My year as Data Governance freelancer

#18 Or how to make money

Hello 😀

I tend to receive messages on how to start freelancing on Data Governance. Many influencers are already producing great content on this topic like

SeattleDataGuy

.

But I’ll give a specific answer with an overview of my year focusing on Data Governance area.

Went to the Fête des Lumières in Lyon !

If you haven't already, you can also :

• Join my Notion space on Data Governance strategy

• Discover my coaching services

• Join +200 readers of “Data Governance : where to start?”

• Follow me on Linkedin and Twitter

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Let’s see what happened 👇

Agenda

1. Market trend

2. My key customers & topics

3. My revenues split

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Market trend

I’ve been discussing with other Data Governance freelancers and it seems that the second semester of 2024 was getting bad in terms of finding missions.

📉 The economic context is not good, companies are cutting budget, especially for projects considered “non-essential”. Unfortunately, Data Governance often falls into this category, even though it’s crucial for long-term resilience.

👉 We really need to work on how to communicate about it, make it more linked to business impact.

What to leverage in this context?

Still as I said in my previous post, 2024 was a year of revelation for Data Governance.

Companies are willing to work on it.

But not at any cost…

🔍 When budget are tied, don’t hesitate to propose a tailored consulting support, meaning that you’ll only bill the time consumed.

In this case you offer minimal but impactful sessions / workshops on your expertise, with a total of around 0.5 or 1 day per week.

This is decreasing the bill for them, but still super interesting for you !

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My key customers & topics

As some of you know, I’ve been working mainly for Pernod Ricard this year.

I was the Data Governance Manager at HQ coordinating the whole data governance program for all Affiliates of the group. The challenge was really good : I had to build and scale the framework for countries with completely different levels of maturity.

💼 It involved :

• Crafting a Data Governance playbook based on strategic objectives, describing the roles, processes, policies required

• Recruiting talents to build the community at scale

• Animating and upskilling these new roles on concepts & tooling

👉 It was really fun interacting with people across the world, with different culture and mindsets when it comes to data.

Why it can last long

Because it’s interesting AND challenging. I was basically talking with all Heads of Transformation around the globe to convince them to start doing Data Governance. Once convinced, I was helping them deploying the framework we had prepared at the global office.

This type of project in such a big company will last many years…

What else?

As freelance, I think it’s better to have several customers to keep increasing my experience and that’s also what customers look for : knowledge from various contexts.

So I’ve been able to do short missions for other customers :

• A framing of a data strategy for an insurance company

  • Did 4 interviews + analysis

  • Just 5 days !

• Coaching sessions for a management controller who had just taken up a data governance position

  • 1 or 2 sessions per week for 3 months

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My revenues split

No surprise here, my main consulting customers are bringing 90% of the cake !

👉 But as they say… “Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket”.

New revenues channel

So far it’s only 10% but I really want to grow these revenues.

🎤 Trainings & Conferences.

I’ve been giving one-day trainings on Data Governance strategy with Hymaïa and paid conferences - only 2 so far but I love it !

🤝 Commissions.

Thanks to my online visibility, I receive inbound leads. For some of them I’m able to place freelance colleagues in exchange for a referral fee.

📚 Ebooks.

Many thanks to the more than 200 buyers of my ebook ! I’d be happy to get more feedback on it.

What topic would you like for a second ebook? Let me know :)

📱 Influence.

This year I started getting revenues from my social media presence. I signed with sponsors for this newsletter and also for a few sponsored LinkedIn posts.

Here's my social media recap in key numbers :

• Reached 31K LinkedIn followers

• Got 3,800 subscribers here on Substack

• 30 people took a slot in my calendar to discuss business opportunities, leading to more referral thus more commissions !

What’s next?

I’ve decided to end my freelance contract with Pernod Ricard.

Because in 2025, I’ll be travelling in Europe !

I really wanted to take this year “off” and try to see if I can manage working a bit abroad while visiting new places.

I won’t take any long missions, but probably short ones or just coachings.

🚀 I also have a super long list of ideas for side projects I want to start…

See you soon,

Charlotte

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I'm Charlotte Ledoux, freelance in Data & AI Governance.

You can follow me on Linkedin !