A while back, I had an uncomfortable interaction with a would-be client.
It was negotiation time. I gave my rate. We discussed. We agreed on a slightly lower rate.
Then the communication became dodgy. Very dodgy.
They asked for something that sounded a lot like a freebie. I repeated their request back to them. Is this what they meant? I mentioned my rate for the alleged freebie. I asked them one other question.
They responded, answering just the other question. Danced a little around the first question without answering directly.
Decision time for me. Do I proceed, assuming they agreed to my rate? Or do I repeat my first question, wording it so they understood I was expecting money?
Because this very scenario was my first lesson learned in freelancing (the hard way), I knew the answer.
I repeated my question and reiterated my terms.
They responded, confirming my suspicions. They had wanted it for free.
[bctt tweet=”Freelance Life Lesson #1: Never Assume Anything That Isn’t Clear.” username=”LoriWidmer”]
The negotiations didn’t die, however. I offered an alternative: a one-off project (they were wanting ongoing). If they were happy with the results, we’d go ahead and sign an agreement. They accepted.
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That ended much better than the client who had signed a contract agreeing to my rate only to tell me later “We don’t see the difference between this project type and that one, so we’re going to pay you the lower rate for both.”
My choices in that scenario: do I push back or do I keep my mouth shut and buy their story that one type of writing is identical to another?
Thanks to another lesson learned years earlier, I knew what to do.
I referred them to the payment section of the article. Then I sent them the final invoice for our work together.
[bctt tweet=”Freelance Life Lesson #2: Don’t Let Anyone Use Guilt or Argument to Change Contract Terms.” username=”LoriWidmer”]
The invoice was paid, and I moved on. They came back once, but eventually realized I had boundaries — one of which was never work with people who will opt for the lower rate and not the higher (still bugs me that they didn’t care that they were seriously underpaying for the first project).
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The invoice wasn’t always paid in every client case, however. There was a client who seemed to hold back payment until I agreed to another project. If it had happened only once, I’d never have noticed. But it happened every time. The check would arrive a week after I agreed to a new project. I even tested my hypothesis once, leaving him hanging for an extra week (telling him I’d get right back to him after I finished a large project I’d been working on) before agreeing. One week after I finally said yes, the check arrived.
The relationship was becoming tedious. He would hold off paying me if there were minor edits. He’d invent edits, using the tired phrase “numerous issues” to describe one misplaced comma or a “form” instead of “from” mistake. He was beginning to talk to me as though I were his employee. Respect wasn’t there, and I wasn’t interested any longer.
Yet that payment he was holding in escrow — what if he didn’t pay?
My choices were: cut ties, send an invoice and hope for the best, or; cut ties and send an invoice that set due dates and late fees.
I did the latter. The invoice was paid, though he did give me a parting shot (to show who was in control, I suspect) by paying it a day after it was due. Without late fees.
[bctt tweet=”Freelance Life Lesson #3: Protect and Ensure Payment By Creating a Strong Invoice Process.” username=”LoriWidmer”]
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Sometimes though, it’s not the invoice that’s the problem. Sometimes, it’s the rate.
One of my first online gigs was a home page rewrite. The guy was nice, fun, and poor. So I lowered my rate on the promise that I’d be sent more work when and if he ever got his business off the ground. And no, I didn’t expect it to happen, but the job was really easy — one hour of my life.
He loved it. He paid me the same day.
Soon he was back — not with work for me, but with a referral. His mom needed website content. Not a revision of one page, but 14 pages or so of fresh content.
I called her and her business partner. We talked about what they needed. Yep, new content to go on a new website. I gave them my rate, which was substantially higher than the few hundred bucks her son had paid.
Her response: “I thought you were cheap. We can’t afford that.”
End of conversation.
My choice: lower the rate dramatically or stick to it and lose a client.
[bctt tweet=”Freelance Life Lesson #4: The Price You Charge Begets the Type of Clients You Will Work With.” username=”LoriWidmer”]
Imagine how my mother would feel to hear someone say her daughter was “cheap.” Losing that client was a good thing. The response showed they weren’t about to value what I was selling.
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Every time we face an uncomfortable or strange situation, we have the opportunity to learn something — about running a business and about standing up for ourselves. The life lessons never end, but over time, we get better at them.
Writers, what are some of the life lessons you’ve learned?
Think of one situation where you were forced to make a tough decision. How did you handle it? What was the outcome?
2 responses to “4 Freelance Writing Life Lessons I’ve Learned (that you can learn, too)”
My very first freelance project taught me a lot. Mostly about how some “clients” prey on young, new freelancers. What I soon realized was he wanted someone to ghostwrite articles that he only paid for if they were published—and how much he paid depended on his own very complex formula.
Did his formula place values on the time I spent researching and writing? No. He placed numeric values on the TYPE of publication (commercial, trade), the publication’s paid circulation, a separate value for it’s pass-along readership, and even the ad rates the publication charged, and word count. I think there were additional values – maybe national vs regional, glossy vs newsprint, color or black and white photos. By his formula, the first (only) piece should have paid $3,000, but the publication was a custom publication, so he gave it the lower “trade” value, which cut the rate a lot. I argued that the custom publication when to a highly targeted base of CONSUMERS. I think we disagreed on other parts of his formula – he initially said he’d pay around $800 or something, but after I used his own formula to further confuse him, we finally settled on $1,000. (Honestly, the $3,000 seemed like pie in the sky considering the hardest part of the project was dealing with the business owner.) He issued a vague threat that arguing I was owed more than his initial offer would jeopardize further work for his company, but I wasn’t THAT stupid. I told him, in writing, I would never again consider working for anyone with such a needlessly confusing pricing system.
Quick update: I wound up getting my first really nice clip from that experience, and that guy’s business tanked.
Wow. That’s the most confusing payment algorithm I’ve ever heard of. And I’m with you — custom pubs get better readership demographics. No wonder he folded — he doesn’t sound like he knew his market very well.
I had a client once offer to pay me “for the portion of the article I use” — which meant if he used 1,000 words out of 2,500, I’d have wasted a lot of time. When I said that writing a 2,000-word piece and getting paid for 500 wasn’t what I had in mind, he said he doubted that would happen.
And he wasn’t willing to sign a contract of any sort. He “hadn’t needed one” with his other writers, he said. Right. That’s where we parted company.
Oh, and he’s the one who said he “rounded down” the amount owed. So if I wrote 1,549 words, I’d get paid for 1,500.
That could be why he was looking for new writers….