My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [76]
Subcontracting often involves finding, screening, hiring, training, and managing the freelancers you outsource to. Since the quality of your subcontractors’ work is on your head, you’ll want to check it—at least until you get to know and trust them—before sending it off to your client. This is in fact what the client is paying you for: overseeing a team of independent professionals so they don’t have to.
Not surprisingly, you’ll want to boost your rates to account for the management and recruiting aspect of the work you’re now doing for such clients. Freelancers who hire subcontractors take a cut ranging anywhere from 15 to 35 percent off the top of what they pay their subs, sometimes even more. The price you’re able to charge your client for the job and the rate you need to pay a qualified subcontractor will largely dictate the amount of your cut. Just be sure you’re adequately compensated for your own time and expenses.
Vacation, All I Ever Wanted
“I learned fairly early on that you just have to schedule vacations ahead of time, block out the time on the calendar, don’t accept any work then, and go,” says editor Sherri Schultz. “If you wait for a time when you ‘don’t have any work,’ it never comes.”
Your best bet is to plan any and all big trips at the start of the year and, if possible, buy your plane tickets or book your lodging right away so you can’t back out later if work gets too hairy. I aspire to be like Sarah Haynes, owner of The Spitfire Agency, a Northern California-based fundraising event firm. Each fall, she sets aside a few weeks to cruise around the country in her restored 1967 Airstream Caravel. “I work through Christmas and I work through every other holiday because I love taking extended periods of time off,” she says. “I plan it really well.” (Indeed!)
Some additional tips for vacationing freelancers:
CLUE IN YOUR CLIENTS. Give any customers you’re currently working with plenty of warning about your out-of-office dates and make sure you tie up any loose ends on your projects before you go. Remember, clients don’t like surprises.
UNPLUG. Seriously. Be reachable by mobile device in case of emergencies if you must, but don’t bring projects to work on. Why spend two days of your trip stuck in an Internet café if you don’t have to? I’d rather have a more distinct line between work and play, even if it means taking a five-day trip instead of a seven-day one.
CUSHION THE BLOW. Nothing is worse than racing to make a deadline four hours before your plane leaves. (Yeah, been there too.) Instead, give yourself a two-day cushion before big trips: one day for any last-minute work issues that crop up (quick client questions, lost invoices, and the like), the other for all the pretravel personal errands you need to run.
Get over the notion that if you leave town, the world will slip off its axis and your freelance life will come to a screeching, permanent halt. None of this will happen. I promise.
Step Away from the Computer!
Let’s be honest: A lot of new freelancers work more than forty hours a week. Hell, a lot of seasoned ones do (again, guilty as charged). Between all the marketing and making ends meet and the heroic efforts to impress hotshot new clients you’ve been courting, overtime happens.
Many of us are so jazzed by the work we do that we don’t mind a little overwork now and then. But it’s when those sixty-hour weeks become the norm that you might want to take a step back and reassess—or at the very least, shut down your computer, get the heck out of the house, and think