My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [29]
Besides rounding out your schedule and income, taking agency work is a fine way to supersize your skills. Jocelyn Brandeis, who’s been a freelance publicist in New York since 2001, gets about 30 percent of her work from bigger publicity agencies. Though her PR background is in corporate entertainment, she’s worked with creative agencies to boost her experience in the nonprofit, retail, travel, tech, and wedding sectors. “When I send my resume or my bio to clients, they’re really impressed that I have more general experience than just entertainment. The more experience I can get in other areas, the more clients I can work with,” she says.
Another bonus of working as an agency subcontractor is you learn how to wheel and deal with clients by osmosis. That’s what happened to Sheryl Landon, a freelance web application developer in Seattle who went solo after a post-9/11 layoff when, as she says, “I couldn’t find a job to save my life.” Because she works in what’s probably the biggest “wait and hurry up” industry on the planet—“It’s typical software development; projects either get behind or everyone shows up late,” she says—there’s a fair amount of client diplomacy involved around deadlines. Occasionally she had the chance to watch the principal of a small agency she’d been freelancing for finesse the client about delays in the project schedule (“Since you got us the source materials late, we’ll need an extra week to finish the project”). For Sheryl, this was like a crash course in client negotiations.
Thanks to the agency work I’ve done in the past fifteen years—which, like Jocelyn, has totaled about 30 percent of my time—I’ve been able to add swanky titles like project manager, web community editor, and developmental book editor to my resume, as well as a few megacorp clients that would have been infinitely harder to infiltrate by my lonesome. Sure, agency work wasn’t always my first choice, but it’s helped me stay recession-proof all these years. And in some cases, it’s led to future freelance work with clients I met through the agency (more on how to fairly finagle this in “When Noncompete Clauses Attack” in Chapter 12). Know that not all agencies are created equal. Some pay better and are more straight up than others. Some even offer health insurance, paid days off, and retirement fund matching. To find the best agencies near you, ask your fellow freelancers for recommendations.
CANVASS THE NEIGHBORHOOD. When Jocelyn began freelancing seven years ago, she embarked on some serious pavement pounding. “I just started knocking on doors in New York City,” Jocelyn says. “If a new business opened up, I walked in there and said, ‘Hi, I’m Jocelyn and I think you need PR for x, y, and z.’” Same goes for Laura Michalek, a former vintage furniture store owner who, in 2005, made the leap to full-time freelancing as a fundraising auctioneer. “You really have to create your own opportunities,” she says. “Early on in my auction career, I not only had to convince folks to have an auctioneer, but an auction.”
But you needn’t be a brazen publicist or lifelong saleswoman to do this. When I showed up in the San Francisco Bay Area without a client to my name, I cracked open the phone book (remember, this was 1992) and began randomly calling publishing companies to see if any needed freelance writing, editing, or proofreading help. Don’t ask me how—I was as shy as a mouse back then. But I really, really did not want a day job. So I hyperventilated awhile and then picked up the receiver. I might have even done a shot of tequila. An hour later I had nineteen no’s and one “send us your resume” from a company that soon became one of my most lucrative clients. Not bad for an hour’s work, though if I’d been smarter I would have done what Ally Peltier, a freelance writer and editor in Baltimore, does:
“I often pick up fliers, newsletters, and postcards from workshop presenters,