How good must you be to freelance successfully?

Do you need to be a rock star genius in your craft?

Nah. Being a genius may be useful. But it’s not a requirement. Heck, just fancying yourself a genius is sometimes enough. (I’ve gotten by on that for years.)

And yes, as I’ve said, having a double dose of clanking, cast-iron confidence (balls) is worth its weight in brass nine times over. It is the difference between the minor leaguers and the elite.

But even if you’re the self-doubting sort with only basic skills in your backpack, you can do okay.

If you are competent enough to survive in a staff job, even a job buried in the southern hemisphere of the org chart, you’re good enough to survive as freelancer.

Don’t count on getting rich just yet, but you can earn enough to eat. As long as you get a few core things right.

Plod

There’s a marketing writer whose work I bump into every now and then. His work, in my haughty, writerly opinion, is two notches below plain vanilla, uninspired and lifeless.

Nevertheless, the guy appears to be working steadily. How much he makes, I really don’t know. But he has clients who like him. People call him back over and over again.

Every month or two he sends out a client newsletter, which in my haughty, writerly opinion, just recycles rusty old cliches about ‘getting attention’, ‘talking benefits, not features.’

But that clunky newsletter is apparently enough to keep his blip on clients’ radar.

From what I hear, this chap is known for always delivering his work on time. If he promises copy by noon, that Word file comes dinging into the inbox at noon, by gum. (He’s one up on me there.)

His prose may be limp and perfunctory, but it dutifully covers all the required points and is proofed and spell-checked and arrives at precisely 12 o’clock.

Maybe the guy is suffocating under the weight of unpaid bills. Maybe his spouse is all over his ass about getting a real job. I have no idea. That isn’t the point.

The guy is working. He ain’t jetting to the Caymans for the weekend. But he’s his own boss (except maybe for that spouse.)

He has found away to wring an income from the ability he has.

Be nice

A producer friend tells me about a freelance voice-over guy who does narration for corporate videos, on-air promos and the occasional radio or TV commercial.

As a voice talent, the guy is considered strictly mid-list. No distinctive voice, no compelling persona. His readings are adequate but unremarkable, and he often requires too many takes.

Ordinarily, producers would toss his demo reel in the drawer with the 193 others.

Except this guy is an Olympic-class thank-you and follow-up artist.

About a year ago I happened to sit in on a recording session for a corporate video I had scripted — where he was doing the voice-over.  I was called in only to help with technical terms and acronyms in the narration.  (It’s ‘EEthernet.’  Not etherNET.  It’s S-A-P, not sap.)

Three hours after the session, I get an email from the guy thanking me for all my expert and gracious help in navigating the complexities of the technical language and, by the way, the script read like a dream and had more juice than most of the stuff he reads and he would enjoy working with my narration any time.

Yep, a bit over-syrupy (except for the part about how brilliant my script was.) And it’s nothing that I could pull off. But the email registered.

The same day, the producer got his own thank-you email, as did the production assistant, the client (who wasn’t even there) and I suspect even the kid who brought in coffees from the deli during the session.

As the producer told me, I could also expect a handwritten thank-you note by mail in a few days, followed by another mail in a week saying, oh, that he ran into another client who knew me and thought me impossibly talented, too.

And around the 18th of every month — for at least a year — I got another email or note with some sort of deft reference to my skill or that last script or something. And the guy knew full well I never even hire voice-over talent.

How much time he spends writing notes and following up with people, and remembering daughters’ names, I can’t say. Perhaps more time than he spends recording voice-overs.

But as I’ve heard around the business, the guy gets called in — at least on the margins, for non-critical jobs — just because he’s so freaking nice. And diligent. And polite.  And he never lets anyone forget him. And he earnestly tries to please.

Guilting people out is not the ideal business model, but it sort of works.  It’s what this guy can do.

If anyone should ask me, this second, off the top of my head, if I knew of a narrator, I’d have to mention this guy. Maybe I’d be obligated to say ‘He’s no superstar’, but he’s okay.’

But I’d know his name.