Hustle - Work - DowntimeHustle - work - downtime is the phrase my husband coined for the cycle of work in his freelance photography business. He needs to pick up the phone and start hustling to find new work. Then he produces - shoots, processes, prepares files, delivers, cleans up the studio, and bills. Then comes the wait. Will the phone ring? How long to wait? Pause. Time to pick up the phone and start hustling again.
That’s the first lesson he taught me about freelancing. Once you are in the loop, work can usually be turned over in 30 days. If you’re new or out of touch, it can be 90 days. And don’t forget the 30-60 day window for payment once the bill is sent. You certainly need to learn to manage money because you can go months without a paycheck. Still, the bills need to be paid.
Over the years, I’ve tried to hire people to help me with the unsteady volume of work I pump through my office. As with most freelance jobs, it’s feast or famine around here. When the work is here, I can never find the bottom of my desk. When it’s quiet, it’s almost scary. The problem for me has been keeping a steady flow - I rarely have enough to keep two people busy full-time, yet the work I do have requires someone with Calculus-level math education. You don’t find many people like that looking for occasional work.
Training is a challenge. When the work is here, I’m so busy that training and reviewing someone’s work is nearly impossible. When it’s quiet, training someone with no work on the horizon seems so pointless. Will they remember what I taught them by the time a job comes in? Will they understand the highs and lows of the freelance world? That I need to feed my family first, and hand over work that’s overflow after that?
In an ideal world, I’d be out selling all the time and my happy, brilliant worker bees would be producing steadily. Is that what I want? Is it realistic? Is the grass greener in that world?
Today I have an amazing, energetic wahm heading over for training. She’s bright, energetic, has her own
business ventures going…and she knows more math than I do. To top it all off…it’s quiet here and I’m changing things up and seeing if we can get it right this time. Maybe after 14 years, I’ll figure it out.
Happy outsourcing!
Treece
March 27th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
This post is a ‘must read of the week for freelancers’! Congrats on finding a great WAHM partner who has the math skills you biz needs;-)
March 27th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Great post!!
March 27th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Thanks, ladies. I love talking freelancing, so it’s nice to know that there are others out there!