serious operating leverage and reach. This is another strong positive, and is going to be incredibly important if Slack is to become profitable.The badIt costs Slack ~$5.54 to make every $4.00 in revenue, losing $154m in 2019 on $401m.Losses are growing: from $57m to $97m cash burn in the past 2 years, largely due to the expansion of the sales and marketing teamsUsage growth is slowing: net dollar retention has gone from 171% to 152% to 143%General and Administrative (G&A) – the least important spend a company makes – is large at $113m and grew 101% in the least year. Slack spent $158m on R&D, core product development, so G&A – admin and office space – was only 30% less than R&D. That’s not a good look.Zoom, a good compare for Slack that went IPO earlier in the year, has similar sized customer base, deal sizes, and revenue but has vastly lower costs and so is (just) profitable. Zoom did $330m in revenue but had roughly half the operating costs of Slack, allowing it to make $6m in profit. Zoom’s G&A costs are 60% lower than Slack’s.Slack is now having to spend a lot more on sales and marketing to collect each revenue dollar, as it builds out a direct sales force. The revenue benefit of a direct sales force lags the expenditure to build it – the S1 “cohort chart” (revenue contributed by year of customer acquisition) shows the leverage from the direct sales team is not making a significant difference to revenue yet.Slack notes that its base of free users is an advantage, but there is no getting away from the fact that it’s costly to deliver that free service and free customer support. If Slack’s sales and marketing costs were lower, one could argue that the free tier of service was a good marketing investment. But Slack spent $233m on sales and marketing compared to Zoom’s $185m to achieve similar revenues (Zoom also offers a free tier and has similar numbers of $100k+ deals).Slack also argues that its addressable market is large ($28Bn ARR), and that it is early on in market penetration. If that’s the case, one would expect growth to accelerate given Slack has just 1.4% of a $28Bn market. So why is Slack’s growth coming down? That suggests that Slack’s addressable market is smaller than they think it is, or they are encountering stronger competitive pressure, or both. The decision to hire an outside sales force suggests that competition is stronger in larger deals. That’s where you’ll run into Microsoft, Google and other well-funded, well-run companies with plenty of ability to execute.Slack is at pains to make out that it is a general purpose communications platform, and indeed all kinds of people use it — but its core user base skews heavily to engineers. Three of the five customer case studies in the S1 produce software as their primary product (Autodesk, Oracle and Monzo). My own personal experience, starting in the late 1980s when I first used IRC, is that Slack is a terrific fit for the kind of real-time messaging engineers do, but less so for other functions that require a lot more cross-group interaction and less time spent in front of a computer. In particular, it can be hard to find information that is scattered across scores of channels that requires reviewing pages and pages of messages. Slack’s search function is great, but having to search multiple channels to find out what is going on quickly gets old.The weirdIn general, Slack’s S1 is reassuringly normal for a silicon valley VC-funded IPO. But not completely!Insiders completely control the company through split share classes: their Class B shares have 10 votes vs. 1 vote per share for ordinary investors. This means they can effectively ignore any demands or pressure from regular shareholders.Slack has adopted anti-takeover measures, including a poison pill, that effectively prevent a hostile takeover that might be better for shareholders than it is for management.The F, G and H venture rounds and executive stock sales seem unusually favorable to investors vs. the company and employees. Remember, Slack didn’t need the money – but the management team took more money, diluting everyone and selling their own shares. Rounds G-2 and G-3 were at a lower price than G-1, so they didn’t grow the valuation of the company (dilution is acceptable provided valuation goes up). The partner at Accel personally owns more of the company than the co-founders do.The founders and management team have been selling shares. Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO, has already made over $3m, and now owns 8.6% of the company. Co-founder and CTO, Cal Henderson, has sold over $10m of shares and owns just 3.4%.Slack bought a $1.4m podcast series from a company owned by the CEO’s domestic partner. It also bought over $1m of services from a PR company run by the CTO’s wife. Slack’s legal team appears to have been uncomfortable enough with this that they felt they had to disclose it in the S1.Slack is doing a direct listing – simply making shares available for sale on the day of the IPO -- rather building a book of orders with institutional investors ahead of the IPO date. While unusual, my take is that it’s good rather than weird. It cuts out the “middle men” of Wall Street institutions.The netSlack is a relatively healthy B2B business. It isn’t hemorrhaging cash in the same way as Uber and Lyft. It’s losing money, for sure, but not that much relative to its cash position and it is clearer how it could get to profitability. It is also a bona fide platform in a way that Uber and Lyft are not. That said, compared to Zoom, Slack looks like it has to do a lot of work to catch up. Zoom makes a lot more money off the same type of customer mix as Slack, and the two companies are starting to overlap (Slack now has some built-in audio and video conferencing capabilities). For value investors, Zoom has a much healthier balance sheet for the long haul.

I think I can answer this question as I have done my Articleship from a small CA firm. In a small CA firm, a guy shouldn't expect to work in a cubicle under the comfortable AC. He should always be ready to work be it his preassigned works or any work that pops up in the office all of a sudden.A guy can get exposure in Audits (Internal, Stock, Stat and Tax). The clients may or may not include MNCs, PSUs and Govt Authorities. He may or may not require to go for outstation Audits. If his lady luck is with him then he may get exposure to non-profit organisations and banks.He can get exposure in the preparation of Accounts (manual or electronic or both). He will get exposure in Financial Reporting i.e preparation of Financial Statements. If he dreams of working on SAP, I am sorry to say, it might not be possible. Getting exposure on SAP is damn hard. But yes, this is reasonably certain that he will become a pro in Tally by working in a small CA firm for some months.He has a great chance of getting exposed to Tax planning, Tax Audit Report filing, cases of Scrutiny Assessments and Tax filings. By Tax, I mean both Income Tax and GST. TDS is another area of Income Tax where an Article in a small CA firm can get exposure of.He can be asked to work on ROC filings, Resolutions and Minutes draftings. These works fall purely into the work profile of a Practising CS. But, thank God, he is probably gonna get opportunities to work in Secretarial assignments as many practising CAs work in this domain to some extent.He can get exposure in Project finance and Project report preparation. These assignments come from either the startups those are willing to enter into the markets or the existing clients planning to expand their businesses.Hey, lastly in a small CA firm he has no option but to accept the fact that he will be ordered to do minimal office chores like going to the Banks to deposit cheques or withdraw cash, going to the NSDL franchises for getting TDS returns uploaded, visiting clients’ premises to bring their documents to his office, etc.A girl can get similar exposure in a small CA firm like boys. But the difference is that she will have an option to refuse outstation Audits, unlike a boy. The no. 6th point is also an option for the girls in most of the occasions. But, having said that, it should not be concluded that a girl can enjoy her time in office like anything. If her habit is taking frequent selfies to check her looks or capturing her pouts or examining the suitability of her newly worn nose-pin then I am sorry to say that she is not going to enjoy the privacy in the office for doing these. Even sometimes she will be asked to work on minimal Admin assignments at the order of her Principal. Yes, you got it right, she can't refuse to do such tasks.Hope this helps.