Are you waiting for a check right now? Here’s a guest post from a freelance User Experience consultant who has waited too long, too often, for clients to pay. Happens to be my brother. By Chris Kania I never understood the logic of doing work for a large company, and then waiting 30 days [...]
Money
First things first
If you have two assignments on the desk, which do you work on first? The one that is due first? The harder, more challenging one? The one you like the least? Nah. I always work on the one that will pay me sooner.
How much can you earn? Really.
How much can you realistically earn as a freelancer? The short answer is: “As much as you want to earn.” I know that sounds smartass and unsatisfying. But it is as close to the truth as I’ve found. Virtually all the freelancers I know end up making precisely what they want to earn. Period. The key word [...]
Pricing: Kill the zeros
In quoting your fee, you are allowed one zero. No more. I recently sat in on a conference call where a design group was talking about a big branding project. They listed all the things they were going to do, in detail. Then, they said it would cost $20,000. Ooh. Fail. The client started questioning everything, [...]
Should you post your fees? Publish your pricing? Hit yourself with a stick?
The default answer is “no.” Don’t do it. Eighty-seven times out of a hundred, you will do way better by only talking about fees one on one, with a live client. Personally, I have experimented with posting and unposting my fees seven different times. (Within the last month, even.) So have all my freelance cohorts. I [...]