Keeping your freelancing roster full–but not too full–can be a delicate balancing act. If you work exclusively with one or two clients, your workload will be more stable and you’ll have less difficulty juggling deadlines (assuming your clients are reasonable), but you’ll have to manage the risk that one will abruptly drop out, leaving you with a significant gap in your income.
On the other hand, if you fill your roster with 6-10 ongoing clients or take on several one-offs each month in addition to your regular roster, you’re better insured against a gap in income. But, you may also feel like you’re being pulled in a dozen different directions. The pressure of competing deadlines and answering to multiple clients can be stressful enough that it creates inefficiencies, aggravating the difficulty of managing deadlines.
Like nearly everything else in business, the best solution to this conundrum depends in part on you, your preferences, your strengths and weaknesses, and your client relationships.
Working with One or Two Big Clients
Working with just one or two clients isn’t for me, and it’s not because of the risk. One of the key reasons I freelance is flexibility, and if you’re devoting a substantial number of regular hours to a single client, it can easily become more like a job, with expectations about work hours and availability. But, that’s not an issue for everyone–many freelancers quite reasonably place a high value on stability and predictability.
The important thing to remember is that when you’re working a freelancing gig that’s a lot like a job, it’s a job without perks like unemployment benefits and severance pay. If you’re not prepared, your income can take a sudden dive, or disappear completely.
The best defense against that scenario is to build a financial buffer. Every freelancer should have money in the bank to pay at least a couple of months’ bills if income is interrupted. Counter-intuitively, this protection is even more important for the freelancer with regular income from a consistent source than the one juggling multiple clients with varied income. When you’re working with several different clients and always seeking out new opportunities, the chances that all of your income will disappear in the same month are pretty slim. Juggling bills when your income takes a dip is no fun, but it beats suddenly losing your sole source of income and having nothing to juggle with.
So, if you’re in a job-like freelance situation, give yourself a buffer in one of two ways: bank the money to tide you over through the gap, or fit in one or more smaller clients to ensure that you have some income even if your primary client drops out. One of the best periods of freelancing for me involved a 15-hour/week commitment to a single client that paid all of my bills, with one-off work for others as I chose to take it on.
If you’re thinking–as many freelancers do–that your relationship with your one great client is reliable and you’re at virtually no risk for the job ending, think again. I’ve known freelancers who lost those gigs because the company hit a cash flow problem, because the person they were reporting to was fired or quit, because an entire department was eliminated, and with no explanation at all. That great set-up I described above ended when the client was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Bottom line: protect yourself, no matter how solid you feel like your freelancing situation is.
Serving Many Masters
One of the toughest things about juggling multiple freelancing clients is that it’s a bit like having eight different bosses who are making different demands and setting different priorities. This is a real problem, but also one that is entirely manageable…if you’re willing and able to tackle it head on.
When you choose to freelance, whatever your field, you also choose to run a business. The key to managing multiple “bosses” is to get it clear in your mind (and theirs) that they’re not your bosses. You’re the boss. You’re running a business. You set the priorities.
Of course, you must be polite and professional while establishing those boundaries. Too many freelancers don’t push back until they’re frustrated, stressed, or unable to meet the client’s unrealistic expectations. It’s hard to convey confidence and engage in productive expectation-setting at that point.
Getting clear in your own mind is the first step toward successfully managing client relationships.
If you’re going to work with multiple clients, whether that means a stable of ongoing clients or taking on several one-offs each month, these tips will help you maintain your sanity and productivity.
- Don’t take on a project you don’t have time for. This sounds like a no-brainer, but in the moment it can be a much tougher call. Maybe you really need money, so it’s difficult to turn down an offer of paying work, even though you can’t quite see where it will fit in. Or, maybe the request is coming from an ongoing client and you don’t want to lose her business. In the long run, though, it will hurt your business and your relationships more to take on more than you can handle and then drop the ball or do less than your best work because you’re in a time crunch.
- Get a realistic, data-based sense of how long projects will take. When you want to take on a new project, it’s easy to be unrealistically optimistic. You should never be making a decision like, “I think I can probably make that work.” Instead, you should be thinking, “Other similar projects have taken 6-8 hours. I already have 30 hours of work scheduled this week, and I have a personal commitment on Saturday, so the soonest I could realistically work on this is…” Then, in most cases, you’ll want to add a day to your estimate–better to give yourself a buffer and surprise the client when you get done on your best-case schedule than have to explain a delay.
- Take control of the scheduling process. When a client reaches out to you with a new project, don’t make the common mistake of saying, “When do you need it?” Your existing commitments are what they are. Look at your schedule before you respond and say “I’m booked for the next two days, but I could start this on Monday and have a draft to you by the end of the day on Tuesday. Does that work for you?” Many freelancers are afraid that they’ll lose out on work if they give the client a realistic timeline, but what’s the alternative? Bump clients already on the schedule? Stretch yourself too thin and provide lesser quality? Give up sleep, throwing off the rest of your schedule? You’re available when you’re available–and you’ll be surprised how often that’s just fine with the client.
- Create realistic expectations in your ongoing clients. If you’ve committed to X hours of website maintenance or Y blog posts each week or month, build that into your schedule and set it in stone. But, let the clients know that you schedule in advance, and any additional tasks will typically require advance notice. The amount of advance notice required will depend on your schedule and other factors specific to you, but don’t just say “advance notice” to the client. Figure out what’s reasonable to allow you to fit in additional work without breaking the existing schedule and don’t be afraid to make it clear. My lead-time is 7-10 days, and I virtually never have a client push back on that.
Many freelancers are uneasy about implementing these strategies, because they don’t feel that they can afford to miss out on business or they believe that clients will respond badly to being asked to wait. And, some will.
As you build a sustainable business, your goal should be not just to land clients, but to land clients who are easy to work with, provide projects you want to work on, pay well, and don’t make unreasonable demands and break your schedule. That requires being willing to let some clients go.
Of course, only you know your specific circumstances. If your rent is past-due and you truly can’t afford to pass up a gig, you have to do what’s realistic for you. But, make sure that’s a one-off. Even as you are compromising to get some cash in the door, you should be strategizing to make your business more orderly and sustainable moving forward.