Community as Advantage - 5 Ways the Right People Accelerate Your Growth

Freelancers who aren’t in smaller, tight-knit communities have a distinct disadvantage, especially in the age of AI. They’re playing the freelance game on HARD MODE.

I’ll explain shortly what easy mode looks like after I pass along an anecdote from my friend Josh Hall.

As the leader of the Web Designer Pro community, Josh talks to a lot of web designers. Some of them struggle to find project leads. That struggle can be discouraging and confusing, and when he and I were having coffee in July 2025, Josh told me that he asks designers who are struggling the same question:

“What communities and networks are you a part of?”

Usually, their answer is “none”—or uncomfortable silence, and out of the dozens of marketing strategies and leadgen tactics Josh could recommend, he defaults to recommending involvement in communities.

Who we know matters. The people we spend the most time with matter, too.

People are at the heart of your business, of any business, and if you show up in a small-ish, private community full of motivated, optimistic people, then you are, in essence, playing on easy mode with bigger weapons, extra health, and bonus lives.

Online communities help freelancers and consultants in 5 specific ways:

1. Positive Spillover

As a teenager, you surely heard some boring adult with a decade-appropriate haircut say, “You are the company you keep.” You surely rolled your eyes and dreamed of being free of the tyranny of unstylish pedants.

Turns out, it’s true. If you surround yourself with people who achieve remarkable results, you’re much more likely to do the same. Researchers have studied the effects of “positive spillover” across domains, from video games and athletics to academics and work environment.

One study that came out of the Kellogg School of Management found that sitting within 25 feet of a high performer improves employee performance by 15 percent.

And if you’re Steph Curry and Jimmy Butler joins your team, you start shooting and sinking more threes. The Golden State Warriors start winning more games.

The right people create an environment of excellence. Are you putting yourself in the way of positive spillover?

2. Strategic Relationships

In 1921 a young writer and his wife moved to Paris. He wasn’t wealthy or well connected. He had no literary reputation to speak of, and he was working as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star.

Then, Ernest Hemingway walked into a bookstore called Shakespeare and Company and met the owner, Sylvia Beach. As Hemingway later recalled in A Moveable Feast, Beach was “a lively, kind, and enthusiastic woman, who welcomed me as though I were a real writer.”

Beach became Hemingway’s strategic ally. She lent him books. She stocked his early works and recommended them to customers. She brought him into her circle of expat artists and writers, which included James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound.

Beach also connected Hemingway with both F. Scott Fitzgerald, who provided critical feedback for Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, and Maxwell Perkins, the Scribner’s editor who later published it.

As he stepped across the threshold at 12 rue de l’Odéon that fateful day, Hemingway couldn’t have known how important his friendship with Beach would prove to be.

Are you nurturing strategic relationships?

Some freelancers will continue to flourish while others flounder. Talent plays a part, but who you know matters just as much.

3. High-Quality Advice, Quickly

Advice is free now. And endless. And ever-present. You can’t get out of bed without tripping over a Youtube channel, podcast, post, feed, or newsletter.

Everyone’s got an opinion on what you should or shouldn’t do, and if you’ve spent any time on Reddit or LinkedIn, maybe you’ve noticed the downside of the ubiquity: Much of the advice is garbage. Well-intentioned maybe, but still, absolute crap.

I see posts and shake my head in disbelief, knowing that if I had actually done what was recommended then I would have suffered for it.

We have two challenges:

• The loudest voices usually aren’t the wisest, and we all have to figure out how to separate the signal from the noise. Who are the true experts?
• Common sense isn’t so common because many of the best fixes and solutions are counterintuitive.

Sifting sludge for gems is time consuming. Reading a book from a recognized authority is too. I don’t always have time for that.

How do I get high-quality advice quickly?

I’m a part of an online community called Creator Science Lab. I trust the advice I get inside the Lab because the group’s leader, Jay Clouse, thoroughly vets people. Jay was the one who inspired me to be very selective with who can join the Freelance Cake Community.

Keep the caliber high to keep the credibility high!

A community of smart, fast-learning people with rich experience, good judgment, kindness, generosity, and incisive thinking and feedback is an on-demand thinktank. Join one so that you can get informed answers, gain clarity faster, and stay unstuck.

4. High-Quality Resources, Quickly

I have a really bad habit of doing too much research. It’s the outgrowth of what we’ll call “silver bullet thinking”: A belief that if I can only find the perfect resource or tool, then I can dramatically reduce the likelihood that I’ll fail.

That’s a half-truth. Certainly, in some situations, better tools can get you better, faster results—for example, building a deck with an impact driver versus a screw driver. By contrast, many mindset or business problems are multi-faceted, and they don’t come with blueprints or instruction manuals.

The same as advice, we want high-quality resources from people we actually trust as accomplished peers or even experts.

We want and need tools and resources quickly, and they must take into account the personal and highly contextual nature of the problems we’re solving. Give me the screwdriver and the impact driver and the complete set of drill bits, not just the Phillips, because the old deck I’m taking apart has three different kinds of screws.

It’s all too easy to go flouncing around the internet and spend hours collecting PDFs, ideas, and process odds and ends that might work, all without actually doing the work. All prep and no progress.

The research and resource-finding meta work is one of the biggest time sucks in business, and one that few people talk about.

A solid resource library can save you hundreds of hours of meta work. You end up putting more time into solving problems and building felt momentum.

Case in point: When I was finally ready to upgrade my studio setup, I didn’t do a bunch of Google searches. I popped into Creator Science Lab and asked Jay for his gear list.

If you have something you need to do or solve for your freelance or consulting business, chances are, the Resource Library in the Freelance Cake Community has exactly what you need.

5. Bias Toward Action

I can’t say this bias is true for every paid, private community, but it has certainly been true of the best ones I’ve been a part of: People focus on doing, not just talking about doing.

And other people doing stuff has a galvanizing effect. They inspire you to do things, too.

The nature of entrepreneurship is that we often must act with incomplete information. We must launch before we feel ready. (I’ve written elsewhere about the value of former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s 40-70 Rule.)

Many freelancers and consultants are already prone to paralysis of analysis. And perfectionism. And then when we finally do make a decision, we second-guess it to death. And because subconsciously we’re worried about making mistakes, about failure, and about success, we put off making decisions. This procrastination leads to overwhelm. Yay for being self-employed!

These mental traps and the dollars-and-cents drain they represent should motivate all of us to find a group of folks who are proactively establishing the habits that get better results out in the real world:

• Design and experiment, form a hypothesis, and begin.
• Take messy, imperfect action and measure results.
• Iterate and improve over time.
• Shorten learning cycles.

Becoming less and less wrong is a more practical and effective way to build a business than waiting to act until you’re sure you’re right.

How do you short-circuit chronic hesitancy? Begin developing a bias toward action.

Communities have the added benefit of accountability. When you said you were going to do something, other members will ask, “Did you do it?” After you do it, they’ll ask, “How did it go? What did you learn?”

Those questions become a forcing function for follow-through and better reflection on the back end.

Becoming an active member of a private community of ambitious, likeminded peers may be the single best thing you can do for your freelance business right now.

The question is…

What are you going to do about it?

If you aren’t already a part of a private, paid community catering specifically to more established, advanced freelancers, then I encourage you to read about the Freelance Cake Community. If it piques your curiosity, then apply to join here.

As I mentioned earlier, I use an application and some other strategic obstacles to keep the level of experience and insight inside the community very high.

I’ve turned away some lovely folks not because I didn’t believe they were high caliber in other areas of their lives but because they were in the beginning stages of their freelance journey.

And perhaps that’s my final piece of advice…

Even if you apply and I say no, I’ll recommend several other communities. You should definitely join a community and get involved because, as Jeff Goins pointed out, the right people matter as much or more than raw talent:

“For creative work to spread, you need more than talent. You have to know the right people and get exposure to the right networks. And as unfair as that may seem, it’s the way the world has always worked. The good news is you have way more control over this than you realize.”

Surround yourself with people who pull you forward, not backward.

When you’re ready, here are ways I can help you:

1. Free Money. A pricing and money mindset guide for freelance creatives. If you’re unsure about your freelance pricing, this is the book for you.
2. Morning Marketing Habit. This course will help you build an “always be marketing” practice, become less dependent on referrals, and proactively build the business you want with the clients you want. My own morning marketing habit has enabled me to consistently make 6 figures as a freelancer.
3. 1:1 Coaching. Gain clarity, confidence, and momentum in your freelance or consulting business.
4. Business Redesign (Group Coaching). Raise your effective hourly rate, delegate with confidence, and free up 40 hours a month.
5. Clarity Session. It’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle. I've done well over 100 of these 1:1 sessions with founders, solopreneurs, and freelancers who wanted guidance, a second opinion, or help creating a plan.