Psychic Ability: The Best Skill a Freelancer Can Have

Being a freelancer these days has a lot of perks: you make your own work schedule and you can work from the comfort of your home, thus you can avoid messy office politics, getting stuck in commuter traffic and blowing your ever-shrinking “gig economy” earnings on a “business casual” wardrobe and workplace lunches.

Sure, there are some challenges to freelancing, like convincing clients that your rates are reasonable while they plead poverty or hide behind budget cuts, or getting them to pay you on time (or at all), or having to diplomatically push back on their requests for additional revisions or input that they don’t feel they should have to pay extra for.

Still, the biggest challenge I’ve found as a freelancer is my lack of psychic ability.

If you’re a freelancer, you may have noticed that your clients tend to fall into two categories:

  • Small businesses that need to hire you because they don’t have the in-house talent to do what you do (e.g., marketing, Web development, etc.).
  • Middle managers in mid- to large-size companies that have downsized their marketing or IT departments into oblivion who need you to help them get the work done (without having to offer you a steady salary or benefits).

Champagne Dreams on a Spam Budget

Small business clients don’t like budgeting for anything outside of their company’s inventory, so when they reach the painful conclusion that they need to hire you to help increase their brand’s visibility, your biggest challenge is usually managing their expectations.

Even if you find yourself pricing their projects on the low end of your rate scale and they can only offer you a limited amount of work, some clients will expect your handiwork to deliver astounding results in record time.

This is when the fun starts. With some small business clients, you can expect one or both of the following outcomes:

(a) You will spend the next three months asking for your money.

(b) Your client will continue to ask/expect you to do more work outside of the scope of your original agreement until they feel they got an adequate return on their investment. Some of us foolishly keep feeding this beast in the hope that someday these clients will actually pay us for the original work.

If you were psychic, you could avoid a lot of aggravation by knowing ahead of time who won’t pay you or who will likely run you into the ground making you “earn” your money.

I May Not Know What I Want…But I Know What I Don’t Want

Sometimes it’s easier to work with mid- or large-size businesses, because the  manager who hires you is more likely to process your invoice…unless they are so overworked that they keep forgetting to do so (which happens more often than is acceptable). Still, as long as they have the budget, you’re not likely to get any push-back or experience unreasonable haggling.

The biggest challenge of freelancing for larger companies is that the mid-level managers who tend to hire you are so overworked that even though they desperately need your help, they often don’t have the time to provide you with what you need to do the job right.

As their hired gun, you’re priority No. 59 on their long to-do lists…way below assisting their VPs and other important business stakeholders, planning the company United Way drive, booking their vacations, arranging their bimonthly date nights with their spouses, finding babysitters for their children or getting their dogs groomed.

Sometimes these clients don’t even know what they’re asking for, while other times all they know is what they don’t want. And woe to the freelancer who receives limited guidance and inadvertently submits what they don’t want.

These clients expect you to have the skill to write or develop exactly what they would, if they only had the time. So what if they’ve had months or years to become well-acquainted with their company’s business objectives, and to attend company-sponsored training and meetings on a regular basis when you haven’t? You oughta know what they’re looking for, anyway, dammit!

The Phantom Lucrative Project

Another potential pitfall of being hired by a large company is one I call “the phantom lucrative project.” A typical scenario involves you blocking out weeks to do a job after being hired by a large, reputable company. Sometimes, you’ll be so happy you got the gig that you’ll celebrate by going on a shopping spree for laptops, patio furniture…or food, if things have been tight for you financially of late.

Then, you hear nothing more from them. When you contact your client, you are given excuses as to why the project is being delayed (e.g., they were on vacation, the project still needs approvals that your client wasn’t aware weren’t in place when he or she hired you, etc.).

The fact that you turned down smaller projects to work on their mega-project doesn’t resonate with them. After all, these people get paid even when they’re working on their tans in Cabo.

Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you’ll wait for weeks to start the project only to be told that it’s been canceled (again, for any number of reasons from budget cuts, to the need to move resources to a more important project, or the project has been mothballed so long it’s actually now irrelevant…or the sponsor was terminated).

Having the psychic intuition to avoid these phantom projects would help keep you that much further away from financial ruin.

Having a pay-or-play deal in place would also help. Unfortunately, unless you have a waiting list of clients or you’re regularly profiled by the top trade media in your field, that ship won’t sail. Your prospective client will just move on to another freelancer who will agree to grant the company the option of leaving them hanging without compensation. Ah, the joys of working in the “gig economy.”

Since I wasn’t born with psychic ability, I’ve decided that the best gift I can receive this Christmas is a crystal ball that can offset my psychic shortcomings…or better yet, a winning mega-jackpot lottery ticket that would get me out from under the freelancer-client bus for good.

The Twenty-First Century Freelancer Redefined

Merriam-Webster defines the word freelance as follows:

noun free·lance \ˈfrē-ˌlan(t)s\

  1. usually free lance : a mercenary soldier especially of the Middle Ages : condottiere
  2. a person who acts independently without being affiliated with or authorized by an organization
  3. a person who pursues a profession without a long-term commitment to any one employer

That definition may still apply to some professions, like the aforementioned mercenaries, but a twenty-first century freelance writer or designer would probably define the word as follows:

A creative entrepreneur who pursues their profession without a long-term commitment to any one employer: frequently required to do additional work for free…often stands a better chance of being lanced by a mercenary soldier of the Middle Ages than being paid a living wage.

Of course, we don’t start out feeling that way. When I was exiled from my corporate management perch after my company was acquired by a competitor a couple of years ago, I didn’t panic.

I set up an LLC and decided that my displacement was a blessing; it was finally time for me to reap the substantial financial benefits that awaited someone with my years of communications and marketing experience. I was ready to take those recession lemons and squeeze them into entrepreneurial lemonade. The sky was the limit!

I soon realized that the sky had nothing to do with the limit; “how low can you go?” is actually the measured limit. Look, I’m fine with negotiating a fair freelance or consultant rate, but when you’re routinely offered less money than what Apple sweatshop workers in China earn, it’s hard to feel that optimistic.

Tales from the Script

Aside from having to compete with the bargain-basement freelancers found on Upwork (the cut-rate lovechild of Elance and oDesk) and the like, I have had to deal with the usual client nightmares:

* Clients that blow their substantial website redesign budget on an agency that knows nothing about creating optimized content…and then being asked to fix the mess, despite their now limited funds.

* Entrepreneurs who want to offer me an “exciting” opportunity to get in on the ground floor of their start-up…at a fraction of my rate (one guy even wanted me to work for free) with vague promises of a financial payoff down the road.

* “Prospective clients” who are really just picking your brain, so they can figure out how do the work themselves.

* Clients who hire you for one job and then casually ask you to “look over” something else, if “you’re not too busy.”

* Clients who want to barter for services. (As much as I would like a past life regression reading, it’s not going to pay my bills, unfortunately).

*Corporate clients who hire you for a sizable project with an aggressive deadline only to delay getting the project off the ground…and/or keep you hanging on for weeks only to kill the project down the road.

This can be a financially deadly situation, especially when, in your excitement at landing a profitable gig, you turn down other work to handle the promised lucrative workload.

* Then there are the “resume/portfolio builder” clients who offer the “opportunity” to work for little or no money with the promise that the work you do for them now will help you earn more money down the road.

Fortunately, my mature age and lengthy resume has protected me from these predators (for now); they typically prey on younger freelancers. Word to the wise: falling for this ruse too often will guarantee that you’ll be sleeping on your parents’ sofa well into middle age.

Pay or Play?

There isn’t an experienced freelancer or consultant alive who hasn’t been jerked around when it comes to payment.

Small businesses sometimes take a while to pay, especially when they’re having a bad month or quarter. While that can be frustrating, there’s really no excuse for corporate decision-makers who park your invoice under their donut or morning coffee; after all, these people would shriek like frightened children if their biweekly paycheck wasn’t direct-deposited into their bank accounts on time, so why do they think it’s okay to delay your payday?

We freelancers typically love what we do and take great pride in the work we create for our clients. Still, just because we’re passionate about our work doesn’t mean we expect to eke out an “all-work-no-pay” existence. Do unto freelancers as you would have them do unto you.

What do you think fellow freelance working stiffs? How would you define your profession, and what funny or frustrating experiences have you endured?