A couple of months ago I decided I’d take a stab at this freelance consulting thing all my techie and communications friends have been raving about for the past decade. The conditions were right – my full-time employment seems to be falling apart, I’d just won a major award from SoftwareVendor who provides services to a huge slice of the progressive non-profit community, and the idea of flexibility seemed attractive enough to offset the uncertainty of the income stream.
So with some help from the folks at the vendor’s shop, I started circulating my name as an “outside partner” and I redid my professional web site to better showcase my achievements and make me seem, well, sane and hirable. And I started thinking about rates.
Given that I have more than a decade’s worth of experience in my field, having dealt with other vendors looking to work in the same realm, and knowing what SoftwareVendor’s shop charges for custom work on their platform, I settled on $90 per hour as a base rate with the idea that I would be prepared to offer discounts in certain circumstances.
One of those circumstances is not when you’ve sat on a proposal for nearly a month, call me up, and ask me to cut my rate while simultaneously asking me to do your work in less than two weeks. Here’s how the timeline of our relationship looks:
October 6:
I get a blind e-mail contact from ProjectManager with no indication of where they got my name telling me about their new site in SoftwareVendor’s online community, letting me know that they want to “use your service to get up to speed quickly,” and asking about my rates. I replied the same day indicating that I’d be happy to chat with her about the scope of work to determine what the best arrangement for them would be, hourly, by project contract, or a block of support hours.
When I don’t hear back for a day or so I call and leave her a voice mail message explaining that I’m working with a new e-mail client, which I was, and wanted to make sure she’d gotten my reply. She replies the same day that things are busy and she’ll get back to me shortly.
October 11:
I get another e-mail late in the day with a draft Word document outlining what they want. I reply October 12 early in the morning letting her know I’ve looked it over, am checking on the feasibility of doing it how they are specifying, what my hourly rate is and that we’d need to get a contract signed and a deposit in before I can start work, and indicating my willingness to have a call with them to discuss the project as they’ve requested.
October 12:
After back and forth because she never got my reply, she requests that I send a contract. I reply the same day letting her know that I need a better idea of the scope of work, deliverables, and timeline before we can write a contract, and when would she like to schedule that conference call? We schedule the call for October 14 for 45 minutes.
October 14:
It’s a good call. I give them an answer about the best way to do what they’re asking, which is not the way they’ve suggested, that will position them better in the future to segment the supporter data they’ll be collecting and will also set them up to communicate strategically to get people who signed up for low-level involvement engaged at higher levels.
I send them a two page proposal with an estimate for the maximum number of hours I think the project will take, an hourly rate quote that lets them know that if they choose hourly they only pay for the hours they use, and a project based quote that at the maximum number of hours estimated for the project represents a 10% discount on my hourly rate. I also send them, as they ask, a rate card for retainer hours separate from this project.
October 19:
I haven’t heard from them so I shoot ProjectManager and e-mail. She replies the same day that she’s trying to get ExecutiveDirector’s attention and will be talking with him that Friday.
October 22:
I get an e-mail request for a conference call the following Monday. It comes in at 4:12 p.m. Eastern (these people are on Central time). I reply Saturday morning, because that’s when I see the e-mail, that Monday would be fine.
October 25:
I have a conference call with ProjectManger, ExecutiveDirector, and their ContractWebmaster to discuss everything I’ve already told ProjectManager, explain again why how they want to do it isn’t feasible, and answer some strategic communications questions for free. The call takes 45 minutes.
So by now I’m down 90 minutes plus the time it took me to prep the proposal.
November 10th I get an e-mail from ExecutiveDirector asking me to call him because he doesn’t have my phone number.
During the 30 minutes I spent on the phone with him he proceeded to tell me that the Project Manager I’d been working with was leaving the organization for health reasons.
He also assured me that he recognized that I was fully worth the $90 per hour but finances had been incredibly bad for his organization in the past year, in fact they’d actually been unable to replace people who had left because they couldn’t guarantee the people they wanted to hire full-time salary, and would I be willing to cut my rate a little? He also holds out the promise of more business in the future. When I say I’ll take another look at the project and my rates and ask him what his budget is he keeps hammering the “we don’t have any money” key and even says “but we pay our bills.”
So, basically, they want me to do the work but they don’t want to pay for it and he pulled out both the non-profit sympathy card and the more business card and played them both.
Bearing in mind here that we’re talking about a project that would if I keep them within scope, take a maximum of 5 hours. That’s $450 if they pay hourly or $400 for the project rate.
After spending an hour working the numbers and trying to balance my desire to get my foot in the door, and have something else for my portfolio, I got some really good advice from TGF: they are the client.
The client never wants to pay for anything.
The client is trying to use you.
Figure out what the lowest hourly rate you’ll accept is and send them that number. If they don’t want to pay that, you don’t want them as a client.
And, of courses TGF is completely right. There’s also another nasty little aspect to this.
Giving them a lower hourly rate for this project would not only undervalue my skills but it would also set a horrible precedent; it would give them the idea that all future work would be done at that rate.
So, I sent them a revised proposal and I also included a contract reflecting the revised pricing. That was around 6:00 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday. It’s now Friday about after 11:00 a.m. , I still haven’t heard from them, and they want this work completed, tested, and live by Thanksgiving.
I suspect I’ll be hearing from them sometime around Thursday next week. And they aren’t going to like the rates for a rush job.
I think I’ve said this before, but TGF is most wise. The client also assumes they’re the only job you have. 🙂
If you figure out how to charge for the up-front project scoping, I’d love to know the technique. For relatively small stuff (under a few hours), I always just factored that into my bids because it seemed like I was always having to shill for more work anyway. (And then, as happened T-day 2004, I had three full-time jobs occurring at the same time… fun times) If the project is particularly complicated, or scoping takes a long time because the customer doesn’t know what they want, it’s completely fair to ask for some retainer money.
Is having an expiration date for proposals feasible for you? It seems like it’d be useful as a “call to action,” but to also emphasize that you have other stuff to do, because even if you’re not working for them, your time still has value.
Have you considered Google Voice to use as an alternate number? (It’s free, and you can selectively redirect calls to that number to one of your choice; I can send you an invite if you’d like.)
Dear heaven, it all sounds so familiar. A major variation on this was how my old boss handled projects. She was very bright and very very fast – she frequently completed projects ahead of schedule and before the users figured out it wasn’t what they wanted at all. But she also had detailed documentation indicating that it was exactly what they *said* they wanted. After awhile people began to listen to her more carefully. This worked well because it was all in-house – had we been outside consultants, different story.
@Jim: All good suggestions, and thank you for reminding me about the deadlines on proposals. I figure an hour of scoping, that first 45 minute phone call, is just as much about them as it is about me. It’s sort of the job interview of freelance work: you get a sense of the client, how smart and organized they are, and whether or not you’re willing to put up with their lack of either. The second and third phone calls in this case were just abuse.
I had not thought about Google voice. My only knowledge of it is when now-fired BigBoss decreed that we should all sign up for it immediately after decreeing that we should all sign up for Skype to save on long distance calls.
~~~
@Susan: That’s an interesting approach, and one I’ve thought about applying recently to my own in-house duties. It’s extraordinarily tempting to just give them what they ask for at my job because they aren’t savvy enough to ask for what they really want. The problem is that they’ve already demonstrated that they’re childish enough to give me the responsibility of getting them what they really need, often not what they asked for, without giving me the authority to make any real change or have any real control over what I’m responsible for. It is the proverbial space between the rock and the hard place.