Let’s say you want to earn $150,000 this year.

Okay. Can do.

Here’s the math:

To pull in $150,000, you need to attract at least 150 clients who spend about $1,000 a year on your stuff. (Every week, you must snag three new clients. They need to arrive on a conveyor belt.)

Or, you need to land 50 clients who will use about $3,000 of your services. (One new client a week.)

Or, you can find 5 clients who can send you about $30,000 worth of work during the year.

Or maybe just one client with a $75,000 budget, plus a bunch of others who buy a lot now and then.

The point is, the realities of freelancing overwhelmingly favor bigger-paying clients. Higher-fee projects. Repeat work from busy customers.

There is no Walmart model for freelancing. There is no freelance equivalent of the $1.99 iPhone app.

Every freelancer I know always makes more money working with big spenders, heavy users, and high-ticket projects. Repeat, always.

You want to clamber ever higher on the food chain.

If you’re getting, say, $2,000 for given bit of work now, the goal is to attract people who will pay $5,000 for for that sort of work. And up and up. That is the only way to scale.

It means that eighty percent — no, make that ninety-four percent — of our hunting energy should be aimed at the big fish, the cash cows, the frequent flyers, the folks with the deliciously plump budgets.

Yeah, even when you’re starting out. And yes, even if you think you suck (like I did), or you have no portfolio, or you’re just a coward (like I was.)

Always have your eye out for the whales.

Picasso didn’t get famous by selling paintings to shopkeepers at $2.37 a pop.

Where the money is

Me?  I wasted entirely too much time where the money isn’t: with the smaller, onesie-twosie clients: the local entrepreneur, the spunky start-up, fledgling rock band, the trendy new restaurant in town, a two-man insurance agency.

I told myself I was being smart, carving out a niche in an underserved market. I figured I could be a guru to these folks, with few competitors to worry about.

And I had a fantasy that these little enterprises would miraculously grow and start buying more work and paying me more handsome sums.

(If you’re laughing aloud at that, good for you. You are already savvier than I was.)

Sure, working for small clients can be creatively satisfying. Like an artist friend told me, there’s a certain buzz in seeing your logo writ large, driving past on a bakery truck.

But there is simply not enough tonnage among the small companies and infrequent users. And not enough hardcore, do-or-die need.  You are always tangential.

And I discovered, duh, that I couldn’t feed myself writing cutesie ads for a balloon delivery service at $51 each, fun or not.

So if you’re doing something like that now, cut it out.

(Okay, you can play around down there for a while, just to limber up, just to break in your invoicing software. So give it a month, then cut it out.)

And keep your radar tuned to the kind of clients you can build a career on, clients that can afford you.  Clients who actually need you.

So who are these big-money clients?

People who need a lot of what you do

I’m thinking of the marketing manager for a company that makes software for purchasing managers.

She’s responsible for a 90-page web site, a pile of product demos, some webcasts, a bunch of whitepapers, and a lot of downloadable ‘how-to’ info. She buys copy, design, and web programming every day of the week. She has to.

If you forge one relationship with her, you can feast on work for months. Or years.  And you don’t have to start from scratch each time.  She is worth $20,000.

And when she moves onto a bigger job next year, she’ll take you along.

But the guy who’s opening that Asian/Mexican fusion restaurant across town?  No.

He buys one identity, one website, then he’s done until 2014. Nice guy, maybe, but small money.

It’s far smarter to chase that creative director of the advertising agency/design firm/web development shop. He hands out freelance assignments all the time. Illustration. Specialized copy. Conceptual photography. Somebody who can work magic over a weekend. He needs to get stuff done.

Even if he doesn’t pay the highest rates on the planet, his lush volume is worth a busload of one-shot clients.

I know a photographer who grows positively tumescent when viewing a website with 1,204 product shots. There, he knows, is a client worth wooing.

Clients whose job is to buy stuff like yours

If you build content for a living, hook up with people who buy content for a living. There is money there.

Are you an illustrator? There is an editor at a publishing company who commissions 300+ illustrations a year for textbooks or children’s books or promotional posters. She’s looking for and talking to illustrators all day long.  You want to know her.

Find the producer at a video/animation firm that creates multimedia for high-profile companies. He orchestrates scriptwriters, shooters, animators, CG specialists. And he spends two hours every Friday afternoon authorizing invoices.

The project director at a development shop, a game developer. He has code crying to be written. All the time.

These people are professional buyers. You don’t need to hold their hands and explain every little thing. And you can usually reach them somehow. It’s their responsibility to keep an eye out for talent, for people who can deliver. They get it.

Yes, these folks can be tough, opinionated, capricious. They may blow you off, or keep you waiting in the wings forever, alongside nine other hopeful freelancers. But if you win them over (and you can), they can be fiercely loyal. And profitable.

Companies that live and die on what you do

The closer your work affects the core of a company’s business, the more money there is.

Example.  Crate & Barrel spends lavishly on design, photography, UI. It is what they do. They will talk your ear off about design and user experience.  They have budget for that.

So does Nike, Apple and Ikea. And all the eager companies trying to be the next Nike, Apple and Ikea.

The CPA firm? Nope. They don’t care. You’ll always be ninth priority. You might as well be selling copier toner or carpet cleaning. You are an expense.

A designer friend invited me to meet with the owners of a concrete company who needed a website. These guys made piles of money. They were wearing wristwatches that cost more than my car. They ran a fleet of huge trucks that delivered concrete all over the state. They had just spent $4.2 million for some fancy rock crusher.

But they were pinching pennies on the website, and spent most of the meeting checking their iPhones. They just didn’t give a shit about design and content, which to them, were no more important to the business than brake linings or having the parking lot restriped. They would never be big-money clients unless we were selling rock crushers. We were too far from the core.

We left.

Appealing to the bigger clients

It’s all about dependability

In the small-client world, you’re working with the owner, the founder, the sole proprietor.

But with bigger clients, you’re working with someone who has a boss. And that changes everything.

Your creative director or webmaster or editor or design director has to answer to a higher-up,  someone who can ask where the hell the project is, who hired that idiot, or why does this look like crap?

And your client will usually have people downstream waiting on the content, or the pages, or the shots, or the code. They will have their own ‘clients’ within the company, who will be all over their ass if things go south.

They do not want to go to their bosses and say, um, well, it’s not finished yet, or it came out lame, or it’s all wrong, because, well, some freelancer gave me a hard time.

These busy, bigger-money clients are looking for people who can deliver. People who will make them look good, relieve pain, make stuff that everyone likes.  End of story.

Which means everything about your web site, your emails, your portfolio, your phone conversations must scream “Pro,”  “Reliable”, “Gets it”, “Will not crap out.”

No, you don’t have to become a dry corporate drone. Be quirky if you want. Or wildly creative, edgy, distinctive. Keep your personality. Take a point of view. Stick with your style. But you must come across as pro. As reliable as the sun. (No, saying you are ‘reliable’ doesn’t cut it.  Been there, doesn’t count.)

They must see you as someone who can put the goods on the desk, no matter what.

You want the client to consider you an ally, a co-conspirator, the go-to guy who can make them look like a genius and/0r pull their nuts out of the fire on demand.

Do that and you will have a die-hard client for life.

They have their own definition of ‘good’

As a writer, I look at Cisco’s website and drool at the 1620 metric tons of technical content packed into their web site.  And I know for a fact they have a slew of writers on their freelance roster.

But I also see that their definition of ‘good’ copy is turgid, pompous, abstract marketingspeak. Techno-paradigm gibberish. Which means, if I wanted to work for Cisco, I’d have to write their version of ‘good’. No matter how painful and embarrassing it might be. (My notion of ‘good’?  They don’t care.)

What one client considers tacky, another thinks perfect.

Sometimes the mission is to give them something entirely and utterly different.

Sometimes it’s a matter of giving them something entirely different, provided it looks pretty much like what they have now.

Sometimes it involves tuning into their house esthetic, doing something ‘new’ but still making it sound like ‘us’.  Sometimes you’re charged with thinking way out of the box. Breaking rules, or challenging assumptions.  (But, usually not.)

The point is, ‘good’ is what they think it is. And the better you can tune into that, the better.

It’s still personal

I’ve worked for maybe a dozen Fortune 500 companies.  And often made a ton of money at it.

But truth is, I have no real relationship with any of those corporations.  They have no freaking clue who I am. Nor do they care.

But what I do have is relationships with Ruth, with Bob, with Kathleen and Kevin. When they move on, I can go with them.

Yes, we want referrals. We want a plethora of referrals.  A veritable parade of referrals.

We want our phones to ring, two or three times a week, with calls like this:

“Hi, I’m Ruth Martin. I got your name from Ted Baker who says you’re something of a genius with copy. We are revamping our website and I was wondering if I could talk to you about it?”

Even if they don’t actually say ‘genius’ (which I tend to hear whether they say it or not) a referral is always a stroke to the ego. It’s a validation of your choice of career, a confirmation of your brilliance and your worth to humanity.  At least for that day, anyway

Referrals are also money. With a referral you jump past all the pain of chasing, courting, and talking about yourself. Someone has already verified that you are not a lunatic or a crook or a bumbler. You start on third base with an 82% chance of scoring.

And better still, a referral can beget another client who can in turn beget another referral .  It creates a biblical chain of begetting: A snowballing, critical-mass, cascading thing that can keep you busy for years.

It means that one ripe referral is worth five random inquries from your web site.  Or even ten.

So how do you boost the odds of one client recommending you to another? Without nagging or being an ass about it, that is.  (Yes, you need to do good work and not screw up. But you are doing that already.)

Here’s the only thing that ever worked for me and the freelancers I know:

Make it so the client likes to pass your name along.

Make it so they get a friendly little buzz, a happy stroke to their ego from sending someone to you.

First, ask

Oddly enough, clients are usually glad to refer others to you, but simply don’t think of it. They aren’t spending their days looking for opportunities for you.

I was also aghast to hear many clients say “I didn’t give him your name because I wasn’t sure  if you were taking on new clients. I thought maybe you were too busy.”

That was a WTF moment for me. Now I set everyone straight with an email or phone call:

Joan:

Really enjoyed working on the new identity and packaging with you. And you were definitely right about showing the team different font options. (Much as I hate to admit it.)  I’m liking the way it turned out.

Thanks for the opportunity.

And if you ever have a colleague who’s considering a design project, I’d be more than happy to talk to them and discuss a few ideas. Any time. Really. They mention your name, they get a-list attention.

The point is, of course, is that you’re eager for referrals because you just love doing this stuff.  You liked working with that client so much that you’d be willing to talk to a friend of hers any day of the week.  (It’s never, never because you’re hard up for work.)

And you’re assuring her that if she does send someone your way, you will respond and be helpful and enthusiastic. There is nothing worse than for a client to hear:  “Hey, I called that guy you recommended. Never got back to me.” That kills future referrals dead.

The exact same tactic works or people who aren’t clients. Maybe people you meet socially.  Or people who don’t buy your services directly, but may have contact with people who do.

Gail:

Enjoyed talking with you the other night. I must apologize for bending your ear so much about web site design.  I tend to get on a soapbox about such things.  Can’t help myself sometimes. Anyway, thanks for listening. Next time, you can do the talking.

Oh, and if you ever know of someone who’s wrestling with a web site, send them my way. I’d be more than happy to chat with them. And I promise not to go on so much.

Thanks.

Say thanks

Always, always.

Ruth:

I want thank you for referring Ted Hagen to me. We had an interesting discussion about his new site. Ted seems like a bright guy. And he has an uncommonly good understanding of his market.

I’ll be sending him a formal proposal next week.  I’ll let you know what happens.
And again, thanks for mentioning me to Ted.

Even if it doesn’t work out.

Chris:

Thank you for sending Don Baker to see me. I think he’s onto something with his new restaurant concept.  Very intriguing.  But based on his budget, I thought another designer might be a better match for him. He seemed to appreciate that. I suggested a few names to him.  He’ll be contacting them shortly.

I was actually quite flattered you thought to recommend me. Very kind of you.  Feel free, any time.

Follow up

I used to be lax about this. Which was a mistake. Clients seem to like hearing they did a good thing.

Ruth:

Good stuff!  Just wanted let you know it looks like Ted Hagen and I will be moving ahead with his new web content. He seems eager to get going.  And I’m looking forward to working on it. This could really be good.

Thanks again for thinking to send Ted to see me. Worked out swell all around.  And I’m glad I could live up to your recommendation.

Lunch is on me next time.

Even if it doesn’t work out.

Ruth:

I just wanted to follow up about Ted Hagen’s project. It seems he’s going with another writer this time around. But we parted friends, and it was certainly fun to be in the running.  I learned a thing or two in the process, too.

And thanks again for thinking to recommend me. I appreciate the opportunity.

Does this seem like too much work?  Good. Then maybe your competitor won’t do it.  Does it sound like too much thanking?  No such thing.

I’ve been holed up working on a batch of new material on winning the bigger-money clients.  And this idea came bubbling up from the deep.

I have never tried this, nor seen it done, so it comes without warranty of any kind. I am posting the recipe without having baked this particular soufflé.

Here’s the idea:

You’ve identified your A-list dream clients.  The well-moneyed, heavy-using customers you would crawl through broken glass to have as clients.

You find a way to make contact with the right person. In your email, of course, is the url of your website.

And there, on your site, easily findable, unmissable, is a link, a text box, or a sidebar that reads:

Companies I admire.

Or, Work I like

Creative Directors I’d love to work for

Or Web sites that get it right

The five best UIs on the planet

And there, maybe number two or three in the list, is the company or brand or client you are wooing.  Along with a few lines about why they make your hair stand up.

Ostensibly, this list serves the same purpose as a blogroll, or a list of your favorite links, or books you read last month.  It’s a shorthand way of showing your leanings, your sensibilities, your style and outlook. Who you like shows who you are.

But for that specific client you’re courting, it’s a way to demonstrate — publicly — that you are in tune with what they’re doing. You’re of the same mind, you’re on their side, you get what they’re about.  You freaking love their stuff. And you say aloud, in public.

I’m thinking, if you were a client, who would you rather entrust a project to?

Some good freelancer with a nice portfolio?

Or some good freelancer with a nice portfolio who also happens to be a die-hard fan and has studied pretty much everything you’ve done and holds it up as the paragon of kick-ass work?

Be careful

- This cannot sound like transparent, vague and empty butt-kissing.  Whatever you say, make it specific, thoughtful, detailed.

- Maybe add this to your site a month before you make your contact.  Just in case your client is savvy enough to check your source code for the date of last update?  This can’t seem like a set-up.

I think there’s something to this.

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.

A client of mine needed to revamp her website and her client presentations. I’m guessing the design work was worth somewhere between $8K to $10K.

After asking colleagues for recommendations and poking around designers’ web sites, she found two firms she seemed to like. (They were, in reality, one- and two-person operations. Freelancers.)

She had a few phone conversations with each firm, describing what she was hoping to do. The calls, she said, were interesting and helpful.

But what happened after the calls made all the difference.

A day or so later, one firm sent her an elegant portfolio, some ‘case studies’ of recent projects, rave reviews from other clients, an essay on their design process/philosophy, and a rough budget range. It was all flawlessly and impeccably designed.

The other firm sent a two-page email — in plain text — offering about twenty suggestions and ideas for addressing the issues with the current site and presentations.

They started at a high level, with thoughts on a simpler color scheme, redoing the logo to save vertical space, and different ways to chunk the content, all the way down to recommending a line length for text columns, and using a freebie plugin for their whitepaper downloads.

As my client told me, the effect of that was huge.

“One firm was all about ‘here’s how brilliant we are.’ The other firm was all about me. My site, my issues.

“They obviously spent time looking at my site and thinking about it. They were immediately on my side, looking for ways to make my presentations kick ass, and freely sharing very specific thoughts and suggestions. I instantly knew who I wanted to work with.”

The dynamic is easy to understand.

Telling clients about the genius things you did for someone else:  a snooze.

Telling them how talented you are: a bore.

Talking about their project, their product, their strong points, and neatly specific things that they could do:  endlessly and eternally fascinating.

But isn’t this risky?

Okay, that winning design firm ‘gave away’ a blueprint for upgrading the site.

Theoretically, the client could have taken those ‘ideas’ and used them herself for free.  (Which is what cynical freelancers always fear.)

Except in my experience, clients almost never swipe the idea and run with it. (Maybe that’s only because my ideas suck. Which is entirely possible.)

But it’s also because even the most ‘valuable’ idea usually entails a whole lot of actual work to pull off.

Steve Zelle at idapostle illustrates the difference brilliantly. There’s a nine-mile gap between an ‘idea’ and something a client can actually use – and pay for.

We freelancers aren’t selling ideas. We’re selling execution.  Implementation. Actually building the damn thing, writing the copy, creating the illustrations, shooting the video, rendering the logo.

That’s where your mortgage payment is.

And giving away the ‘idea’ is the easiest way to win it.

Making this work

Yes, sorry, this takes a little effort.  Instead of simply sending off a portfolio or your website url, it will take some thinking. But I’m guessing, at most, it will take no more than an hour or so.

No, you don’t have to write copy, do sketches, write code, design the interface.

Just offer your impressions, your recommendations, your off-the-top ideas.  Yes, they will be preliminary.  Things may change later.  That’s okay. Show them what you’re thinking, how you’d approach this, the easiest ways to fix this.

To show you what I mean, I pulled three examples straight from my email files, which you can download here. Other than changing names and specifics for confidentiality purposes, these aren’t prettied up in any way. (I think there are even a few typos in there.)  They all resulted in work.  Simply by giving away ideas.

If you look at these and think, ‘Heck I can do better than that,’ good for you. Go do it next time.

One caveat.

Never, ever, bash what the client has right now.

Rather than ‘why this sucks out loud, talk about ‘neat things you could do.’

For me, business cards are about as useful as typewriter ribbons. In the past two years, I needed an actual, hand-outable business card maybe three times.

I didn't need these, but Moo made me want them. Twice.

But when I saw what Moo was doing with business cards, I simply had to buy 50 of them.  Twice.

With Moo, you design your cards with an ingenious online tool that won’t let you do anything ugly.  The software has built-in taste. You can even make every card different if you want.

Moo cards aren’t cheap.  They cost a just bit less than Kennedy half-dollars, but you can buy in such small quantities that you don’t mind at all.  I didn’t mind.  Twice.

And unlike those sites hawking discount cards by the bushel, Moo is fun to buy from.  Moo has class. And they’re polite.  Okay, they border on cutesy.  But far more pleasant than the loud and raucous discounters.  You feel glad you bought from Moo.

I keep my stash of Moo cards on my desk because they look so grand.  They come in a slick box.  They feel smooth.  They make me look stylish. They are not your average real estate agent cards.

And the cards have backbone.  You could spread cream cheese with these things.

I’m so stingy about giving them away, there are still 96 left from my original 100.

Buy a box and keep them on your desk.  You’ll feel upgraded enough to raise your rates.

And no, I don’t get a nickel for referring you.

Be like Moo

Better still, see if there’s a way to go Moo-like in your freelancing.

Moo is fresh and different.  Every other online business card vendor looks and sounds the same.  They compete by yelling loud about cheap.  Moo competes on style and being polite and being refreshingly different.  And refreshingly fun to work with.  Moo shows up.  Moo delivers.

What is ugly about other freelancers in your field?  What is irritating?  Tasteless?  How are they all the same?  How you could you be different?  More pleasant to work with?

Moo also lets you buy a little at a time:  23 bucks.  Can you offer a service, a micro-project or trial size just so clients can see how you work?  Something low-risk, low-commitment?

How can you change the game on all those others writers, designers, coders, consultants, coaches, illustrators out there?

I’m beginning to suspect that it’s smart, at least sometimes, to turn down and beg off assignments from time to time (even if you really want them.)

It seems to be, paradoxically, good for business.

And no, this is not about hauteur. This is not about being a diva or a prima donna.  It’s about some reverse zen contrarian anti-matter dynamic that I can’t figure out.

Latest example.

A client — a bootstrap start-up — comes to me with a project.  They want me to write their web site. They seem like bright and eager guys.  I like them instantly, but the subject is well outside my skill zone. And the project is a logistical hairball.  No way I can hit a home run with this thing. Worst of all, the budget is below slave wages. A non-starter.

So I politely decline, and point them to another writer.

But, of course, they’re having none of that.

They call back. ‘No, we want you.’  They raise the fee, extend the deadline, sweeten the pot. The more I decline, the harder they push.  They are trying to sell me on the project. And oddly, the more they sell, the less I want it. (Did too many other writers turn them down?  Am I the last sucker on the list?Are they crooks? What’s the catch here?)

Meanwhile, of course, I’m courting the hell out of another client.

This one with budget spilling over the dikes.  The company is huge.  With them, one pipsqueak document would cover two mortgage payments. Talk about heavy users.  They have sixteen hundred pounds, at least nine page-miles of content on their web site.

And all of it is unintelligible crap. The sort of crap that makes a writer just itch to get at it.

I could re-write it all to brilliance with one hand on my Mac and the other juggling a Corona and my FIOS remote.  This is what I am born to do.  I lie awake re-writing their intros in my head.

I’ve even sent them samples of my miraculous makeovers and transformations. Half the bandwidth, double the impact, six times the clarity.  It’s as good as has been done in their industry.  (Even if I do say so myself.)

“Very interesting,” is all they say.  “We’ll let you know.”

But they ain’t calling.

The harder I sell, the less they want me.

When you’re not actively doing work for a client, be working on something of your own.  Something you want to build just because you want to.  Write some software, amass a collection, do a book, build some design templates, take pictures of ice crystals.  Whatever you’re passionate about.

Good example:

As a day job, freelancer Bill Milbrodt writes music and designs soundtracks for TV commercials and videos.  Does very well at it.  He  even won an Emmy along the way.

But some time back, just for the heck of it, he took apart his battered old Honda, made musical instruments out of the pieces, wrote a suite of music for them, and gathered some adventurous musicians to play it all. 

Whenever he got the chance, took his Car Music Project on the road, performing at every festival and venue that invited him, including a gig this August at Lincoln Center Outdoors in New York City.

That’s were he caught the attention of a big London film production company that is creating commercials for an auto company.  Bill landed a very juicy contract to build an ensemble of instruments out their client’s car for a big-budget, high-profile commercial.

Good money, invaluable exposure, a world of new contacts, and a dazzling new item on the resume.  Just for doing something he felt like doing.  (He also worked his ass off, mind you.)

The lesson.

Apply your skill or craft to a project of your own.  Work it.  Finish it.  It will pay off, but very likely in a way you never expect.  And it’s good for the soul, too.