My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [53]
As for agreeing to not poach the clients of a small agency or another freelancer who’s subcontracting work to me, I’m happy to oblige—within reason. No one knows better than a freelancer that your clients are your livelihood. But if that agency or freelancer wants me to promise that after the project ends I won’t work directly for their client for five entire years, I may try to get that time frame reduced to a year or two.
Plus, if an agency’s noncompete would prevent me from working for a 25,000-person company, I’ll want the clause narrowed so it only restricts me from working directly for the specific department the agency hired me to work with, not the entire company. Where I live, most technically inclined freelancers work for a certain 30,000-plus-employee software empire at some point during their career and have contacts throughout the company (yours truly included). No chance would I sign away my right to work with my existing contacts at said empire, though I have been asked to do so by a couple agencies with overreaching noncompete clauses in their contracts. I’m happy to let the agency keep their contacts, but only if I can keep mine.
Never Assume Anything
I know creating and negotiating contracts might sound more daunting than, say, performing oral surgery on yourself, but trust me, it gets much easier with practice. The most important thing to remember is that your contracts can never be too clear.
“Sometimes I think certain things are obvious, but then those assumptions come back to bite you in the butt,” says writer/editor Ally Peltier. “For example, I just completed my first ghostwriting project. It was a heavily illustrated coffee-table-type book, something I’ve never worked on before. The publishing contract stipulates payment to be made in thirds: one third on signing, one on early delivery, and one on final delivery. Having worked in book publishing, I know this is standard, so I did not question it. However, when push came to shove, it turned out that the publisher considered ‘final delivery’ to include delivery of the final, retouched digital photo files from the book’s photographer, something that would not occur until the last stages of production, which was more than six months after I sent in the manuscript!”
Ask any freelancer who’s been nipped in the derriere by a contract with a nasty loophole like this and she’ll say she made dang well sure it didn’t happen again. Take West Coast wedding photographer Dani Weiss, who told me this tale: “A client postponed their wedding two times, causing me to lose work on both of the dates. They then proceeded to try and get their initial deposit returned to them. I ended up having to hire a lawyer to write a letter, which rementioned that my initial contract required a 50 percent deposit to hold the date. However, I ended up changing my contract to reflect a rescheduling fee in case this was to happen again.”
Publicist Jocelyn Brandeis even includes a clause in her contracts stating what work she won’t do on a project. “I’ve learned to put in my contracts several items that are not included in my services, so no one is surprised when I recommend outside services to help them,” she says. Apparently a lot of PR clients expect their publicist to cover everything from their event catering expenses to their travel costs—go figure.
One last word to the wise: