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Author Topic: Nice Blog Essay and Site for Freelancers: 10 Absolute "Nos!" for Freelancers  (Read 2400 times)
mouser
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« on: November 24, 2007, 07:29:04 PM »

Nice looking site and some nice tips on succeeding as a freelancer.

Quote
When I first started freelancing as a college student, I was eager to do any website and would say "Yes" to anything, regardless of my skill set or the time involved. It was just nice to know that someone needed me for a skilled task. Unfortunately, I quickly found myself working all the time, eating Ramen noodles, and not getting anywhere in terms of paying off my wonderful college debt. To make things worse, these people were also giving my contact info out to other such people (you know, the lady who has been thinking about selling dog sweaters online and has a $100 budget for an e-commerce site, 1000 brochures, and a guranteed #1 Google search result for the "dog", "sweater", and "love").

Anyways, now four years later, my world (AND financial success) now requires ample use of the answer "No." And here are ten questions I nearly always answer "No" to:



from http://www.veign.com/blog
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Ralf Maximus
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« Reply #1 on: November 24, 2007, 09:01:19 PM »

You'd be surprised (or maybe not) at how even bigger companies have trouble saying "no" sometimes.  I once worked for a CEO who always negotiated deals to success.  He literally believed even a bad deal was better than no deal at all.

So we'd end up doing these insane projects for little income, the promise being this was a "strategic" project and would lead to bigger, more lucrative deals with the same customer.  It's a slippery slope, though... once the customer got a whiff of free stuff, it was difficult to throttle them back.

Then money we'd get from new projects would go to fund existing "strategic" projects and the hole dug itself ever deeper...
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Veign
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« Reply #2 on: November 24, 2007, 09:24:20 PM »

I still evaluate clients who can't, or won't, pay my going rate at how important could this client be for me and my company's image - since I do web development and a lot of my projects are tagged with Veign sometimes a highly visible client could be of benefit to me.

This benefit factor is actually used in the initial calculations of a projects cost.  The more benefit the lower the cost.  A zero benefit client doesn't affect the final cost in anyway, meaning it won't raise the cost.

Maybe I should do a blog post oneday that discuss how to determine the cost of a project.  For me there are a lot of factors beyond my hourly rate.
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housetier
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« Reply #3 on: November 25, 2007, 06:29:34 AM »

A very good article. I should have read this before ruining my freelancing career.
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::: Das Buch :::
mouser
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« Reply #4 on: November 25, 2007, 03:02:58 PM »

Quote
Maybe I should do a blog post oneday that discuss how to determine the cost of a project.  For me there are a lot of factors beyond my hourly rate.

yes please  thumbs up thumbs up
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Veign
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« Reply #5 on: November 25, 2007, 04:50:24 PM »

Its something I am on the fence about.  One part of me says share it and another part says clients (or competitors) really shouldn't know what goes into the costing of a project.

I'll give this some serious thought and maybe I could write in a way that helps other freelances without giving away my secrets.
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