Amy Abatangle

The most difficult part of any freelance business is client relations; it’s also the basis for success. If you’re a freelancer, you’ve spent a lot of time trying to woo clients and keep them happy. You’ve probably also dealt with clients who’ve taken advantage of that desire, intentionally or not. Here are ten things that I’ve learned over the years sitting on both sides of the conference table that may help you play nice  and run a tight business.

10. Always Use Protection
Most everyone enters into business relationships with good intentions. Along the way, however, things can get complicated. The best protection is a comprehensive contract and adequate insurance. For a freelancer, this can be as simple as running a sample contract (check professional associations or online legal sites) past an attorney to customize it for you and adding to your existing insurance policy to cover business liability. There are a number of companies that specialize in insuring small business owners, so look around to find a competitive rate.

9. Show Me the Money
For any project that will take you more than a day, you may want to consider charging a percentage of your total estimated cost upfront as a retainer. I bristled at this idea at first, fearful that clients might balk. Think of how much time you put into front-loading a project: meetings, writing up a proposal, possible contract modifications, research about the company or new technologies. If you’ve dealt with flaky clients or project delays, you’ll realize the benefit of recouping some of these costs early on. Consider charging a flat fee or a percentage (twenty percent is a reasonable figure) as a retainer, and you’ll feel better about working towards the balance.

8. Expect the Unexpected
No matter how carefully you’ve planned a project, surprises are inevitable. I’ve been both a client and a freelancer working on projects that have been delayed, put on hold or even terminated before completion.  Make sure that your contract specifies a turnaround time for any materials, content or reviews that will be provided by your client. Consider including a clause to cover any hiatus requested by the client; for example, you might want to include the ability to draft a new proposal if the project is delayed for more than three weeks and be able to bill for the portion of the project that was completed. Lastly, be sure to allow a way out for both yourself and your client by covering project termination explicitly in your contract. You’ll want to specify how much notice you’ll want to give and receive, and how you’ll handle billing if the project ends before it has been completed.

7. Lock, Stock & Barrel
It takes a lot more than HTML and CSS to produce a working website for a client. You may be surprised how many clients will need to be lead through the process of finding an ISP, hosted e-commerce solution or even licensing images. Think about your long-term relationship with the client when determining your role in providing these services. Consider acting as a trusted source for vendors and encourage your client to contract directly with the service provider. For example, you may charge a markup for sourcing stock images, but your client will license the images themselves. This will save you the headache of license transfer later. Similarly, think about whether or not you want to deal with uptime hassles before you act as a mini-ISP. By guiding your client to a reliable service provider, you engender trust without assuming liability.

6. Play 20 Questions
Before any of the design fun can begin, you’ve got to come up with a proposal to best serve your client’s needs. In addition to learning about your client’s business, you may also have to educate the client about YOUR business—building websites. Often, this involves you asking the same questions over and over again each time you start a new client relationship. Consider putting together a list of questions to “qualify” your potential clients. Sales people do this all the time; it’s called lead qualification. This can be not only a sales technique but a way to discover what the client actually needs (as opposed to what they make think they want). You’ll be able to better assess the scope of the project which will ultimately lead to a tighter proposal and more accurate budget and timeline. Questions to consider might cover budget, technical dependencies, potential project delays, existing vendor relationships, or branding guidelines. By asking a client to do their homework, you’ll free up your time at the beginning of the project and help them to really understand their requirements before work begins.

5. Work the Phones
Working online, we often immediately go to email to communicate. Email is efficient, but impersonal. When you’re setting up a project, you’ve got to balance the needs for speed and efficiency with establishing a personal connection with your clients. Some clients want to text you from an airport; others will want to sit down with their extended team for a face-to-face meeting. A happy medium is that old standby, the phone. When you’re first trying to figure out whether or not you can provide services to a client, you’ll want to be as open to communication as possible. At the same time, since you don’t have a signed contract, you’re not going to be billing for the hours you’re putting in to preparing a proposal. Rather than driving to a meeting or exchanging emails, schedule a time to find some quiet (especially if you’re working out of your home) for a teleconference with the appropriate contacts. This may be a great time to review your 20 Questions list and establish the project scope. Make sure you communicate upfront that this is your “initial consultation” and that future meetings will be billed to your clients (including any travel expenses you may charge).

4. A Day at a Time
Whether you generally charge your clients by the hour or by the project, it can help your business to establish a day rate: the amount of money you would charge for a full day’s work. If you’re used to setting your own schedule and working part-time, you may find yourself working 12 hours one day and 2 hours the next. By coming up with a number for a day’s work, you’ll give yourself another tool to calculate project costs. Think about how long it would take you to complete a project working full-time (8 hours a day on this project only), and you can often come up with a more accurate ballpark figure than trying to shoehorn your project into “man-hours” (especially when juggling multiple clients/projects). Establishing a day rate will also help you to fight the temptation to tune your hourly rate to your client, a mistake I made early in my freelancing career. Your fee should be based on the cost of your time, not the ability of the client to pay. Every time you say yes to one client, there is the potential to say no to another. Trying to scale your rate to attract a client ends up being a losing strategy. Figure out the value of your time by looking at the marketplace and establish a consistent rate accordingly.

3. You’re the Expert
Decide what you will do and won’t do before you engage your clients. Some clients will trust you to do whatever it takes to get their project done, regardless of whether or not you’re the right person for the job. Love Flash but hate copyediting? Make it clear upfront that all content will have to be ready for publication before it’s given to you. Are you an avid blogger who’s never sold anything online? Spend some time researching hosted e-commerce solutions that are plug-and-play with your favorite blogging platform. You may find a way to extend your area of expertise, or at least define what you are and are not willing to do.

2. Be a Referee
Freelance web designers almost always have subject matter expertise in more than one area. This is precisely what makes us so valuable. But when your client is asking for something you really don’t know how to do, it can make sense to have a stable of trusted partners to whom you can refer work. The time and energy it will take you to become fluent in a new area of technology or a tangential skill is time that can be better spent working in your area of expertise. You’re very unlikely to recoup the costs, and it’s ultimately rather unfair to your client have them subsidize your education. If you see enough demand in a certain area, consider spending time outside your billable hours to gain new skills. We work in an ever-changing medium, and ongoing learning is part of the fun.

1. Just Say No
Sometimes, your gut reaction really is right. When you’re getting the runaround from a client before you have a signed contract, you can bet that you’ll be treated the same way even when there’s money at stake. You treat all of your potential clients with respect and should demand the same from them. Any freelancer is essentially a brain-for-hire and every hour is potentially billable. If you’re already having problems getting answers to questions, phone calls returned or contracts reviewed, you’d best cut your losses and move on. There’s an opportunity cost to every “yes”, so it can pay to be stingy and learn to say a strategic “no.”