Freelancing in Technical Writing – Part 2

Seven habits for successful freelancing

By Makarand Pandit

Habit 1: Prospect, Prospect, Prospect

The word ‘prospect’ is used here as a verb and not as a noun. You will need to look for and create opportunities for yourself. Find out who is in business, who is new, who is hiring, and talk to them. This, in marketing jargon is called ‘prospecting’. It is a never-ending process. Keep prospecting as long as you want to stay in business.

But, what about existing clients and repeat orders? They will help you meet your bottom line! To thrive, you will need more and more clients. Your business cycle looks like this.

ProspectàInquiryàQuote/ProposalàApprovalàOrder ExecutionàSign-off

The client enters your business cycle in the prospecting stage. Prospecting is something that you need to do all the time. It has to be a part of your daily routine. The lack of it will lead to breaks between assignments. In IT Services Terminology, you will be “on the bench” till you get your next order. This non-billing time can wipe out your profits.

You can generate a database from job advertisements, trade journals, business listings (yellow pages) and other resources.

Remember, there are very many things that can happen to an existing client. The reasons for not getting work from the client can be temporary or permanent.

Reasons for temporary discontinuation of work from a client:

• The company may not have projects

• The company may not have the budget for a project

• The manager prefers some other resource

• Project dates do not match your availability

• Your skills do not match those required

• Previous projects of this client have not yet come to a logical conclusion. So they want to give this project to someone else. Or they may not want to load you with many assignments at the same time.

• They gave a project to you or someone else who goofed up!

• Remember, a temporary discontinuation can lead to a permanent discontinuation later on. In addition, there could be many other reasons for permanent discontinuation.

Reasons for permanent discontinuation of work from a client:

• The company stopped that line of business (products or services)

• The company closed down, relocated or was taken over

On the same lines, there could be many reasons due to which a company who never considered you in the past, may start giving you work. So you should always be on a lookout.

Habit 2: Network

Many jobs are not advertised. Many tenders are never floated. You need to learn who is buying and from whom. So you need to be plugged into the network. Networks of friends, relatives, business associates and even competitors! This takes many years to develop. But it is worth it.

There are many resources that you can use. At least 30 jobs are advertised on TWIN (www.twin-india.org) e-mail list every month. STC web site (www.stc.org) has an online job database giving details of opportunities available. There are some bid sites where you can bid for technical writing contracts (www.elance.com). For many jobs contractors are preferred over full-time employees.

Your network should be strong enough to get you leads. Remember, the network does not work if you do not share. It is ‘give’ and ‘take’. Which means that you need to ‘give’ before you ‘take’. If you try to ‘take’ first, the network will most certainly not work for long.

The STC India chapter and the formal informal meetings provide an excellent platform for networking.

Habit 3: Update your cash-flow statement each month

Your cash flow statement can be similar to the following table. 

Your total income should be more than your total expenses for any given month. If it is not, you should have an arrangement to cover that period using a credit facility.

What can you use as finance? Whole lot of things! There are a number of options available. You can use credit card, cash-credit facility provided by your banker, bills discounting, checks purchasing, credit for exports and much more.

It is a good policy to have 2-3 months expenses in hand. Practically, it does not always work out. In any case, if the average income is less than the average expenses, you are headed for trouble.

Know what is your bottom line – your average monthly expense. The actual figure changes every month and every month. Track that change, so you know when you can take some risk. In certain conditions you need to take the job as soon as you get it. But after you have a few assignments in your hand, you can afford to wait for the bigger pie.

Remember, more than half of the projects are behind schedule (mostly for reasons beyond your control). If your payment is tied to the project completion, it gets delayed too!

Habit 4: Book more orders than you can handle

No matter how hard you try, no matter how good your relationship with your client is, for many reasons beyond your control, there are going to be gaps in your work. Some typical issues are,

• The application is being updated or redesigned

• Feedback is awaited from the client or end user

• The contact person is not available (he/she is on leave, or out of country)

• Mails are bouncing back

• Something more urgent has come up, so your project is put on the back burner

If you expect an assignment to be completed by a certain date, most of the times, it will not! This will have two effects.

• You will have no work to do till you get enough inputs to start work again.

• Your payments will be delayed.

This means that at the end of the year, you would have made less money than you thought you would.

Your first reaction will be to try and get more control over the situation. Like reminding the client for feedback, or asking for part payments against work done. But this does not always work out. If you push beyond a limit, you run the risk of losing business.

The smarter way out is to overload yourself to some extent. Something somewhere is going to go wrong. When it does, you will still have billable work in hand. The risk that you are running is, if everything happens on time, you may have an intermittent peak workload. But that can be managed by working extra hours or hiring some resources. If you are on the network, you might be able to share this work with some other freelancer. I prefer to take the overload risk than the downtime risk.

Habit 5: Charge at least double of what you would have been paid as a an employee

Companies pay employees for medical leave, casual leaves, insurance and training. But, when you are on your own, you need to generate enough income to pay for all this.

To do all this, you need to charge at least double of what a company could have paid you as a salary. As a matter of fact, the Cost to Company (CTC) for a typical writer is indeed almost double his/her salary.

You will have to save for rainy days yourself. The challenging part will be to convince your clients about this. If your billing is calculated to earn your “carry-home salary”, at the end of the year, you will realise that you were much better off as an employee.

Habit 6: Train yourself

It is natural to make an effort to maximise the billable hours. But, when you do it, everything else is compromised. Even training!

I was told a story about a group of woodcutters. They all worked in a jungle. At the end of the day, everyone would be paid by number of logs they had cut. A new guy joined in. He was sincere and hardworking. To earn more, he used to save his lunch-time and spend maximum time possible on “billable” work. But at the end of the day he realised that they had all cut the same number of logs. What happened to the additional time that he spent during lunch hours? What did the others do that he did not? Well, while they chatted after lunch, they sharpened their tools!

Similarly, you will need to take out time to sharpen your skills. If you do not, you will be out of business soon. You need to find out what is latest and learn it. The training also gives you an essential break.

Put ‘training’ on top of your ‘to do list’. If possible, undertake assignments that teach you something new. Prefer such assignment to others. You are getting trained and yet billing for it. You can also give a lower rate for such assignments.

Habit 7: Team up with competitors

Healthy competition helps. Cut throat competition cuts! If you can manage to lay down some ground rules, teaming up will help.

Just like good ones, there are bad clients too. Some managers will want to get their work done, no matter what happens to the writer (you) after the assignment is completed. No matter whether you made money or not!

If your estimate is wrong and you are making a loss, the client may not consider the additional sum. But if your estimate is wrong and the client ends up paying more, the issues will be taken up seriously.

I have worked on assignments when the client informed us that there were only 15 screens in the application. We quoted and finalised the order. Then the application changed. The functionality increased. The total number screens in the application went up to 45. But the client wanted the document to be written at the same cost. The reason given was that the project had cost overrun and there was no more budget available to fund the incremental work.

Big fish eat the small fish. There are many unfair business deals. If you team up, you can warn each other against such unfair business practices.

Some amount of business intelligence should be shared. All Banks send a CR or Confidential Report about their customers to other banks (even their competing banks) when asked for. This is a standard practice.

If you team up, many things can be shared and standardised. You can determine benchmarks for delivery, standard rates, standard operating procedures and so on. In good competition, all competitors develop, and so does the market.

You will enjoy the game if all participants know and follow the rules of the game. If someone doesn’t he will not only loose himself, but will also spoil the game.

In business, the best recommendation you can get is from your competitor. If, your competitor recommends your name, you are almost certain to get the assignment.

It is an ocean out there! There is enough for everyone. Otherwise, why am I writing all this?