The Freelance Dance: Sustainable Income Balancing Long-term Clients and One-off Gigs

You're listening to. The Future is Freelance podcast, the show for solopreneurs, digital nomads and slow mats, consultants, remote workers, e-residents and everyone living a life without traditional boundaries. We're here for people who defy categorization, people who make a life and are living on their own terms. Every Freelance Friday, we bring you expert tips, inspired insights and stories from the frontiers of freelancing to help you achieve success with your borderless business, whatever success means to you as you live your life on your own terms. We know that our audience consists of a huge variety of freelancers many in Europe, others further afield who are doing all sorts of different activities to make their living. We try to make sure our content addresses all of those needs, and today we're going to unpack one subject which I think is really important to all of us, whatever we're doing to keep the lights on, and that's finding that balance of clients. Who do we do the work for? How do we get paid? How do we structure and package what we do for our clients in order to make sure we have a sustainable income? Because, at the end of the day, we all need that income. So that's what we want to look at today how to create a sustainable freelance income by finding the right balance, the right roster of clients who are going to give us that work to do hopefully, work that we love at the same time. So freelancing we've talked a lot on this show about how freelancing has been a bit strange this year. A lot of us have found various technological advances encroaching on our traditional spheres of work. Writers, in particular, designers, creatives of all sorts are feeling the threat of AI, and we've seen clients experiment. We've seen businesses go completely away from human creatives, then come back when they realise what they've given up. It's been a bit of a weird revolving door. We've also seen lots of layoffs in industry. At the same time, we've seen hiring crises in lots of industries as well, and people bringing in freelancers for things that might traditionally have gone to full-time jobs. So we're still very much an industry in a state of flux and we need to think about how we as the solopreneurs, as the businesses of one, can navigate that continual state of flux and find a way of getting through that which serves our own goals. At the end of the day, we have to put ourselves first when we're in business. So let's talk about that balance between long-term clients versus one-off geeks, because there are two different ways that we can look at our freelancing income. For me, I find there's a great deal to be said for finding long-term clients, people that you work with on a regular, really predictable basis. Now, one of the best things about that predictability is predictability of income. Let's face it, it's hard to know as a freelancer where next month's money is coming from, next quarters, sometimes when you're trying to get credit for someone and say how much you could earn next year, well, actually I have no idea. I'm a freelancer. It's basically whatever work I can pull in. If you know that you've got a long-term client who at least they need a regular blog article every month or every week, they need their newsletter designing every fortnight, you know that that is likely to be there. Well, you might have a client who you don't actually know what they're going to want you to do, but you know that whatever they need on the design front, they always come to you. So you have at least some predictability there. They come to you because they know, like and trust you, and that's one of the other huge pros about building long-term client relationships is that it is a relationship you get to know them as a person you want to support what they're trying to achieve in business. You care about making them look great in their job, because that's the best thing that you, as a freelancer, can possibly do for your client is make them look amazing, and then they will come back with their budget for more of that, because they need that on an ongoing basis, and you can only do that when you really understand what they need. And that means you can do better and better work for them. It means you can do more interesting work. It means you can anticipate the work. It means you can suggest, you can pitch things internally. What have you thought about doing this? Is this something that you might need help with? Oh, that's another department. Could you introduce me to them? And you know you can really find yourself very comfortable with a long-term client who has ongoing needs or they're going to grow, and you can grow with them. You can grow your business alongside them. So it's great to be working with long-term clients for those reasons. So are there downsides of working long-term with clients? Yes, of course there are. The main one is that you come to depend on them. Now. Interdependency is important in our relationships in life and in business, but if you end up with clients who give you a lot of work potentially several hours each week, for example, you could end up with two or three of those and feel like you've got more or less full-time roster of clients. It means that you stop looking for new opportunities. That's the risk. It's brilliant to have that work, but it means that you haven't really got capacity. If something comes along that would stretch you in a different direction or a new opportunity, you do become very dependent on those people. So if anything happens to one or two of those gigs or one of them that's come to dominate half of your time, if you have that all taken away from you which can happen in a heartbeat in freelancing, we all know that then you are very vulnerable to that. So you need to balance that need for stability against that potential risk. Another thing that can happen, of course, when you work long-term with somebody is that the work isn't that varied. The reason that I became a freelancer that many of us decided to work for ourselves, is that we crave that variety. We thrive on it, we love to experiment, we love to try new things, we love to be challenged in new ways. I was speaking to somebody once who's been doing the same social media role for about four years and she's about to quit because she just cannot write any more tweets about that particular business. She's just absolutely completely stagnated on it and she knows she needs to get out because she has to do something with more variety in it. The other thing that can stagnate, as well as your mojo and your creativity, is your rates. Incidentally, she is still charging that client the same rate that she was four years ago. She hasn't really got the capacity to ask them for more money at the moment and the only way she can raise that rate is to pitch somebody else and she will. And she'll get it because rates have changed in four years and she knows that her skills are developed as well. She's worth a lot more. When you work long-term for somebody, there is a risk that you can stagnate in lots of different ways and you can take your eye off the ball of what's going on in your market. If you find that you've got what amounts to a part-time job with one client, you might not be aware of what their competitors are doing, what the threats are in their industry, what the opportunities are. It can stop you having that business mindset of keeping an eye on what's out there on the horizon that could work for or against you. Should you go after gigs, then? Should you work more sporadically, one project at a time? Well, yes and no. Of course, that has pros and cons too. Now I love doing one-off projects for lots of reasons. They give me diversity and different skill development. They help me improve my portfolio. It means that I get the chance to write about new things, to learn about new things, to meet new people. All of that is fun and it's inspiring. It's energizing. It makes you think about things in new ways that you can bring back to that regular client. I think I've seen this synergy here, or I had this new idea, something that came out of something that came from a one-off gig. I think that's the way that your long-term value improves for your regular clients. I find that variety is something I never want to give up. You can sometimes ask for higher rates for short-term projects, particularly if they are true one-offs that have lasting value for that client. I love writing white papers for text startups, for example. They might just need that once or twice in their product development cycle and then that's it for years. They're then working with that one product that doesn't really change and they're just basically adding users off the back of that. Or it could be something that they need once a year. I'd actually put that in the regular client bucket, but it does mean that for that one-off, short-term work you can charge a lot more highly. Or I have another product where I develop key messaging strategies for clients. Now that's something that they should review every few years, but generally in the startup cycle it's done as a bit of a one-off. I can charge a lot for that because it's a really crucial strategic product that they will use internally for a long time and they will also use it to hire frankly, cheaper freelancers to create a lot of their messaging using that strategy which I've developed for them. That's absolutely fine. It means that we can each niche into our individual roles and that creates opportunities for freelancers to work in different ways and to move through that cycle. I know the value I bring and I'm very happy to do that on a one-off basis, though I have to block off time for that around regular work and around other commitments, because I know it will be a deep and intense piece of work that I will have to charge a lot of money for so. Sporadic gigs are brilliant for that and they also give you that flexibility. If you do have some long-term client work going on, but then you have an opportunity to travel to an event or you want to take some downtime or you need to deal with some personal stuff, you can simply back off from pitching the one-off stuff for a little while, especially if you had it a quarter of a month before and while the feast was on. You can put some money in the bank. You can afford to give yourself that space to deal with whatever you have to deal with future. That's why one-off gigs are great. One-off gigs are also problematic and if you become overly reliant on them, the biggest problem no surprise at all is income unpredictability. When you really don't know where your next paycheck is coming from, it's really difficult and it affects your ability to pitch. It affects your ability to live and sleep. If you're a breadwinner, you really need to have some predictable income because otherwise that stress that that creates can permeate everything. It can affect your credit ability in the marketplace. If it seeps into your communications, to your manner, that you are desperate for income, it's very hard to not let that show. If you're completely reliant on one-off gigs, spontaneous, sporadic income, then that can create an unpredictability that makes you deeply uncomfortable. It's very hard. Personally, I find it very hard not to let that show, and so I'm determined never to let my business get back into that situation Again. There's also a sense that you'll do anything where you'll take stuff that's really outside of your zone of excellence, so you charge a bit less for it, or it takes you a lot longer than you thought, or you accept a rate that you're really not happy with, simply because of that income need. That's why it's important not to be too reliant on these one-off gigs. You also have to spend a lot of time time you do not get paid for on that hunting and gathering when you should be cooking and eating. I would say to every freelancer you always need to spend some time on that, building your reputation, working your inbound media, making sure that you're constantly out there at least just keeping an eye on and probably pitching, just to keep your pipeline full. The balance can get seriously out of whack when you're doing that for every single gig and it's quite hard to build in to your pricing what you need to in order to reflect that time spent having to market yourself for every single project. You might think you're making a great margin on a one-off gig because it is a one-off, but then you look at how many hours it took you to win it versus how many hours it took you to win that long-term client you've been working with for three years, then actually the cost of that marketing time isn't nearly reflected in the rate that you're charging for that one-off gig. So it's really important to balance that and to understand what that can cost you, particularly as you don't develop those deep client relationships. And when you just do one of stuff. You know sometimes you can do an amazing creative piece of work and you might you feel very invested in it in the moment because you're giving it your all and you're doing an amazing job and at the end of it you know idea what the outcome is and you might sort of you set up a google to see how did they get funded off that amazing pitch deck you wrote for them, but then you never hear from them again and you really wonder whether they're still trading or what's going on or is somebody In fire. What happened in that organization? And for me the personal relationships that I build. Long term clients Also valuable, and that's a big downside of these one off gigs that sometimes you don't know what the outcome is of that very intense effort that you put in for them. I mean, that's freelancing, that's how it goes. You so did you pay for it? What they do with that is is up to them, but it's just a personal thing for me that I really like to know what the outcome was and what the added value was from my work. Again, I'm coming at this from my personal perspective of the balance that I like to find in my business and sometimes it swings a little bit more one way, sometimes the other. But the point is that for you it's going to be unique and you need to find that way to balance for you between the flexibility in your work with the need for predictability and you need to find ways to navigate that when you feel it getting out of whack. And Maybe, if you have a sense that something's unbalanced in your business, even though it's been a good month or whatever, it could be that what's become unbalanced is this this pivot point between the stable, predictable income and client relationships on one side and the spontaneous, fun, nightmare deadline stuff on the other side. So that might be something that you need to pay on going attention to. Now, one thing that sometimes come up when we talk about these kind of long term client relationships is the role of formal retainers and contracts. This is an interesting question, is something I do get asked about. It's something I almost never do with clients and I don't have any clients under formal retainer at the moment. I haven't for the last year or so. Why is that? Well, let's look at what retainer is first of all. Generally, it is a contract for availability or deliverables over a certain longer period of time. So a retainer agreement might be written with a freelancer over. It would have to be a minimum of quarter to be meaningful. It might be for up to a year and it could be for x number of hours per week or per month. It could be for a certain number of deliverables, like a newsletter weekly, for example. The idea of a retainer is that somebody has that time blocked out in advance contractually and they have that availability from you. Whatever else is going on in your life or in their life, they're going to pay you for that work. That's great in terms of predictability of income, because it's great as a freelancer to say, yeah, I know, for the next six months I'm going to be earning x from this client and it means you don't have to spend time acquiring that client. So just talking about it effectively makes your rate more competitive and it does mean that you build that relationship, just as with any long term client. It's excellent. Of course, it greatly reduces your flexibility. There are times when I've worked on a retained basis and it's almost like having a job, a part time job that might have a role in your mix, in your personal blend. But you need to be careful that You're not becoming over reliant on that one client, because that retainer will end at the end of six months. You might think it's all going amazingly and that they're certain to review and then, well, hang on a minute, they're not renewing with you because and you can no idea why because you're a freelancer, you're really not in that strategic decision. You're a guest in this channel or you're working with just one or two contacts and you feel like you know what's going on in that organization but you don't have any long term dependable relationship with them. And, of course, if you are retained on that basis, it limits your potential to take other opportunities. It might even limit your potential to take a holiday, frankly, because the way it often works is that that you hold that time in readiness for them, whether they need it or not. Somebody like to Working like a medic on call. You know you have to be free and you have to live a certain distance from the hospital, otherwise you have to go and sleep there because you might be needed when siren goes off and there's an emergency coming in, you have to be ready to go and do that work. So you can't socialize, you can't have a drink, you can't move a certain distance away because that time is bought and paid for. Even if you don't spend the time, you might spend it Reading and relaxing and ready for that siren. So it's not your time when you sell it in a retainer. Now I want to share one anecdote with you from a freelancer I spoke to recently who's coming towards the end of retainer, which is for six months and it was for content delivery and it was based on a certain number of hours per week and she has been invoicing that client every month and she's going to put her last invoice in this month or next month for the end of this contract. But the problem is they haven't been using the hours in the way that they thought they would. So they negotiated with her based on the previous six months work we think we need X number of hours per month and will agree a rate with you. She gave them a site discount against that rate for the predictability which you know, because you do trade that off against the fact that you don't have to go and acquire that work every month. But they haven't always used her capacity and most retainer agreements are very sensibly written that that capacity doesn't roll over. You can't get to the end of the six months and find that you owe them 70 hours or something. That will be a nightmare. So you have to have it that it doesn't roll over. And she has felt awkward invoicing for that full amount and she doesn't know she needs to have that conversation about whether the client feels awkward too about it, because if she had a lean month like that, when they were previously working on a month to month deliverable basis, she would simply have invoiced with them for the work done. They had a quiet month, she had less income, but she felt a greater sense of reciprocity and she's very concerned that that's going to impact on the relationship after the retainer period. They're obviously not going to renew it on the present terms Because there's this growing sense of awkwardness that her services are not required in the same way and she is already looking towards the new year To having to replace that client completely because she feels that it's really not going well. So I think for me that's one of the reasons I don't like working on a retainer basis with clients, because I know that the clients I tend to work with their needs very hugely month by month. Anyway, what I do say to clients is if you work with me regularly, you will get my priority attention and when you do have a month where you need a ton of stuff or you need a big one-off project or you have a big strategic thing going on and you need me to step up and get involved in that and consult, then I'm there for you because you give me regular work. I understand your business and your priorities. I actually know that that particular thing is coming up anyway because I'm aware of your longer-term goals and I'm aligned with those. So you get me first. If there are clients I will check in with every month. If I haven't heard from them, what are we going to need this month so I can make sure I build that time in for them. They don't need to put me in the golden handcuffs of a retainer in order to do that. Because we have that interpersonal relationship and, frankly, if we did write a retainer contract, it's probably going to be unenforceable anyway. Most of my clients are international. It's not going to be If they suddenly turned around halfway through that six months and said no, actually we realize we don't need what you're offering anymore. There's very little you can do as a freelancer. If it's corporate, they're going to have a legal department. They will find a way to make sure you don't have to get paid for it. So, frankly, I'd rather not have that contract in place in the first place. I'd rather not have somebody use it as leverage to try and beat my rates down, because it's still going to take me the same amount of time to write. I do not give a volume discount. I don't scale as a writer and I know that if I work regularly for someone I will get more efficient at it. Then that's my business, quite literally. I will make sure that they still get the same value out of every piece I create for them, so they're not going to get a reduced amount from me. What they will get if they work with me regularly is my priority and they will get me anticipating their needs. They will get me checking in with them before I take on other stuff. Occasionally I've had really nice big juicy, one-off projects or opportunities dangled my way or things that include a lot of travel or commitment, and I will check in with the regulars I'm expecting to hear from first to make sure that they don't need something from me so that I won't let them down. And for me, that's the way I prefer to structure things. That's the way I offer that reliability to long-term clients. So that's up to you to think about. If you like the idea of a retainer, then go for it. Think very carefully about the wording. Look for model documents. Look for agreements that are at least in some way legally recognized in the jurisdiction way your client is based, because that's likely to be where it would be enforced if it ever had to be. Talk to your client about what they need from you. Is it that you're always free on Mondays to do stuff. Is it that what they really are budgeting for is one new I don't know a web layout every month, or one new app or something, if you can try to structure it around deliverables rather than outputs? But obviously you need to make sure that you don't have that rolling over to subsequent months. You need to make sure that you then manage that relationship differently because, in the terms of my friend, the one who thinks that the retainer is not going to renew she's been chasing this client at the end of every month saying look, I'm going to be enforcing you next week, as per our agreement, but just as an FYI, you still have this surplus capacity and I could get this done for you next week If you let me know today what you need. She's been managing that relationship increasingly awkwardly because he's not been responsive and he obviously hasn't got the work for her. But it then changes the relationship between you and your client. For me. That's one of the reasons that I don't like to work in that way. I'll be chasing my client anyway at the beginning of the month saying what do you need from me? Making sure, if you're one of my regulars, that I have that time that I can block it out for you that I can still create all the content I want for the future as freelance, making sure I still have time to work on remote work Europe, which is my own startup, and making sure I have time to keep all of my regular clients happy. So retainers have a role definitely in structuring this, but they are one part of the blend and that blend can work in lots of different ways. I'll give you another example. There's one publication I write for regularly and on their behalf I look after a number of client relationships and their clients have a contract for X number of sponsored articles over a year. So then it's up to me to both to liaise with that client but also to manage the time and make sure that they stay on their contract and we get all of those articles written over the year. But if I have one-off stuff or travel or live things I want to do, I can build that around it and I can tell those sponsored clients that I'm available on this date but not on another. To me that's a great way of achieving that flexibility, whilst also I have predictability that I know I'm looking after these contracts for them, albeit while they're renewed. Anyway, it's up to me to manage that relationship. But exactly what hours I work, even the number of pieces that I write each month for them is very much under my control. Obviously, it's under the client and their subject matter experts. Nobody else is controlled, and the time that I spend administering that side of things and the herding of various cats has to be built into the value equation for me. But in terms of what that gives me the predictability of income versus the flexibility of timing, that one makes the cut in terms of my business at the moment. And that's what it's all about really. It's figuring out what you need, what you need personally in terms of how you do your best work, that level of unpredictability, that edge that keeps you thinking, that keeps you motivated, that keeps you hunting, that keeps you aware of what's going on in your industry, that keeps you wanting to pay attention to what's out there, because you don't feel complacent, you don't feel that it feels like you've got a job and everything's known to you, so that if you do lose one of those long-term clients, you also don't feel completely cut adrift either. You know that you have other stuff going on. You know you have other leads in your pipeline. You know that you I mean I've been in the position with really great clients where if I've lost a big client, I've then immediately said to another client look, can you help me? Do you know anybody? Because right now I need to replace this income and rather than that being part of a sort of sustainable, predictable cycle of asking them for testimonials and recommendations, I've gone to them on an interpersonal level and said look, please, can you. And they've come up with internal referrals or recommendations, or let's get on a call and brainstorm about it, because they're people who know me and know my work and know my needs and know what's going on in my personal life and vice versa, and I would do the same for them. So building those long-term relationships is vital for me, but also so is having that variety and that stimulation and that openness to new things, because I'm a futurist. There are people I'm going to be working for next year who I don't know about yet, and that's really exciting. They haven't formed their startup yet, or the technology that they're going to be using doesn't exist yet, and that will always keep me motivated. So my personal balance is going to be along that spectrum. It's always going to be a blend, and that's the thing about the futurist freelance. We've always encouraged our listeners to not think about a dichotomy where you've got nine to five sorted permanent job for life at one end and one gig after another at the other. That's not what freelancing is about. It's about that entire spectrum. So you can start to shift along that spectrum anytime you like. Even if you're in the nine to five paradigm right now, you could start to think more entrepreneurially. You could start to look at maybe a bit of consulting on the side, a little bit of a hustle, a change of direction. There are all sorts of things you can do to move along that spectrum. That might reach the point where you end up going part-time at your current job and that provides your stable, long-term client income and that frees you up to do the spontaneous gig type stuff While you figure out what it is you've got to offer or what value you can bring to other clients. You can move further along it with moving into consulting, maybe moving into a non-execrol consulting on a long-term basis, an interim position, a fractional board position, for example that can give you that long-term stability whilst you build a freelance business and then further along that you have the retainers, then you have the long-term relationships, underpinned by interpersonal connections, which is kind of where I'm at at the moment, and all of that balanced out by the availability, the opportunism of those spontaneous one-off gigs, because they will always be a cornerstone of freelancing. And I would say anybody can have a portfolio career and I strongly advise people to do that, rather than have that one nine to five which could be taken away. Remember how many layoffs we've seen in technology in the last 18 months, for example. So if you are completely dependent on that one basket of eggs, then for me that's too risky. I think if you really want to be employed, it's probably better to have a couple of different part-time contracts going on and to have your eye on the horizon anyway and keep your LinkedIn up to date, because you just don't know. So what you can do is find your personal comfort level, really stress. Test things a bit just in your own mind. What if I lost this one? What if this happened? What if this big project doesn't get funded that I've done all this work for? On their marketing? What if? What if it's really important to do this just as part of your own risk assessment for your business. Don't forget. You are a business. Even if part of your money comes from employment, even if part of your money comes from a retainer, they're not your business. All of those things can be taken away from you in a heartbeat. You don't ever want to make yourself dependent on other people in that way, so I really encourage you to do this kind of review from time to time. We're coming up towards the end of the year. It's been an interesting year, certainly in the freelancing space, and we'll be reflecting on that a little bit more in upcoming episodes and what 2024 might hold for the future of freelancing. But for now I'd encourage you to maybe just audit where your incomes come from over this year. How much of that is from long-term relationships, how much of it is from one-off gigs, how much of that time you feel that you spent. You know you haven't got time sheets probably to look at, but you know in your own mind and your own heart which of those things came at you out of sheer opportunity that you couldn't see coming, which things did you fight for and pitch for, and which things that did you simply open yourself up to the opportunity for by prep work that you had done without a specific aim in mind, because all of these will feed that balance. All of these will inform where your next year's work is going to come from, where that income will come from. You will find your way to fill your freelancing business with the right blend for you of retainers, regulars, irregular, brand new opportunities that you did not see coming. But you have that availability for, and that capacity for, and that agility to be able to say, yeah, okay, that sounds interesting. I'll figure out a way to fit that in, because I do have that flexibility in my life, even if something else has to give, and that's why we love freelancing. After all, however in demand you become, however many regulars want to retain you with the golden handcuffs, don't forget the craving for spontaneity and variety that may have driven you into working for yourself in the first place, and remember that you're in control. It's your future of freelancing, it's your business, it's your life. At the end of the day, this is your lifestyle business and, whatever you do even if you do decide to take on that extra thing for the short term because it really inspires you or because you really want to help out that wonderful client who's had your back all year. Either of those is a good reason to burn the candle at both ends for a little bit, but remember at the end of the day, that candle is actually you and your energy and your capacity. That's where I'll leave it, I think. Just permission to remember that, to put yourself first, to build the business that works for you in terms of your activities and who you do them for and on what basis. Thank you for listening to the Future is Freelance podcast. We appreciate your time and attention in a busy world and your busy freelance life. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a fellow freelancer and help us grow this movement of independent entrepreneurs. If you rate and review the Future is Freelance in whichever app you're listening to right now, it really helps spread the word and that means we can reach more people who need to hear this message. Together, we can change the world and make sure the future is freelance, don't forget. You can check out all our back episodes from other seasons and learn more over at futureisfreelancexyz. We're so grateful, not only for our listeners, but for the contributions of our wonderful guests and for the production and marketing assistance of coffee like media. This is Maya Midlemish, wishing you freelance freedom and happiness until our next show.