My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [28]
My first couple years working solo, my clients included a former college roommate’s current roommate, a high school buddy’s husband’s start-up, a couple I met while photocopying something at Kinko’s, and countless neighbors, friends of friends, and friends’ bosses and coworkers. But it’s not just me. Ask any freelancer how she got her first couple of clients and there’s a good chance you’ll hear a story like that of Elizabeth Mance, an Arthur Andersen expat who now runs Accountability Services, a Seattle-based accounting boutique for small business owners: “A neighbor who was a real estate agent was struggling with her tax return, and I said, ‘I could do your tax return for you.’ And before I know it, I had four clients from her brokerage firm who I was doing taxes for.”
In fact, Elizabeth’s decade-old business now gets more than 40 percent of its customers from the real estate industry—all because she told one neighbor. Ah, the power of the Fabergé Shampoo Commercial Principle.
RECYCLE OLD DANCE PARTNERS. Having your friends, family, and neighbors pimp you out is of course just part of the pavement-pounding story. Another tried-and-true for landing clients is to recycle as many former employers as you can. So if you didn’t do so on your way out the door, tell any former managers and colleagues who didn’t leave a foul taste in your mouth that you’ve struck out on your own and would be happy to lend a freelance hand. Email, call, fax, telegraph, send smoke signals, whatever it takes.
Remember to reach out to former coworkers and managers who have moved on to new companies. Ditto for organizations you’ve volunteered with or temped at, as well as any vendors you outsourced work to when you were back in the 9-to-5 grind. I’ve turned all of the above into clients over the years.
My first steady freelance gig was writing advertorials for a daily newspaper I’d interned for after college. I believe the initial phone conversation went like this: “Hi, Michelle. I hear you worked in our news-room last summer writing mind-numbingly dull features about local legislation. I edit the newspaper’s advertorial section, and I’m looking for a freelance writer to get the scoop on our biggest retail advertiser’ s fall clothing line and write some quick, pithy articles that basically tell people how to part with their hard-earned money at the mall. Oh, and we’ll pay you as much for each piece as you make in a week at that pissant 9-to-5 admin job of yours with the gluey mousetraps under your desk that keep getting stuck to the bottom of your shoes. . . .”
In other words, she had me at hello.
As we’ve already established, outsourcing managers live for referrals. If the freelance need exists, your contacts will be all over you like flies on stank. Not only are you a proven talent, you already know what all those obscure industry acronyms mean. Lest you think that returning to the nest is beneath you, I’d like to point out that early in 2008, former Saturday Night Live head writer Tina Fey guest-hosted SNL and reprised her role as Weekend Update co-anchor, proving that no matter how high on the creative ladder you climb, you’re never too big to go home again.
COZY UP TO CREATIVE AGENCIES. Whether you write code, walk dogs, or wax floors, somewhere there’s a contract agency with your name on it, from big firms like the international Aquent, Hired Guns in New York, and Filter on the West Coast, to smaller, more specialized outfits like WAM Marketing Group, the biomed ad agency mentioned in Chapter 5. If it weren’t for the many editorial, technical documentation, and marketing agencies that over the years fed me everything from three-hour work-from-home projects to three-month full-time contracts on their clients’ turf, I might have scurried back to the 9-to-5 grind long ago. The beauty of working with a creative