I love being a freelancer. I’ve been lucky enough to get away with it for 9 out of the past 10 years, and wouldn’t have it any other way. However, it hasn’t always been easy – especially the first few years. There were so many hard earned lessons and missed opportunities that could easily have been avoided had I known better at the time. That’s what this post is all about. Over the years, I’ve kept a running Google Doc with pasted tidbits and observations I’ve made over the years with the intention of someday encapsulating it in a blog post.
I have about 30 different tips on my list, but here are the first 15:
Always collect a retainer. This is a tough one to insist on, but a healthy way to vet serious projects from the rest. It is an industry standard in the freelance world to collect a retainer, and any potential client hiring professional services should be comfortable with it. Projects less than $8k, I usually invoice 50% before I start and 50% upon completion. For projects larger than $8k, I usually invoice $4k before I start and invoice monthly thereafter. My only exception to this is if I’ve been invited to help with a project and my role isn’t very large or well defined, and I suspect there could be a lot more work ahead if I perform well. In that case, I’m often trying to win over a larger share of the assignment (and future projects) by exceeding expectations on every front. The last thing I want to do is burnish my first impression by demanding lots of cash up-front when my value to the team hasn’t been well established yet and my assignment is relatively small.
Don’t let the contract suck the life out of the project, but always sign something. No matter how much you pay out in legal fees to review your contract, and no matter how long and carefully crafted your contract is, there will always be loopholes if it ever comes time to pick it apart in a court of law. Also, freelance contracts (mine, anyway) rarely get large enough to make it worth hiring a legal team to bring a lawsuit or legal threat to uphold a contract with a non-paying client. As an independent worker, you’re probably not retaining a large legal team at the ready to defend your position. Finally, most of my projects come from outside the United States, so the legal challenge and cost of upholding a contract with a client in another country becomes doubly complicated and expensive. Instead, I write a very simple and straightforward Statement of Work (SoW) for every project, purposely lacking excessive paragraphs of legalese. I’m also *very* careful to avoid clients I suspect will be difficult to work with. I generally draft and deliver this SoW as part of my estimate to help ensure we’re all on the same page. I write out as clearly as I can exactly what I will be doing, what the payment terms will be, what the estimated timeline will be, and what my final deliverable to the client will be. In 9 years of independent work, working with close to 80 different clients on hundreds of projects, I’ve only had trouble ONCE with a client who admits they mismanaged their cash flow and needed to delay payment. Even in their case, I trust they’re still going to pay me, and I count them as friends, so it’s not all bad.
Work night and day (no, seriously). Most people will tell you to keep work and play separated, but I say let them blur! Any serious advice about increasing your creativity or achieving goals will tell you that enjoying some rest, play or down time between stretches of focused work increases productivity. Forcing yourself into some strict work schedule just because you think you have to is a mistake, imho. Everyone has their own working style, but I tend to work in bursts, or sprints. I find that when I’m not ‘working,’ I’m still somehow subliminally chewing on different ideas, or strategies to tackle the work I need to do. When the time comes to go back to work after that time away, the answers or ideas tend to flow naturally as if they’ve already been solved on their own. It’s the same phenomenon as working all day to solve a problem without any luck, then waking up the next morning with a clear solution in mind. I think of my work capacity like breathing. If you try to hold your breath through a strict 8 hour straight work day, you’ll be stifled and get nowhere. Instead, get some work done for a few hours, then take a break for a few hours. You’ll naturally settle into your own work style, but my only recommendation is to stay flexible and avoid forcing yourself into an arbitrary work day schedule.
A similar concept applies to days of the week. I work whenever I need to work, BUT I enjoy the tremendous advantage of playing whenever I want to play. If it’s Monday morning, and I’m just not feeling the work vibe, I can pack up the car and take the family out for a day trip to hike at Devil’s Lake. Conversely, it’s Saturday afternoon and a deadline is approaching, I’m happy to work through it to get the job done. In fact, a tremendous advantage of freelancing is that you can play when everyone else is working. Why not take advantage of it?
Use a Standing Desk. The science on this one is obvious and well documented. You can spend a bunch of money, or just build something simple. When I first experimented with a standing desk, I stacked up all my old AutoCAD manuals (yeah, those 4″ thick ones..) and put a piece of plywood across to support my monitors, then used a mini coffee table to hold my keyboard and mouse. It worked great as an experiment, and I later upgraded to some cheap, quick 2×12 stands I built to sit on top of my desk to elevate the work surface.
One thing you won’t often read about with standing desks is that standing all day is just as bad for you as sitting all day. You need to mix it up. I use my padded drafting stool from architecture school because I can raise it up to a near-standing height and rest on it occasionally to switch up working positions. I could write an entire post about the many wonders and virtues of the standing desk, but I’ll summarize and just say… do it. Switch to a standing desk, and you’ll never look back.
Build yourself a tripod. The idea here is if you maintain 3 different ‘vectors’ at any given time, you’ll have a much easier time keeping your balance if one area of your business shrinks or disappears. A vector can be a major client, or some new startup idea you have, for example. If you invest all you’ve got in one vector and it doesn’t work out, you can be stuck for months seeking other opportunities. I have my freelance business, but I also own a real-world design business, Crescendo Design, that takes on several new design projects a year, just to keep it active. I also created a web property last year, Virtual Dubuque, which I continue to actively invest in and pitch projects with on a regular basis. Even though a full 80% of my work is freelancing in virtual world and game development, I purposely maintain these 2 other vectors and keep them strong enough to support full time work.
Get outside. a LOT. If all you know of me is my online representation, you could safely conclude that I’m a techie computer geek type who spends most of my time staring at a computer screen. You’d be only half right. I’m certainly a techie computer geek, but I spend nearly as much time outdoors. I’m a birder and a prairie enthusiast. I’m into native habitat restoration, and few things thrill and inspire me more than finding and exploring remnant prairies and savannas. Those who know me through those outdoor channels find it hard to believe that I even own a computer. I cherish my time outdoors, and I believe it gives me a tremendous creative advantage. If I don’t get outside every day, even for just a little while, even in the coldest depths of winter here in the northwoods, I’m just not the same person. I can’t think straight. I don’t get as much done, and my mood sours. I heard someone once call this phenomenon ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ and I think the value of time spent outdoors is widely understated in workplace performance of any stripe. It’s the air, the sun, the sounds, the psychology of existing within an expanse of space vs. confinement indoors and so much more. On balance, all of the eco hippy hemp underwear folks who wag their finger at technology for making us all stupid might do well to log in every so often. 😉 It’s all about balance.
Perpetual Retooling: Constantly Learn New Skills. This might be an industry-specific challenge for my own work in virtual worlds and games, but I suspect it applies, to a certain extent, in every tech field. As technologies advance, new platforms emerge. New skill sets are in demand, outdated skills fade away. The biggest mistake I see a lot of other developers making is clinging to a single platform. It’s like a religious obsession, and a guaranteed way to fail in an emerging industry where change is the only constant. Not only do you have to be open to change, I think the best advice is to seek it out. Try to get ahead of it. Even if you enjoy an extended period of stability on a single platform, there will probably be a steady stream of new releases and features. So often I see developers decry some new feature because they’re entrenched in a single-channel view of the platform’s status quo, only to see so many other developers take that feature and run, building better, faster and more advanced projects because of it. What doesn’t bend breaks, and if you don’t strive to continuously learn new platforms and technologies, your days of profitable independent work will be numbered.
Similarly, I suggest diversifying your skill set as much as possible. Chances are, you’ll see other independent workers hired on the same team you’re brought into to complete other kinds of tasks. In my work, I focus on architecture and 3D modeling, but there are almost always animators, riggers, scripters, server admins, custom avatar modelers, machinimatographers, and more. Last year, after completing some major assignments, I took a learning sabbatical to learn organic modeling and animation in Maya, as well as basic C# programming. I’m not in any position to offer those services professionally, but after gradually putting those skills into practice over time, I’ll soon have a newly diversified skill-set to offer.
I think this bit of advice could arguably be the most important of this post. If you don’t aggressively learn new platforms and skills, your potential market will never grow, and your chances of continuing successfully as a freelance worker will be compromised.
Networking for new business is planting, not harvesting. Be patient. The success rate of germination per seed planted seems to average somewhere around 0.05% no matter how they’re planted. So, about 1 out of every 2,000 engagements (counting any kind of engagement – retweets, likes, presentation attendees, unique blog views, etc.) will turn into a client. Of those that do germinate, they take on average 6 to 10 months to grow into a project. Sometimes they take a year, or two, or three. The key is not to get discouraged, and to constantly be reaching out to new contacts.
Make Money! Keep your eyes on the prize. You might think your goal is to make the world a better place, or transform an entire industry, or save the planet. That’s all well and good, but if you truly want to succeed, the very center of your every move should be to make money. Call me greedy or insensitive, or overly simplistic, but it’s the truth. Unless you’re enjoying a free ride on an inheritance, a wealthy spouse, living in your parent’s basement with no bills to pay, or are able to live an uncommonly minimalist monk-like lifestyle; if you don’t make money, you’ll be forced out. If, however, you can figure out how to make money, and become sustainable in your practice, then you can start thinking about those larger goals. The ability to make money is a proof-in-the-pudding filter that you have to tackle head-on if you want to work independently. Even non-profits (heck, *especially* non-profits) and charity organizations would disappear if they can’t bring in money. Every time you go to your white board and jot down your goals, the first thing you should write should be ‘Make Money.’
Health Care and Retirement Funds. Depending on the country you live in, this can be a make or break consideration for working independently. In the U.S., finding an affordable health insurance plan on your own can be a monumental nightmare. I suspect most freelance workers enjoy coverage under a spouses insurance plan, but if that isn’t the case for you, be sure to take the time to do this right. Shop around, get lots of quotes and make sure you’re covered, or you could regret it. When you do dial in on a plan, take that monthly expense and factor that into your projected annual income and be sure you can still make ends meet. Oh, and don’t forget to save for retirement too. Since you’re not enjoying any kind of fund matching or contributions through an employer, you have to be mindful of it, make a plan and stick to it. You have to create and fund your own benefits package.
Save money to bridge the gaps. Unfortunately, there are no government bail-outs for freelancers. I wager if you try to work freelance on a payment to payment basis, you won’t last long. This is a feast or famine business, and you have to stash away enough savings to straddle the periods of famine. You might be really busy for months at a time, feeling great, making bank, when suddenly a project loses funding and you’re facing a payment gap. If you haven’t been preparing for it, setting up new projects and saving up some funds to pay the bills during the down-time, you could be in big trouble. Could you survive 2 months without any pay? What about 4 months? Stretches of unpaid time are not uncommon, and the more financially prepared you are for it, the more likely you are to succeed at freelancing.
Go ahead and sign the NDA, but be wary of taking on too many top secret projects and cautious of non-compete or exclusive rights contracts. I’m not saying don’t take on top secret projects, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to approach them. Just about every project is secret at least for some duration of development until launch day. Include a paragraph in your SoW, or be very clear with your clients that you wish to publish screenshots of your work when the project is completed. Specifically, spell out how those screenshots will or won’t be annotated. Some clients really want their names on every screenshots, some don’t want their names associated with it at all. Every project, and every client, is different. Upon completion of every project, I try very hard to document and publicize the project and images as much as possible. That’s typically how I find new work and new clients. If you find yourself in a routine of perpetually taking on secret projects you can never talk about or share photos of, you could be significantly limiting your market reach. That said, some of the best work I’ve done remains buried in NDA. If I could tell you about some of the highly successful, but top secret projects developed in Second Life for Fortune 500 companies, you wouldn’t believe me. I don’t even think Linden Lab is aware of most of those success stories. Part of me still believes that NDA’s are what killed Second Life, but I digress.
Pecha Watchu? (gazoontite!) This will undoubtedly be a debatable bit of advice, and every industry is different, but simple math suggests (to me anyway) that your time can be much better spent doing work rather than chasing after all of the cliche local incubator meet-ups, luncheons, conferences and PM’s. Meeting people is great, and if you enjoy it – by all means do it. But do it because you enjoy it, not because you think you have to in order to generate project leads. Take the time you would have spent preparing and attending those and instead teach yourself a new skill, write a blog post, send a catch-up note to a colleague, or prototype that crazy new idea you’ve been noodling over. Or, spend that time courting a single client lead over coffee or lunch. In the end, you’ll come out ahead by spending that time *doing* work rather than *talking* about work and back patting. Completed projects, prototypes and online networking has a much longer tail and casts a much wider net than handing out a few business cards at a luncheon or conference.
