• Anna Lundberg is the founder of One Step Outside, which helps corporate professionals consider alternative careers, and a business strategist.
• She offered five steps to transitioning out of your 9-to-5 job into a freelance career in whatever timeframe works best for you.
• Make sure you have a clear idea of what you want your freelance career to look like, then develop a strong business model, she said.
• From there, establish an online presence, prioritize your time and energy, and choose your projects and clients carefully.
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It takes nerve to decide to leave a staff position with a reliable salary for the professional and financial ambiguities of freelance work. But it can be well worth the effort to run your own business, set your own hours, office, and schedule, and work on projects you're most passionate about.

How long it takes to make the transition from full-time to freelance is not an exact science, according to Anna Lundberg, a success coach and business strategist at One Step Outside, a company she founded to help experienced corporate professionals reimagine success outside of the 9-to-5. Lundberg is author of the book "Leaving the Corporate 9 to 5" and host of the "Reimagining Success" podcast, in which she provides actionable tips on making career transitions for more freedom, flexibility, and fulfillment. The coach, who made the transition out of a full-time job into freelancing herself, usually plans for her clients to take a full year to transition comfortably into freelancing.

She added, though, that you may be able to shorten that timeframe if you're going into an industry that you know well with clients already lined up.

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"If you're planning on doing exactly what you're doing now as a full-time job but in a freelance capacity, then you'll be able to leapfrog a lot of time-consuming steps since you'll already have the skills, experience, and network to hit the ground running," Lundberg explained. "On the other hand, if you want to move into another industry and do something quite different, you may need to retrain and build your credibility and authority in this new area - and that takes time."

For a step-by-step guide on how to make the leap, Lundberg offered five strategies to expedite your shift from a regular paycheck to the freelance life.

1. Define what 'success' looks like for you in concrete terms

Before you get carried away with giving your employer notice and ordering business cards with your freelance logo on them, Lundberg believes that it's important for any aspiring freelancer to know exactly what they're hoping to get out of their new role.

To that end, she suggested asking yourself these questions:

1. What are your reasons for wanting to freelance?
2. What kind of work do you want to be doing?
3. What kind of hours do you want to be working?
4. Do you want to be able to work from home, or are you happy to commute and travel to clients' offices?
5. What kind of income are you looking for?

"[D]ecide which of these are 'non-negotiable' and which are 'nice to have,'" Lundberg elaborated. This means, she said, also looking at your finances and deciding what you can and can't afford to do and how many clients or assignments you'll need to take on in a given time period to build a sustainable income.

Lundberg admitted that she didn't do this herself when she first quit her job back in 2013. While she said she was lucky enough to have a good savings buffer and a reliable network that helped her hit the ground running, she failed to really reflect on what she wanted and needed to succeed.

"This meant that I ended up almost accidentally doing very similar work with similar types of clients and that wasn't actually what I had wanted when I quit," said Lundberg. "As a result, it took me several years to once again 'quit' that type of freelancing, redefine what success looked like for me, and start working toward my new vision."

2. Choose your business model and target audience

You have to understand that freelancing is a business, even if it's just you - which means you need a business model.

Lundberg advised asking yourself what problem you're solving, who your ideal clients are who suffer from that problem and are willing to pay for a solution, and how you will package up your solution as a service in a way that attracts your target market.

"Carry out some research to help you do this more effectively, talking to the kind of people or companies who you think would be ideal customers and seeing what solutions are already out there," Lundberg said.

You also need to decide on how much to charge for your freelance services, and it's likely much more than you think, she said.

"Remember that you need to cover all your business expenses and taxes, and every hour won't be 'billable' because you'll also need to account for things like business development and marketing, accounting and admin - not to mention holidays and sick days," Lundberg added.

Lundberg said that she sees a lot of her freelancing clients struggling with this step.

"First of all, they often won't think of themselves as business owners and so they might not even ask themselves these questions," she shared. "They'll be very vague both in terms of their target client ('I can work with any business!') and their solutions and services ('I can help them with all these things!')."

She suggests to her clients that instead of only getting paid by the hour they diversify their model, like offering courses, newsletters, or ebooks as an additional revenue source and way to boost their expertise (and thus how much they charge).

3. Establish an online presence

While it would be nice, you can't necessarily just put up a website one day and expect clients to come flowing in the next. Lundberg stressed that building an audience and client base for your freelance business takes time. Because of this reality, she recommended starting to grow your online presence "sooner rather than later" in order to establish your credibility, showcase your work, and grow your network.

She suggested, in addition to keeping your social media up to date, commenting and engaging with other people's content, creating your own articles and videos, setting up an Instagram profile, Facebook group, or Medium blog, and/or creating a profile on freelancing sites like Upwork, Guru, and Freelancer (or another site that's specific to your niche).

When Lundberg first graduated from her coach training, she enthusiastically put up her website and thought, "Tada! I'm a coach!"

"The reality was that it would take me months, indeed years, to build up my credibility in this new arena, to shift people's perception away from the digital marketing work that I had previously been doing and to build up a new audience and following of my business," she said.

These days, Lundberg reported that more and more people tell her that they've been quietly following her blog, watching her videos, or reading her emails for years, and it's only now that they're coming out of the woodwork and are ready to work with her.

4. Prioritize your time and energy

As appealing as the freedom and flexibility of freelancing can be, Lundberg pointed out that the flip side is sometimes too much freedom and flexibility.

"Yes, you can have too much of a good thing!" she said. "Being a successful freelancer requires discipline and structure as you take consistent action, not just on your client work (that will always get done), but also on everything else involved in running the business: getting new clients, doing your accounts, and so on."

If you're managing your freelancing work alongside an existing job, then Lundberg noted that you'll need the discipline to do all of this on top of your current workload - which places a premium on your time and energy. Even once you transition fully into freelancing, you'll still need structure to avoid your days passing by with little to show for your efforts. She recommended setting a routine schedule.

"You'll still have the flexibility, for example, to exercise mid-morning, or run errands in the afternoon," she said, adding that discipline doesn't just mean doing your client work, but also managing your health and well-being, taking proper breaks, and scheduling time off.

Lundberg's clients have had a lot of success with the technique of time blocking, in which she coaches them through designing an 'ideal week' where they account for each and every hour of their day. This includes earmarking time for both personal and professional priorities and your full-time work and fledgling freelancing business.

"That way, you can do a bit of an audit of where you're spending your time today and kill off/reduce anything that's not a priority so you can make more space for working on your freelancing," Lundberg said. "Although one of the main attractions of freelancing might be the freedom and flexibility, it's actually the structure and routine that gives you that freedom."

5. Choose your projects and clients carefully

Lundberg's final step in greasing the wheels for a smooth transition to freelancing is knowing what kind of work to take on and which clients to work with.

"You may be tempted to say 'yes' to every single piece of work that's offered to you, but I'd urge you to be more strategic," she said. "Refer back to your definition of success and personal criteria and use these to decide when to say 'yes' or 'no.'"

Even during what Lundberg described as the "experimental, exploratory phase" when you're first starting out as an independent worker and you don't yet know which kinds of projects and clients you'll most enjoy - or which will be the most rewarding or lucrative - you can still be intentional about the projects you take on.

"Are you doing it for the experience? The contacts? The testimonials? The money?" Lundberg asked. "These are all valid reasons, as long as you go into the relationship with your eyes open to what you're hoping to get out of it."

When Lundberg initially launched out on her own, it was easy for her to say yes to very low-paid or even unpaid work that promised to give her exposure. But the coach found that while that type of work did serve a purpose in providing her with experience, feedback, and testimonials, it didn't add up to a viable business. She also said "yes" many times to clients and projects only to come to resent it later on, as it gobbled time and energy from what she really wanted to be doing.

"I get better and better at this, and the reality is that it does take time to get a sense of the type of clients and projects that are the best fit for you," Lundberg said. "But the sooner you can get a handle [on] this, the more enjoyable and profitable your business will become."