If you’re going to actively look for clients (as opposed to lie in wait for them), who should you be pursuing?
What kinds of clients are worth hunting?
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The life
You’re drawn to working on your own because you want to do it your way. You don’t want a boss. You hate punching a clock, asking permission to do stuff, going to meetings, trusting your fate to some company. You’d rather run your own life, and not be blown around by someone else’s winds. Yeah, me too. But there’s flip side to all that sweet autonomy. It hit me sharply about three days after I went freelance. Staying sane
1. We’re afraid we won’t get the assignment. It will go to the cheaper guy. 2. We’re afraid of being laughed at. “How much? For that? Are you serious? Wow, you are way out of line here.” 3. We’re afraid the client will say yes to that big juicy fee, and holy crap we’ll actually have to deliver something that justifies all that money which will be hard because the client will be expecting to be blown away and we might not be able to pull that off which would be hugely humiliating especially if the client wants the money back. Money
What you quote for an assignment will send strong signals to a new client. Or a potential client. Your fee gives off subtle clues about the quality of your work, where you fit among other freelancers. It will even color how much the client likes what you deliver. Most of us, most of the time, are leery of losing out on good work by quoting too high. Fact is, you can also miss out on jobs by charging too little. There are plenty of clients out there who will pass you by because you’re too cheap. “Is this guy working at a folding table in his basement, or what? “At those rates, she can’t be very good.” “He obviously doesn’t understand what’s involved here.” Clients who think like that are gold. Those are the clients looking for world-class work, for smart people who can solve problems, for stuff that must be good. And they usually need a lot of it. You do not want to turn them off with WalMart prices. You can buy a beach house with a stable of true fans like that. Starting Out
There must be at least 3,298 articles around the web on “How to Launch Your Freelance Career” or “How to Start a Freelance Design/Copywriting/Photography Business.” Have you seen them? The advice is remarkably consistent and utterly sensible. Have six months of living expenses in the bank. Assess your skills and strengths. Survey the competition. Identify target clients. Devise a ‘positioning’ for yourself. Set a launch date with 30-, 60-, and 90-day milestones. Write a detailed marketing and promotion plan. Build a network of contacts, enhance your social media presence. Hone your portfolio. Set up your workspace, set up your pricing, invoicing and accounting systems . . . That’s all well-reasoned stuff. Hard to argue with any of it. Except for one thing. Try This
This is a spooky phenomenon that I cannot explain. Don’t ask me what’s behind it, or how it works. But you can apparently invoke this to your advantage, almost at will. Let’s say your workload starts to slow down. Or you want to expand your stable of true fans. Or maybe you’re just itching for fresh faces and different work. So you start to reach out more. Instead of waiting, you begin pursuing. You contact a few companies you’d like to work with. You call people you haven’t spoken to in a while. You send ideas to your clients to plant the seeds for new assignments. You hustle. And after a few days of this, or maybe a week, or even two weeks, lo and behold, new stuff happens. New work shows up. New clients ask about a project or two. Inquiries land in your inbox. The pot begins to bubble again. But here’s the odd part: none of the new stuff comes from the people or projects you were chasing. None of it. Clients
Sometimes the assignment isn’t what we think it is. In fact it’s often something else entirely. For me, things tend to go a lot smoother when I remember that. I get more work, more referrals, too. Starting Out
The more you think about the freelance model, the simpler and simpler it gets. Example. If you are a musician or a sculptor or a fine artist, the thought is, you need about 1,000 true fans to make a living at your chosen craft. To live large, you need maybe 10,000. If you aspire to open a restaurant, you will need a surrounding population of at least 50,000 people, and then convince 2,000 of them to eat at your place. Over and over again. (And, you will need about a half-million in cash to even get in the game.) If you want to launch an iPad killer, you’ll need to wow a few million paying customers, minimum. And you have to lure them away from Apple. But to carve out a living doing what you do — whether it’s illustrating, writing content, coding, InformationArchitecting, project managing, making logos, coaching, or taking pictures — all you need is, get this, ten true fans. Just ten. And by true fans I mean people who regularly use what you do. People who have already paid you money. People who, when they need what you offer, automatically call you, and no one else. People who, when asked “Hey, do you know a good ____?” they will tell people about you, without thinking. With ten people like that, you are okay. Maybe not rich. But you are alive, well, and solvent and not selling your soul to the company. You don’t need to be famous. You don’t need to show up number 3 in Google. You don’t need 5092 followers on Twitter and 664 contacts on LinkedIn. You don’t need to be profiled in Wired. You need just ten true fans. In the real world. Ten living, breathing human beings who think you’re swell. Fact is, as my freelancer friends and I realized over a few beers one night, none of us ever had more than 10 true fans at one time. Ever. Even when we were raking in the cash like autumn leaves, it wasn’t because we had ninety-two clients. The huge money always came from a relatively small circle of paying, avid fans. Always, always. Better still, once you get your head around ten true fans, everything clarifies. Your daily task gets simpler. You can shed a lot of bullshit, and lose excuses. You have focus. You no longer have to worry about ‘the economy’, or ‘the industry.’ Or the 89,422 other people on Google who do what you do. You are not working in the vastness of the universe. You are serving your ten true fans. When you sit down at the desk on Monday morning, all you have to think about is your people. How are they doing? What do they need?’ It’s your personal micro-economy. Not the economy. Ten true fans. Money
You’ve been talking to a new client about a project. The client has been disappointed with other freelancers, seems to like you. Has lots of work. The client asks for a quote. You want this project, you want this client. So you think very carefully about the fee. After a lot of head-scratching and figuring, you finally settle on $2100. You type up the email, send it off to the client, with fingers crossed. A few hours later, the client replies to the email: “Okay. That sounds good. Let’s get started right away.” Except you notice that, in your email to the client, where you had meant to type $2100, you actually typed $3100. One thousand dollars more. What do you do now? Promoting
No, this isn’t about doing work for free. That is a dopey business model. (I speak from experience here.) And it’s not about doing work on spec. Which is mostly an exercise in jackoffery. Run away from that. I’m talking about giving away advice, expertise, game plans, ideas — even that BIG idea that can literally make a client’s project. The best stuff you have. It is the simplest way to make potential clients love you at least 187% more than your competitors. While you land the paying work. Quick example. |
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