Some honest takes from going freelance lately:
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Don’t undercut your own price. If a client accepts your quote, use that as your pricing baseline going forward. Price too low and you’re miserable doing the work; price high and it pushes you to deliver quality.
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With clients who keep probing your scope, don’t get attached. Cut means cut. Forcing the deal through just burns time in endless back-and-forth and drags down your margin.
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The higher the margin on a job, the more reasonable and easy to talk to the client is. The lower the margin, the more there’s no floor to how they behave. The 22k and the 10k clients were a breeze to work with; the 500-buck client kept asking for more and even tried to PUA me.
It’s genuinely strange, and I don’t know why either…
Too bad I don’t get PUA’d. Worst case, I’m out — and then I’ve got an open slot in my schedule, perfectly happy.
Plate’s full, and I’m not the least bit rattled.
The Pros Who Hide in Plain Sight
I once had a colleague who tutored rich kids, and he let me in on something:
These families never find tutors online. It’s all word of mouth inside the private-school mom circles — referrals and recommendations. These pros hide in plain sight. You won’t find a trace of them online (my colleague never advertised online either), and yet the jobs keep coming, one after another, more than they can take.
Later I got to know some sharp friends who are lawyers, accountants, corporate trainers. Same thing — no over-the-top online marketing, some of them eerily low-key, but behind the scenes the long-term clients and the steady stream of work never dry up.
I really hope one day I can become like them. That kind of thing probably takes both luck and skill — you can’t have one without the other.