How Charlie Hoehn's Recession-Proof Strategy Helped Him Find Meaningful Work
I am grateful that I am not the first guy to try the "work for free" strategy and attempt to write about it.
Charlie Hoehn graduated college in 2008 during the Great Recession. If you think getting a job is hard now, then it was really hard to get any decent job back then.
After sending out over a hundred resumes and getting rejected, Charlie knew he had to try something different.
Charlie decided to apply the "work for free" strategy, and he ended up working with some well-known authors and entrepreneurs such as Tim Ferriss, Ramit Sethi, Tucker Max, and Seth Godin.
Based on his experience, he wrote a popular career guide called the "Recession Proof Graduate", which has been downloaded over 200,000 times.
Here is a cliff note version of his strategy:
Get some skills under your belt.
Build your online portfolio with your skills.
Research the list of people and companies you like to work with.
Find a specific problem you can help them solve, and reach out to them.
Offer to work for them for free for [blank #] weeks. (blank # equals number of weeks you are willing to work for free)
At the end of the "free work" period, you will either transition to paid work, get a quality testimonial, or a referral to other opportunities.
This book is the basic blueprint of how I am approaching my own "work for free" journey. I understand the job market has changed a lot since the book was published, but this just means I have to tweak a lot of things mentioned in this book to make it work for myself.
Isn't Working for Free the Same as Doing an Internship?
Not exactly, and there are two major differences.
The first difference is that you generally apply to internships the same way you apply to regular jobs.
The "work for free" strategy, on the other hand, is a much proactive approach. You don't send need to send out resumes, but you do need to network with people, and you need an online portfolio to show your work.
The second big difference is that most people are given menial tasks and they don't learn much from their internships.
A lot of them just spend their time grabbing coffee and filling out spreadsheets.
My first and only internship experience was at a small tech startup, and I spent the majority of the time manually testing if the company's app is was working on different phone devices.
I didn't learn much from it.
When you are implementing the "work for free" strategy, you don't passively wait for other people to tell you what to work on. Instead, you reach out to people and tell them specifically what you can help them with.
If they don't need your help at the moment, you can just look elsewhere for people that will value your skillset.
Most internships typically last three months. A side benefit of the "work for free" strategy is that you get to set a deadline for when the "free work" transitions to "paid work".
You should be clear on how many weeks you are willing to for free. For me, the maximum length of time I am willing to work for free for a company is one month.
That is mainly because I only have enough cash saved up to sustain myself for around seven to eight months, which means I probably have to do some freelancing on the side of the experiment takes a lot longer. I also think I can do a lot for a company in a month with my current skill set.
Assume a lot of the companies are not going to start paying you after the free work period, and that is fine. If you did a good enough job, you should at least ask for a testimonial or a referral to more challenging and lucrative opportunities.
Definitely check out the "Recession Proof Graduate" if you are thinking about starting your own "work for free" journey. The book covers a lot more topics than what I've mentioned here.
Want to learn more about what’s happening in my “work for free” journey?
Check out part one of my first month progress update.
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Thanks for reading!
-George 🐙