A year ago, Eric Vogel (username: evogel21) was a full-time student at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island, pursuing degrees in International Business and Marketing Communications. His life changed after a professor introduced him to Elance.
Eric’s journey since then has been an interesting one – he shares his experience in his own words:
“Within the first two weeks of joining [Elance], I landed my first project: building a website for The Rose and Crown Pub – a restaurant near where I live. I then took on some smaller projects $50 - $200 each, and after the first couple months on Elance, I was already making significantly more than my part-time campus payroll position wages.”
“I soon began getting referrals and repeat customers,” Eric continued. “I started taking on larger projects and earning even more money.”
“At this point, I decided that with the number of requests for proposals I was receiving every day, I needed to find some help. So I hired a few of my closest friends – also college students – and continued to move forward from there,” Eric said.
“Needless to say, the name College Freelancers was born. We began taking on project after project on Elance – always making sure that the employers were completely satisfied.”
“As we continued to grow, I decided it was time to formalize things,” Eric said. “In July 2008, I registered with the state of New Hampshire and am now officially the President of College Freelancers LLC.”
“Since then, we’ve been working hard and are developing our niche – focusing on delivering excellent customer service, competitive costs, and effective and efficient project management,” said Eric. “We’ve even begun accepting projects from private clients and have continued to grow our team of college freelancers.”
“We are pretty tough when screening new team member candidates,” explained Eric. “They must prove that they have a creative mindset and can function in a demanding environment which requires balancing projects with their class schedules. I get a lot of enthusiastic applicants – because this type of work is very appealing to students – but I focus on the qualifications and only those who I believe have what it takes will come on board.”
“We now have a team of 10 highly motivated and talented college students from Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New York, Massachusetts and Maine – working either full-time or part-time depending on their school schedules. I am hoping to expand the team even more with students from across the United States.”
“Although we are currently working closely with professional software developers and programmers to help handle large projects, we still strive to do all of our work in-house – because after all – college students are known to work hard!”
