My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [13]
“A few years back, an office where I was working had to lay off about fifteen people and they took a year to decide which fifteen. Theoretically, it didn’t affect me or the work I was doing. And I wasn’t doing the job of anybody who was going to be laid off. But it was a sour place to be. I had to work with employees who were wondering if they were going to be axed, so they weren’t always doing their best work. And it makes you feel like you’re not quite a freelancer because you get sucked further into the corporation than you’d like to be.”
Moral of the story: The grass may always be greener, but the Berber carpeting is always grayer too.
Chapter 4
Act Like a Professional
From licenses to lawyers: What you need to hang your shingle-and what you can live without
“I’m experienced now, professional. Jaw’s been broke, been knocked down a couple
of times, I’m bad! Been chopping trees. I done something new for this fight.
I done wrestled with an alligator. That’s right. I have wrestled with an alligator.
I done tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in
jail. That’s bad! Only last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a
brick! I’m so mean I make medicine sick!”
—Muhammad Ali in When We Were Kings, 1996
I remember the first time I walked into an Office Depot back in the early nineties. I’d just started working for myself as a freelance writer/editor/proofreader/publicist/typist/anything else remotely related to publishing and had not a spring but a full-blown bounce in my step. If they’d been handing out HELLO, MY NAME IS . . . tags at the door, I gladly would have filled one with thick, bubbly letters reading A FULL-TIME FREELANCER! and worn it proudly over my breast.
Here was the biggest office supply closet I’d ever seen, and it was all for freelancers and small business owners like me! No matter that nothing in the store was free. I was a professional, dammit, just like Muhammad Ali. This was my championship prizefight, and I intended to go home with as many trophies as my double-wide shopping cart would hold.
I don’t remember how much that day’s bloated spending spree wound up costing me in credit card interest payments, but I do remember filling several rows of kitchen cupboards with pens, pencils, erasers, highlighters, rulers, protractors, pencil sharpeners, three-hole punchers, notepads, sketchpads, paperclips, staples, rubber bands, Scotch tape, printer paper, fax paper, manila folders, bubble mailers, mailing labels, neon green photocopy paper, and what appeared to be a lifetime’s supply of Post-its. While the Post-its were a surprisingly good call—I managed to use them all before the decade was out—I haven’t had to buy another notepad, paperclip, or staple since.
Like me, you might be tempted to slap on a HELLO, MY NAME IS FREDA FREELANCE! name tag, grab your wallet, and outfit yourself to the gills: $500 espresso machine, $1,500 Aeron chair, $15,000 garage-to-office conversion. Don’t. Trust me, eventually the debt catches up with you, and it will suck. Hard. (If you don’t believe me, see “Debit or Credit?” in Chapter 15.)
Then again, there’s being frugal, and there’s pinching your pennies so tight you get calluses. Yes, in the interest of testing the freelance waters, you should only pour your time, money, and energy into the equipment and services you absolutely need. But don’t go so bare-bones your business gets KO’d in the first round.
The Necessary Accoutrements
As we’ve already established, when I was starting out as a freelancer, I was a little confused as to which went first—the cart or the horse. Save for buying a lifetime’s supply of paper clips, I blazed right past all that snoozy infrastructure stuff and took a flying leap—cannonball style—into the deep end of the freelance pool. Unfortunately, this hastiness wound up costing me time and money I couldn’t really spare (in other words, lots of eleventh-hour rush fees). If I could