My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [32]
The Hunt for Repeat Customers
Remember that Business Plan To Go you wrote back in Chapter 1? And how you figured out how much money you need to earn per year back in Chapter 6? These are the details you need to keep in mind as you head off to harvest new clients. The more strategic you are about choosing who to work with and which projects you take, the better your business will do—and the sooner you’ll meet those creative, professional, and financial goals you made in Part 1 of the book.
“It used to seem so crass to me to do your creative work with your financial compensation in mind or having that be such a major component of the process,” says graphic artist Ellen Forney. “But it is, because it’s your living now. And it affects how much time you can put into it. And ideally what it’s doing is giving you enough time so that you can do whatever work it is that you find most satisfying, which by and large doesn’t pay well. You have to take good-paying gigs in order to do the work you find most satisfying.”
Like Ellen, it took me a while to wrap my mind around the whole craft plus commerce concept. Back in the nineties, I had this friend with a 9-to-5 gig selling magazine ads in Silicon Valley. More than once she ended a phone call to me with “Let me talk to you later—I gotta go find another $50,000 by Friday . . .” At the time, I thought, Ugh, ad sales—could there be anything more heinous? But supporting yourself as a freelancer means thinking like my friend the sales hound. You have to weigh the target income you came up with in Chapter 6 against how much work you have on deck each month. If you’re a week into the month and you have a $2,500 hole in your schedule, it’s time to get cracking.
I realize that when you’re in pavement-pounding start-up mode and someone offers you a hundred bucks to massage their copy, boost their website’s Google rank, teach their old dog new tricks, or whatever it is you do best, your first inclination will probably be to say “How soon can I start?” Depending how low your checking account balance is, you may have no choice but to say yes and help yourself to a slice of that buttered bread.
But keep in mind that each new client you get into bed with requires an investment of your time. You need to learn your way around their likes, dislikes, mission, lingo, and all those industry-specific trends. And each project you take on comes with its very own set of unpaid administrative tasks, from contract negotiations to invoicing to record keeping. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather manage four $1,000 jobs a month than forty $100 jobs—a handful of clients is much easier to juggle than several dozen.
One way you can eliminate piecemeal work and the accompanying administrative avalanche is to set a minimum project price (or session time, if you’re, say, a therapist or business coach). During my first couple freelance years, I wouldn’t take a gig for less than $250, even if the project was to write a three-paragraph press release. (My minimum is about four times that now.) It simply wasn’t worth the ramp-up and admin time. As Seattle web designer Colleen Lynn says, “If you want me to really build an effective site, I’m going to have to understand your audience. I’m going to have to understand the market. And that means research.” Her bottom line? “If my first project for a new client isn’t worth $3,000, I’m going to eat it.”
In the interest of staying solvent, you’ll also want to find as many repeat clients as possible. For this reason, I prefer to work with multi-employee companies over individuals. A life coach might ask me to revise her web copy once a year. But my midsize business and megacorp clients have journalism or copywriting needs throughout the year. “We’re looking to increase our freelance pool” is something you’ll hear a lot as you