The Freelancer’s Bible by Sara Horowitz and Toni Sciarra Poynter

#literature #seedling

Citation

Horowitz, Sara, and Toni Sciarra Poynter. The Freelancer’s Bible: Everything You Need to Know to Have the Career of Your Dreams―On Your Terms. Workman Publishing Company, 2012.

Quotes

Collations

Literature notes

title: The Freelancer's Bible
aliases:

To Do

Preferred Skills

Other Skills

Top-rated skills

Specialize

Learn multiple specialties

(annual salary + annual expenses + annual profit) ÷ annual billable work hours = your basic hourly rate

180,000 + 132,000 + 36000 = 348,000

348,000 ÷ 1,004 = 346

Chapter 3 - Your Freelance Portfolio

4 Levels

Level 1 - The Blue Chips

Level 2 - Growth Investments

Level 3 - One-Shots and Long Shots

Level 4 - New Ventures and Growth

3 Goals

Goal 1 - Have enough clients of the right kind: not too few and not more than you can handle, who pay well and/or can advance your career in some way.

Goal 2 - Bring in enough steady income to reduce cash flow highs and lows.

Goal 3 - Meet your total income goals.

optimal clients + steady cash flow + meeting your income goals = balanced freelance portfolio

Remember the mantra of the balanced Freelance Portfolio: a client mix that delivers maximum value for your time and effort.

The Life-Quality Quiz

  1. Somewhat disagree 2
  2. Somewhat agree 3
  3. Strongly agree 4
  4. Strongly agree 4
  5. Somewhat disagree 2
  6. Strongly agree 4
  7. Somewhat disagree 2
  8. Strongly agree 4
  9. Somewhat agree 3
  10. Somewhat agree 3
  11. Somewhat agree 3
  12. Somewhat agree 3
  13. Somewhat disagree 2
  14. Somewhat disagree 2
  15. Somewhat agree 3
  16. Somewhat disagree 2
  17. Strongly agree 4
  18. Somewhat agree 3
  19. Strongly agree 4
  20. Somewhat agree 3

1-4 (Personal Life): 13 (keep going!)

5-8 (Your Body and Mind): 12 (uneven satisfaction)

9-12 (Your Work Life): 12 (uneven satisfaction)

13-16 (Financial Life): 9 (uneven satisfaction)

17-20 (Living in the World): 14 (keep going!)

Chapter 17 - Your Safety Nets

  1. Study health insurance
  2. Create a bank account for the four: Expenses, Taxes, Emergencies, and Retirement
  3. Research how you can best save for retirement.

Introduction

Map

Keeping connected is key for your success.

If freelancers don’t stand up together to be counted, they may not be counted at all.

Kinds Of Freelancers

1. Independent Contractor (aka freelancer, consultant, sole proprietor): You obtain clients on your own and provide them with a product or service.

2. Temp Employee (via a temp agency): You work for a temp agency that assigns you to work at a client’s site.

3. Contract Employee: You work for a company that serves other firms under a contract. You work for one client at a time, usually on-site.

4. Day Laborer: You gather with other workers in your industry and wait for an employer to pick up to work that day.

Most Common Problems Of Freelancers

Don’t Compare Yourself To Regular Workers

When you start freelancing, the roller-coaster ride of freelance cash flow can be scary and stressful. It’s important to realize that freelancing is its own animal, entirely different from regular paid work, with its own mindset and methods.

"You can’t keep comparing your work and income to people who have salaries. If you do, you’ll never feel good about yourself."

Cash flow fluctuations is part of the job

Everything takes longer than you think (landing gig, doing gig, and getting paid)

How to deal with cash flow fluctuations?

The Four Opportunities

  1. Security
  2. Sustainability
  3. Leverage
  4. Community

The Freelance Life

On a typical freelance workday, you move back and forth on the spectrum outlined below.

  1. Getting Started
  2. Getting Work
  3. Growing Your Business
  4. Managing Your Business
  5. Your Business and Your Community

Some days it might feel like you’re scrambling to keep up. But on the good days, it’s invigorating, liberating, and fun. And you wouldn’t trade your freelance life for anything.

Chapter 1: Seven Start-Up Steps

Map

There are no perfect freelancers. But there are smart ones.

Step 1: Know why you’re freelancing

Benefits of knowing your goals

Do your dreams and reality match?

"Look at your industry realities squarely against your dream lifestyle."

Freelancing’s inherent flexibility may offer unprecedented freedom to live your life on your own terms:

With research and planning, you may find an exciting new life is within reach.

Step 2: Figure out your key strengths

What to do when you’re just new?

Your Key Skill List

Make a two-sided list. One one side are the skills you love to use and could happily exercise daily. On the other side are skills you don’t enjoy as much, but they’re in your bag of tricks. Include all your skills, from all the parts of your life, that you can legitimately offer for a fee.

Your Key Skills List will help you see different ways to market yourself and find the project mix likely to be most satisfying.

Sometimes the best-paying skills aren’t ones you like the most. In lean times, you might tap your “Other Skills” column more. But ideally you shouldn’t “live” there for too long.

Your Top-Rated Skills

Be irresistibly valuable.

Your top skills create your reputation - which drive your marketing message, your negotiating leverage, and your pricing.

Clients learn fast who’s excellent and who’s phoning it in.

Know Your Metrics

Ask clients (or coworkers, if you’re transitioning from a staff job) if there are sales figures, financials, or other measurable results from your work that you can use in self-marketing.

Can You Specialize?

Skill-Enhancing Personal Traits

They improve with experience and are often what clients remember best about you. They’re the basis of your reputation and are what will ultimately distinguish you from other, equally talented workers.

Build these traits by spending time with people who embody them. Read up on qualities of leadership, teamwork, and social and emotional intelligence. Consider taking some personality assessment tests to help identify your particular strengths.

Step 3: Figure Out Your Customer’s Needs

The 3 Essentials Of Getting Clients

  1. Empathy in the analysis of clients needs.
  2. Skills match clients needs.
  3. Skills are distilled into a pitch of utter simplicity.

Go back and match your skills, your metrics, and your specialty ideas to what your market needs—not what you think they should need, but what they actually need.

What’s important to your clients and in what order?

For hits look at:

Elevator Speech

Come up with one succinct sentence that says what you do.

Step 4: Know What You’ll Charge (More Or Less)

Your goal isn’t just to pay your bills, but to be paid what you’re worth.

Know your skills and your value.

Look at the norms in your profession.

Sharing info with other freelancers about pricing and deal making helps you get paid what you’re worth and helps all freelancers be paid what they deserve.

Common Fee Structures

  1. Hourly
  2. Unit or Quantity-Based (Per word, per foot, per dozen)
  3. Project Fee
  4. Pricing Packages
  5. Minimum Amount
  6. Day Rate
  7. Percentage of Profits

Undercharging hurts you and other freelancers in your profession by dragging down what your skills are worth in the marketplace and conditioning buyers to expect lower prices. Help hold the line in what the market will bear: Price yourself right! It’s not only a matter of calculating what you’re worth, but accepting it.

Other Things To Consider When Pricing

  1. Billable time
  2. Purchases connected with the project
  3. Overhead - life and business bills
  4. Profit - reflects your value (experience, specialty, USP)
  5. Market considerations

Having a specialty can help stabilize your income against market changes because it’s perceived as having higher value. Value-adds such as degrees, certifications, training, and awards help, too.

Factors That Affect Your Profit

Calculate Your Rate

(Annual Salary + Annual Expenses + Annual Profit) / Annual Billable Work Hours = Your Basic Hourly Rate

Annual Salary: How much would you like to make?

Annual Expenses: Your rate must cover your business overhead. Remember to include taxes and health insurance. What about living expenses?

Annual Profit: Not salary. Salary is business expense paid to you as boss. Charge over and above your expenses (10-20%).

Annual Billable Work Hours: Allow for vacation, sick time, and weekends off. Does not include administrative or non-billable work.

Basic Hourly Rate: Adjust based on:

If you’re new to your field, right out of school, need someone to take a chance on you, or are trying to break into a higher level of client, you’d likely be in the low-to-middle range, increasing with experience.

To make more money you must either:

  1. Increase your project volume
  2. Raise your value (skills, experience)

How To Charge Higher Rates To Existing Clients

If the client’s a steady income source, it may not be worth jeopardizing your relationship for an incremental rate increase. Instead, prospect for new clients and quote higher for them. Maybe you’ll find a new steady. Then you can negotiate with the lower-paying client from a more secure place financially.

Five Fee-Setting Strategies

  1. Track your time.
  2. Avoid feast or famine pricing and know your rock bottom. Find the zone that reflects your value, but leaves room to negotiate. This means doing market research and getting a sense of job scope and, if possible, budget from the client before you crunch the numbers. Going too low or too high causes stress and costs time. Know your lowest number—the one you won’t go below, no matter how great the gig is.
  3. Do your homework. Learn the benchmarks for rates in your industry.
  4. Educate the client about what you’re worth.
  5. Don’t fear fluctuation.

Reasons To Raise Fees

Reasons To Give A Discount

2 Essentials

Step 5: Work out your budget and do any necessary paperwork

Make a list of month by month expenses.

Exclude unanticipated one-time expenses.

Find the number you need to earn each month.

Freelance work doesn’t bring in the same amount each month so you have to save.

Each check that comes in from a client, you’ll want to apportion into these buckets:

  1. Emergencies
  2. Retirement
  3. Estimated Taxes
  4. Expenses

Your Business Budget

List any necessary start-up costs and identify them according to:

Get Set For Taxes

  1. Show you mean business. Keep a business diary of all your appointments, client sessions, and project deadlines; have business cards, promotional materials, website, or other items showing you’re going after business.
  2. Start right with record keeping and accounting. From the get-go, keep careful records and receipts of every business-related expense. You’ll need them as documentation if you itemize business-related tax deductions.
  3. Separate your business and personal accounts.

Official Paperworks

  1. Business structure
  2. Business permits, licenses, and registrations
  3. Sales tax and seller’s permit

Step 6: Gather Your Brain Trust

Find the trusted inner circle who can help you as you launch and grow, offering advice and ideas, referring prospects, problem-solving, and cheering you on. It could be fellow freelancers, company buddies, relatives. They should be people you feel you can be totally honest with. Your Brain Trust has your back and you’ve got theirs.

Step 7: Make Your Game Plan For Going Public

It’s okay to put some friendly distance between certain people and what you are doing.

Surround yourself with people who are practical and positive about freelancing.

How To Tell People

  1. Tell everyone. Everything is a marketing opportunity.
  2. Don’t be pushy.
  3. Make it professional. Start strong. Have your one-line or short pitch polished.
  4. Share what’s great about it, what’s challenging about it, and how you’re going about it.

Business Cards

Business cards are meant to explain and remind others about:

Consider privacy and what contact info to include. For writers, an email address is enough.

Other Options

WORKSHEET

1. List your freelance goals

2. Accomplish your Key Skill List

Preferred Skills

Other Skills

Writing

Editing academic research papers

Teaching life

Teaching English

3. Identify your Top-Rated Skills

4. Identify metrics that you can use to promote yourself

5. Identify specializations you can pursue

Current specializations

Planned specializations

6. Identify skill-enhancing personal traits you can nurture

Customer care

7. Figure out your customer’s needs

8. Come up with an elevator speech

9. Identify the fee structures you will use

10. Calculate your basic hourly rate

(Annual Salary + Annual Expenses + Annual Profit) / Annual Billable Work Hours = Your Basic Hourly Rate

11. Look for a free time tracking software for freelancers

  1. Research about the writing industry - the skills needed, the rates, etc.
  2. Identify your monthly budget
  3. Research how to use banks for personal and business purposes
  4. Watch the BIR for freelancers video
  5. Arrange website and social media accounts to promote yourself

Chapter 3: Your Freelance Portfolio

Map

Freelancers can’t count on paychecks, promotions, or job titles as benchmarks for their value. They have to create their value in the marketplace every day.

Negative

Positive

Freelancing is volatile and risky.

Freelancing is flexible and opportunity-rich.

“How can I keep the ups and downs from happening?"

“How can I ride the waves?"

The Freelance Portfolio

4 Levels

  1. The Blue Chips
  2. Growth Investments
  3. One-Shots and Long Shots
  4. New Ventures and Growth

Balance these levels to achieve these 3 goals:

  1. Have enough clients of the right kind: not too few and not more than you can handle, who pay well and/or can advance your career in some way.
  2. Bring in enough steady income to reduce cash flow highs and lows.
  3. Meet your total income goals.

Full work, money little

Goal 1

Decent income but payments far apart

Goals 1 and 2

Great clients, money lousy

Goals 1, 2, and 3

Portfolio Planning

Finding a client mix that delivers maximum value for your time and effort.

Equation

Optimal clients + Steady cash flow + Meeting your income goals = Balanced freelance portfolio

Benefits of a Balanced Freelance Portfolio

  1. No more living project-to-project. You can fill the gap immediately after a project is suspended.
  2. No more “pipeline perspective."
  3. Awareness that you need to network and market.
  4. Your portfolio lets you see holes and change your goals

Level 1: Blue Chips

Benefits

Challenges

When overwhelmed with work from a Blue Chip, subcontract to people you trust.

How to balance Blue Chips?

Level 2: Growth Investments

Benefits

Challenges

How to balance Growth Investments?

Level 3: One-Shots and Long Shots

2 Categories

  1. Passive intermediaries (“listers”) - list available jobs and leaves the rest of the process up to you and the client (Craigslist, Monster, Freelancers Union, Media-Bistro, and professional job board listings)
  2. Active intermediaries - actively manage the freelancer/work provider relationship (temp and staffing agencies, on-deman workforce websites, Elance, oDesk, and Guru)

Check them to:

But you shouldn’t spend a lot of time in these competitive spaces.

Benefits

Challenges

How to balance One-Shots and Long Shots?

Level 4: New Ventures and Growth

How to cultivate level 4?

Dry Time

Dry time happens when you lose a Blue Chip and get caught with your network down.

4 Benefits of Dry Time

  1. Dry time pushes you to do “the ask.” Ask for work. Let people know your skills are available.
  2. Dry time reminds you that work can come from anywhere.
  3. Dry time reminds you to tend your portfolio.
  4. Prolonged dry time may point to market changes.

When dry time is caused by the market

13 Tactics for Dry Time Damage Control

  1. Keep a routine.
  2. Connect.
  3. Tackle administrative stuff.
  4. Ask for testimonials from satisfied clients.
  5. Clean up your act online.
  6. Evaluate your business model.
  7. Add skills.
  8. Consider bartering.
  9. Do pro bono or volunteer work.
  10. Make dry time “you time.” Planned dry time keeps it from being so dry.
  11. Work Level 4.
  12. Revisit your Key Skills List. Use them all. Add some more.
  13. Take low-paying gigs.

When to Work For Free

Chapter 4: Getting Clients

Map

Make genuine connections.

Networking and prospecting narrow the field to a small number of people you’ll ultimately work with.

Think long-term and relax into it.

Successful freelancers have the ability to influence people

6 Influential Fundamentals

  1. Reciprocity
  1. Consistency
  2. Social Validation
  1. Liking
  1. Authority
  1. Scarcity

Networking Best Practices

Use a different word for networking

The best networking is networking you’ll stick with doing. Your style should mesh with your personality and habits, with gentle stretches in new directions.

Your Network

  1. Inner Circle - parents, siblings, immediate relatives, closest friends, close family friends
  2. Second Circle - good friends, their families, school connections, people you’ve worked with
  3. Third Circle - people you meet through your activities, sports, alumnae organization, or spiritual community
  4. Fourth Circle- contacts you make through people in all of these circles

Steps

  1. Start with your inner circle.
  2. Get feedback.
  3. Use feedback to set goals and possible markets.
  4. Go to the next circle.
  5. Zero in on the people and professions to focus on.

Change your mindset to “What can I give?"

Unwritten Rules for Love Banking

  1. People don’t appreciate those who expect a “get” for every “give."
  2. When someone gives you something, don’t ask for more.

The 3 Step Follow-Up

  1. When you get home, jot down some key words on their cards about what you talked about, including personal details.
  2. Add them to your contacts list and include the notes.
  3. A couple of days later, call or email one or two of your new contacts and suggest getting together. Get into this habit and see how it accelerates your networking. Send emails to the others (create a form email that you personalize) saying it was nice to meet them and talk about such-and-such.

Creative (Not Creepy) Contact

  1. Send something.
  2. Congratulate them on something (a deal, a promotion, a new job, a new product).
  3. Ask them something (appeal to their expertise).
  4. Sign off through a suggestion of getting together or an invitation.

Respect their Time

  1. Be sensitive to their time.
  2. If they’re busy ask if there’s a better time for you to call.
  3. Start with some small talk to revive your connection then get to your point with a clear transition (assume they’re multitasking).
  4. Let them talk.
  5. Keep your asks modest.
  6. Just call because you’d like to get to know them better

Thank people for leads even if they didn’t work out.

Prospecting combines strategy, Love Banking, and throwing yourself in the path of opportunity.

The 3 Goals Of Prospecting

  1. To start a conversation with the right people.
  1. To make connection.
  1. To be top of mind when they need someone like you.

Truths

  1. You’re not spamming people who couldn’t care less about your work, you’re talking to people you know you can help—now or in the future.
  2. You’re not selling you; you’re connecting with them.
  3. Nobody needs anybody—until they need somebody. You want to be top of mind when that happens.
  4. Rejection helps you prospect efficiently. It lets you focus on prospects who say “not right now,” “maybe,” “not yet,” or “let’s talk.”
  5. More people want to know about you that you might think!
  6. If you carefully qualify your candidates, you’ll be narrowing the field into a few prospects who are more willing to bite.
  7. The goal isn’t to get a gig but to start a conversation, build network, and start building your Love Bank account.

WORKBOOK

  1. Look for a good free CMS

Prompts