Green Gecko wrote:Good work Taf. I'm probably making assumptions here but now that you've got paid gigs please double your rate on your next engagement before you get compared to the next guy charging £1 less per hour.
Why do designers need free copywriting? Because they're gooseberry fool businesspeople who charge too low to cover their overheads? If they can't write why not pay someone to do it well? I struggle to imagine a scenario where that's not a reasonable request.
Corporate conferences charge hundreds of pounds per head.
That's why at my last pitch I asked what the monthly turnover of the business was when I was told there is no budget yet. They just told me the monthly turnover there and then - £16,000 per month. So surely I can take 5-10% of that if my work is going to drive business by what, at least 10% per month for the following twelve months? My signage is good for 7 years. That's an extra £134,400 in revenue (at least, I can't be bothered figuring out compound % which is considerably more).
Compared to my last engagement where I totally strawberry floated up on a shitty day and quoted literally 20p over my minimum price per unit, I increased my profit on cost to something like 1000% and I charged over half of that upfront - and I often get paid upfront, even when I don't ask for it. I do that by convincing people I am worth even more than whatever the money is, and that just becomes an incidental figure at the bottom of the paperwork. In fact, I rarely have anyone even questioning the price of something anymore (and I still cut my prices occasionally because apparently I hate myself).
Do not compete on price alone. That is a retail or distributor model, that works purely on volume, but it does not work for freelancing.
I just think when you get into freelancing you don't want to spend 5 years sloooowly incrementing your rate when you could just do it tomorrow and still win as many jobs or even more jobs. You'll thank yourself when you're earning £10k more because you asked for it and you spend less time working for dreadful people. Because that's what a low rate generally gets you. I don't claim to always head my own advice that I have heard from many different very successful people (businesses in the £millions) because it's a massive learning experience and we all have shitty days, but it's something I wish I really took to heart earlier.
I'd also drop the term "freelancer" and call yourself a copywriter, as that's probably what you want. Your job isn't to dally around employment status and save people money there, it's to solve their problems and add value - if you do that you're on the way to being a valuable business partner instead of a gun for hire, and there are so, so many cheaper guns. It's really hard to sell yourself early on but I urge anyone employing themselves to cut out the no/low pay as soon as possible, within say, 6 months at an absolute maximum or the prognosis is not good for first of all your health or the business, the former being most important because without it, you cannot succeed in the latter.
You only need at most 3-6 good work samples to win bids - even if those are the only jobs you've ever done. And nobody needs to have heard of those companies either - just that you did a good job and you can do it again.
That's coming from someone with a long history of self-esteem issues trying to make it work.
Wow, thanks GG. This is all fantastic advice, and ties in really well with the situation both myself and my partner find ourselves in. For me I'm almost totally at sea when charging for a job. I did some quick research and came to the conclusion that charging per word is my best bet at the moment as I have no metrics to base a per hour charge off of. I'm going to set my prices around the average of the big proofreading houses (so around £0.01 per word below 30 000) which is, as far as I can see, still cheaper than your average freelancer proofreader, and we'll see where we go from there. I still have no idea how long the job is so I imagine they'll be some wiggle room too.
My partner has been a freelance designer for almost 2 years now (again
here if anyone's interested). We recently had a situation where she had completed a large amount of work for the design conference I mentioned above and she was inclined to only charge for two thirds of it. Although large in scale, the conference had a relatively slim budget and the guy who held the strings had become a friend over the course of the thing. I encouraged her to instead seek the whole amount as, strawberry float it, she wasn't doing this gooseberry fool for fun. She was a bit worried she might get a push-back as it was a large amount of money, but it was handed over without comment.
She has also been through the slow incremental style of price management but, and she asked me to put this in, mainly thanks to your advice above she's now seriously reconsidering her pricing structure.