My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [75]
SLEEP YOUR WAY TO THE TOP. I’m not much for caffeine these days, which means if I don’t get seven or eight hours of sleep the night before, I’m useless by 1:00 PM. Fortunately, I’m a big fan of the abbreviated siesta. Give me a good twenty- or thirty-minute snooze at lunch and I can crank out copy for the rest of the day, no problem. I realize you may not have the luxury of napping through lunch (on many days I don’t either). But if you hit that exhaustion wall and you do have the time, try sleeping it off for a few minutes. It’s much cheaper than a latte.
Get Some Professional Help
If you find yourself spending much of the day trying to keep up with all the administrative tasks your hopping freelance business generates before you can even turn to the work your clients are hiring you to do, it’s time to hire another set of hands. Start with an intern (easy to find through your local university) or a virtual assistant (suggestions for where to look in the Resource Guide).
Yes, you’ll initially have to invest some time explaining what you’d like done, and yes, your right-hand gal (or guy) might not perform certain tasks the same way you would have. But if the result is the same and you’re freeing up valuable time you need to get your billable work done, does it really matter?
Though I’ve had a couple of assistants and interns over the past few years and I’ve subcontracted a bit of work to other freelancers in the past decade, I’m admittedly a novice at this crazy little thing called delegating. So I asked virtual assistant Erin Blaskie of Business Services, ETC, who manages a team of ten VAs, for her best tips on handing off work to others. Her golden rules for delegating:
• Hand off any tasks you hate to do.
• Hand off any tasks you do repeatedly each day or week.
• Hand off the tasks that will be easiest to teach someone else to do.
• Think about delegating an entire “department” of your business, such as accounts receivable or market research.
• Hand off tasks you can’t bill your clients for, and focus on doing the billable work yourself.
Before you start handing off projects, track all the time you spend at work for a week or two in a tool like MyHours.com, from billable hours to client correspondence to Google searches. Now revisit the previous list. See any dreaded or nonbillable tasks tying up a pretty large chunk of your workweek? Then delegate away!
“Outsourcing should not cost you money,” Erin says. “It should make you money.” Think about it: If paying an assistant $25 to $50 an hour frees up five hours of your week for billable work and you’re charging your clients $100 an hour, you stand to make $250 to $375 more a week.
Photographer Anne Ruthmann is the perfect case study. “Processing digital images bores me to death,” she says. “I’d literally fall asleep at my computer.” More important, processing her photos was incredibly time consuming, accounting for at least 50 percent of her schedule. Once she factored in the other administrata of her business, she was only shooting pictures 25 percent of the week. By farming out her processing, though, she’s now able to do far more shoots, which means she brings home more bacon.
Still, as a lone freelancer, you can only make as much as your billable rate multiplied by the hours you’re able to work each year, unless you farm out some of the billable work to other freelancers and take a cut off the top. If you’re getting offered more billable work than you can handle, subcontracting like this can be a great way to keep your client, keep your workload manageable, and harvest some extra green. Note that you’ll need your client’s approval before you can outsource part of a job they’re hiring you to do—they may not be amenable to this setup (it likely will say so right in your contract).
Before you farm out work to other freelancers, you’ll need to draw up a contract outlining the terms of your working relationship with them. Now that you’ve stepped into the role of “client,” you’ll want to ensure that your subcontractors