My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [46]
The Trouble with Retainers
Ongoing projects for star clients make the freelance world go ‘round. Show me a dream client who needs two $1,000 articles from me a month—that is, articles that earn me $75 an hour and up—and I’ll show you a freelancer who saves herself many hours of trolling for work each year.
But there’s a big difference between agreeing to deliver a piece of a fixed scope and price to a client on the first and third Monday of each month (or reserving a half day of services for them) and agreeing to do $2,000 of yet-to-be-defined work for a client each month whenever they say jump.
The first option obviously lets you retain control of your schedule. You know how long each lunch you cater or animated greeting card you create will take and what’s involved with the job. The second holds your schedule hostage and can greatly reduce your hourly earnings.
How? Say you’re a freelance web usability tester for WeHeart Widgets.com, which pays you a retainer of $2,000 a month in exchange for twenty to twenty-five hours of checking their site content, links, and downloads. Now say your friends at WeHeartWidgets.com send you the work piecemeal throughout the month—fifteen web pages to test here, thirty pages there—with your corrections to each batch due back to the We Heart Widgets mother ship within two to four business hours. Only you never know what day, hour, or week We Heart Widgets will be sending the next batch of web pages to review, as there’s no set schedule. Plus, you’re never sure how big each batch will be, making it difficult for you to schedule other time-sensitive projects during the month, much less stray from your email for any length of time.
Some freelancers would argue that such time-management gymnastics are a worthy trade-off for a $2,000 monthly retainer. I couldn’t agree less. What the client is “buying” in this situation is someone who’s on call forty-plus business hours a week. If you do the math (for example, 20 hours a month x 12 months a year = 240 hours / 52 weeks a year = 4.6 hours a week), you’ll see that they’re only paying you for an average of 4.6 to 5.8 hours of work a week. The only one getting a great deal here is the client.
The easiest remedy is to set some ground rules with the client about scheduling and deadlines. If this was my gig (and I have done a smidge of web testing on projects past), I’d insist on a setup like the following:
• Each Monday morning, the client sends me all web pages to be tested that week. I have till end of day Friday to test the week’s pages.
• On the first of the month, the client sends me an estimate of how many web pages they’ll need me to test that month, with a breakdown of how many I can expect each Monday.
• The client promises not to send more than 30 percent of the month’s work on any given week. That way, I don’t have to worry about receiving 75 percent of, say, February’s work during the last week of that month.
• The client pays me $2,000 each month regardless of whether they provide me with the full twenty to twenty-five hours of work for the month.
• If the monthly workload the client wants me to do exceeds twenty-five hours, they pay for each additional hour of work (that is, if I have the time to take it on).
The idea is to “train” the client to gain control of their own production schedule so they stop monkeying with yours. Never sell yourself short by agreeing to on-call contracts. Get paid for each hour your client “reserves” you for.
The Master Haggler
So you’ve figured out your bottom line—the flat fee or hourly rate you want for the project and which, if any, expenses you need reimbursed. Now what?
Before you contact the