Dependability vs. Skill

I am constantly trying to turn my experiences as a consumer into lessons as a business owner.

Early in my writing career I decided to hire someone to take care of my yard, freeing me to focus on work. Phoenix has four million people and approximately three million of them offer yard services. How was I going to narrow the field?

The first thing I decided is that I wouldn't consider someone who didn't have a web site. Huh? I hear you saying. A web site just for someone to mow your lawn? Yup. Any idiot with hedge clippers and a truck offers yard work and too many of them are appallingly unprofessional about it. It is a field that attracts far too many people who play at working without treating it like a business, something that is also true of freelance writing. Web sites are cheap and easy and there is just no excuse for any business not to have one. Even a one-page website with an email address under your own domain creates a professional image.

Despite this, I certainly still had my share of unreliable people. Phone messages to dozens of providers went unreturned. One guy showed up for the initial cleanup and did really nice work but was spotty on the follow-up work until he just stopped coming.

The one I finally used was very business-like. His wife stayed home to answer the phone and do the books. I got invoices every month rather than the pay-as-you-go most of them do. He showed up promptly every two weeks like clockwork.

It's a pity his work was lousy.

I stuck with him for about a year. I cut him loose recently because I really can't afford the luxury at this point. I went back and forth over that decision because it's smart business to outsource things like that. I would have kept him if the work had been better but I couldn't justify the cost for him to do work no better than I can do myself.

His professional demeanor got him the contract and certainly put him ahead of the competition. However without the skill to back it up, the monthly cost wore thin.

I'll still need someone to come back about once a year for cleanup. So who am I going to call: the unreliable one who does a great job or the dependable guy who does mediocre work? I'm going to go for dependability and I think most customers feel the same way. I'd rather have second-rate work done than great work not done.

Anxiety

I've had a recurring nightmare lately. I'm trying to make my way through an airport. Sometimes I'm going home, sometimes I'm trying to get to a plane, sometimes I'm in the parking lot but usually I'm in the terminal. And I'm lost. Everything keeps twisting and I end up in odd places. Stairs lead up to the 2nd and 4th floors, but not the 3rd where I need to go. There are lots of people around who all know where they are going. The more I wander, the more annoyed I get, occasionally getting so angry I wake myself up.

OK, I'm no dream expert but this one doesn't seem hard to interpret. Fear of change. Or at least fear that change is getting you nowhere.

Not surprisingly, these dreams started as I changed my business plans.

As I think I mentioned before (I blog so seldom that I forget what I've said and what I've just mumbled to myself about) I'm at the point where my goals exceed my actual work. I use these unrealized goals to pay myself for non-writing work tasks such as sending queries, reading about business plans, and doing my taxes. This has forced me to make decisions about what the next step in my career is.

Until now I've been depending on a single client who gives me keyword articles to do. It's not the most fun I've ever had, but it pays a good hourly rate and is steady. She does the marketing and subcontracts to me so it's easy for me to get complacent. However I need to diversify.

My original plan had been to start offering services to non-profit organizations. I decided recently that with the economy in its current sorry state, this would be a bad time for that. Nonprofits are tightening their belts and probably not interested in hiring services.

My goal now is to send letters of introduction to a number of trade magazines. Before I do that I have a few other tasks I want to get done such as getting some clips together. I also need to rewrite my website. I've never been happy with the text there and it's not a good sign when a writer's website is badly written. I was trying too hard and I need to go back and write it in my own voice.

But as I move out of my comfort zone, I experience anxiety. I was reading a book on business plans today and my stomach was in knots. Once I put the book down, they went away. I've always been pretty transparent.

The cure for anxiety is desensitization. The more you do something, the less nervous you get. I need to keep to my goals, get some of those letters out, and get moving.

Once I do that, maybe I'll find my way through the airport.

Motivation for Freelancers

Every freelancer needs motivation. Some people are just naturally ambitious but they are rare.

The rest of us need a kick to get going. Different freelancers use different methods: goals, rewards, motivational plaques, or whatever. Each of us needs to find our own way. It's great to get inspiration from other people's methods, but if something doesn't work for you, drop it and move on.

I've found two good motivators: deadlines and numbers.

Deadline pressure gets me to work, but only at the last minute. I have a history of submitting minutes before the deadline even if I've had weeks to work. Until the end is near, it's easy to make excuses. The flaw is that inevitably everything goes to hell the day before, and suddenly I don't have any time. I've had weeks that I wake up at 4 am to finish things on time. I've also rare occasions that I've handed things in late, which is inexcusable for a freelance writer.

The other flaw with deadline motivation is that it doesn't help with marketing and without marketing there are no deadlines.

The second motivational system that works for me is numbers. I'm a geek and I love charts and statistics and it's always good to use your strengths. I track my work on a spreadsheet, look at monthly performance, and set goals accordingly.

That system works well for me and has changed over time. At first I was just trying to match performance. Well that's just silly because then I never grow. So I set monthly goals to beat past performance by 10% and that worked better.

That was fine for a while. Most of my work is subcontracted web content. I get plenty of work handed to me, I get paid quickly, and it was easy to track the work performed. But I struggled with how I should track things like career development or applying for new contracts. These are important but don't pay, so how do I include them in a payment-based system?

The answer is that I pay myself my hourly rate for these tasks. Of course there's no real money changing hands, but it makes it easy to convert hours to money and keep my existing goal system.

This is the first month that I've had a goal high enough that I've had to start using it. It gives me the chance to read books on writing and business planning. It rewards me for hunting down contracts or getting involved in writing forums again. Even updating this blog has now become a paying proposition, even if that pay is all in my head.

I've said before that most motivational techniques don't work with me because I see the man behind the curtain. This method is still hand-waving and smoke, but it's a sleight-of-hand that I'm willing to suspend disbelief for. I don't know why it works on me, but it does and that's all that matters.

The curse of the lazy freelancer

I’ve talked several times about my biggest limitation as a freelancer: I’m basically lazy.

I’m careful that my indolence hurts only me and not my clients. I meet my deadlines but I’m seldom early. However even this can be a problem if your client assumes you are working to capacity because you hand things in at the last minute.

This happened to me recently. My primary client had been turning away work because she assumed I couldn’t handle it. I assured her I could take more and we set a weekly goal equal to about half what I need to be making to survive.

Why half and not all? There are a couple of reasons. I think it’s dangerous to depend on all of your income from a single source. Even though I’m subcontracting so technically the work is originating with dozens of clients, it’s still all funneled through one person. If she suddenly runs off and joins the circus, all that work disappears.

Another reason to limit work from one client is for diversity. Right now all I do is web content. The pay is good, the work is steady, and payment comes sometimes mere hours after a piece is submitted.

However I can certainly see how someone could get burned out on it. If I reach that point I want more than just content experience to show for it. By limiting the amount of one type of writing I do, I force myself to get broader experience.

Hmm, I’m reading back over this and I seem to have misplaced the point I had started to make. That’s the problem with stream-of-consciousness writing. I have several subjects I’ve been meaning to post about (and I really hope to get back to posting more often) and they all get muddled together.

Now I could list my ideas and check each one off off as I post about it, but I’m basically lazy ;)

Not dead yet

The struggle to get back to my life continues. Not only am I still not making the income I was back in June, I'm not going to any of the forums, reading other people's blogs, or (as you may have noticed) keeping this one up.

I keep waiting for things to calm down and get back to what they were like before July and I've finally realized that they aren't going to. This is my life now - more complicated, more busy - and I need to start getting used to it. It really shouldn't have taken me four months to figure that out.

It means that I no longer have the luxury of "writing days", at least not as often as before. I need to get better about stealing hours here and there to get work done rather than waiting for long blocks of time. For example, in the past if I had a 4-article assignemnt, I'd try to find time to write them all together. Instead, I need to get used to writing one here and one there until they are done.

This leads to another of my annoying habits. If I have a one-day project and a one-week deadline, it ends up taking me a week because it's not a priority until the deadline is looming. I still get it done but it gives the illusion that I'm busier than I am, which is a bad thing. I had my main client the other day say she was holding things back because she assumed I didn't have time to do them. I told her I could easily take a lot more work, but that just reinforces that I need to get things done faster.

For the first time in a long time, I've spent the last few days thinking about expansion. Right now I do web content that I subcontract from a single client. Not only is it not enough, it's not all that I want to do. I have been kicking around ideas for other income streams from diversified areas. This protects my income in the event of wild market changes, and it keeps me from getting bored.

Unfortunately, this blog is low on my priority list. I really would like to update it more but often by the time I finish things for the day, I'm just too tired. The focus of this blog is my own personal lessons learned, but I keep forgetting to get over here and take a couple of minutes to document them. I hope to get better about that in the upcoming months.

I'm aware that I'm getting my momentum back right before the holidays, and everything tends to drag from Thanksgiving to New Years. Last year I frittered away the time. This year I plan to use the down time to nail down plans for future projects. As I keep reminding myself, if I don't get my freelance career on track, I'll have to get a real job and few things fill me with dread more than returning to the horrors of the 9-to-5 cubicle zombies.

Slowly getting back to it

I am trying to get back my momentum after my disasterous July. My personal drama has abated (for now) and it's now just a matter of getting back to it.

The situation was complicated by the fact that my primary client was going through her own stuff during this time so I had no steady workflow. I had periods over the last six weeks that I could have gotten some work done but didn't have the energy for the marketing side of things. It would have helped to have a trickle of articles to keep me focused . Still, I guess it's better that our respective personal disasters were in parallel rather than in sequence. Imagine coming out of this nonsense just to have her go through another couple months of it.

This whole situation again underscores my biggest weakness as a freelancer: marketing. When I have work, I work hard and hit my deadlines. When I don't, I make lots of excuses to avoid self-promotion. It's not insecurity; I know I'm a good writer and have a lot to offer a client. I simply find marketing tedious, which is why I like subcontracts when I can find them.

July = total bust

From a work perspective, I've been a bad boy this month. Last week was the only clear week I had in July. I should have been out there pounding the pavement, but instead I caught up on non-work stuff and took a lot of "mental health" days - probably more than I really needed. This week has been a total farking nightmare and I've had to learn all kind of new medical words. I actually had to turn down the only work I've gotten this month.

The next day I will have clear will be Tuesday, which is the last day of the month. My main client thinks she'll have work for me so maybe I can make a few dollars before the month is over.

Ooh, that was interesting. While I was typing this up, I got a call about a possible ghostwriting opportunity. He caught me off guard so I already can't remember who he was. He asked about rates and I stalled a little because I prefer bidding by project. He was insistent so I quoted him an hourly and a per word rate that may prove to be completely wrong once I find out more the work. Still, it's nice to see past efforts showing some results.