One of the complaints we sometimes hear — and sometimes envy — on freelancers' social media is too much work and having to decline.
The first thing people think about in response is work-and-life balance.
Yes, being overworked is not good for balance, but there is a different point to raise:
If you decline a lot simply because you don't have free slots, it means you've sold your capacity out and the demand still exists.
Without getting into theory, that means you could probably charge more.
It's not certain you could get away with charging more, it's only probable — and worth checking if you can do so without taking on too much risk.
And it's difficult to tell how much more — there are too many variable factors to play guesses here without knowing details of your situation.
But it's probable you could get away with quoting at least a little higher fees than you quote now.
Note: This applies if running out of capacity occurs regularly to you, not just once in a blue moon.
If you simply have peak periods that throw you off balance, develop a coping strategy for that specifically, e.g. a network of colleagues not all of whom will be experiencing peaks at the same time.
But if you regularly run out of capacity at your current rates, those rates should be going up.
Remember, as a freelancer you won't get a raise from your clients. Just like a law firm, private clinic or design studio, clients won't normally spontaneously offer to pay you more than they did one or two years ago or than you quoted them. You'll only be paid more if you charge more.
Some ethical doubts may arise here, and I want to deal with them separately in the section below the line. If you don't have any such doubts, don't waste your time reading further.
Ethically, you shouldn't worry about whether or not you deserve the raise based on the circumstances, the circumstances being e.g. that you like more time off and begin to wonder if something like that should affect how much you charge or entitles you to a raise.
I suggest focusing instead on the ultimate rates you'll end up charging. Will they be fair? Sticking a knife to someone's throat to help yourself get an objectively fair fee would be unethical. But using supply & demand to stop being underpaid by taking a tougher position? Hardly!
Using legitimately obtained knowledge for the legitimate purpose of resisting demands for rebates that your clients don't deserve is hardly unethical.
Next point, if you believe you're already making enough, however low that could be, so you believe you don't need more. Fine. Great. You don't have to keep the money. Donate it to a charity of your choice. Or work less (charge more, so you'll work fewer hours) and donate your time instead. But undercharging for work that generates real money for your clients is not the answer, especially if it puts financial pressure on your colleagues, some of whom may be in a tougher situation than you are.
If you want to spend your time doing the job you love and still don't feel comfortable charging more than you honestly believe you need, then perhaps work for charities and pro bono causes rather than business clients. Undercharging business clients does no good, and it destroys the market for everybody else.
If you're a single guy who lives on bread and water, owns no property to maintain, pays very little rent and bills, doesn't like to travel, doesn't like hobbies, doesn't like to travel, doesn't need anything really, or somoene who doesn't depend on the job for income, then like I said there's still the matter of what undercharging does to your colleagues and the matter of who's the best qualified recipient of your charity.
It's your time and your money, of course, so I don't want to give the impression of accusing you of doing something wrong, but perhaps think if that's really what you want to be doing. My goal is not to denigrate that approach but to show that any moral high ground would be up to debate, as there are better uses for whatever talents you may have than semi-donating them to for-profit enterprises.
Showing posts with label balance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label balance. Show all posts
Sunday, 19 May 2019
Saturday, 18 May 2019
A Different Voice on How to Become a Successful Freelancer or What It Means to Be One
There has recently been a discussion, yet another discussion in the
endless succession of such discussions to be sure, about what it takes
to succeed as a freelancer.
I am not qualified by reason of personal achievement to speak as an authority on that, but I want to look analytically and synthetically at where we are with those discussions.
I will inevitably be drawing on the collective experience of such discussions that fit in my attention span.
I will be applying a ruthless, no-nonsense method of intuitive analysis focused on getting right to the point without wasting time on too much mumbo jumbo.
So what does it take to succeed as a freelancer?
It is a platitude to say we need to define success first. It nonetheless needs to be said. It needs to be said because we can't keep comparing apples to oranges to strawberries and melons.
There are up to as many planes and criteria upon which success can be judged as there are the 'judges' of it. Some trimming is therefore necessary. Let's cut it down to two things:
1) Being good at what you do.
This one is easy to define and take further. There exist objective criteria to assess skill. Who wants to can use those, end of analysis for us here. Let's move on to the next one:
2) Money and other benefits to you.
For 'other benefits', generally see no. 1. Let's focus on money now.
Contrary to what some suggest, being successful on this front does not include frugal lifestyles. However you choose to spend your 'salary' does not affect how much you are paid, which is the primary question.
Frugality in *business* expenditure may count, however. Still, money is not created by spending less. It is created by earning more.
The more you earn, the bigger your business success, simple as that.
And that is a matter of:
In other words, it's basically successful sales — generating enough leads and turning them into enough conversions at good enough fee rates to cut a nice profit. The rest is footnotes.
Therefore the kind of advice people need to hear is not a reminder after reminder of how they are not the people who succeeded and how they differ (at some level we aren't all brilliant scientists because we aren't all geniuses), but practical advice on how to actually:
Just two things. The essentials.
The whole science of the 'get'. It can be a million words, a thousand books, but it basically comes down to the how to of getting things done.
We can expand this a little as we delve into more detail, viz. how to:
The rest is a matter of degree:
We don't really need to raise more awareness in people that they are not successful and that that is because they are doing something wrong — they already know that.
'Just do what I did,' is helpful advice provided you explain what you did, in a way that can be repeated, and in a way that demonstrates it was a methodical approach with justified expectations of a desirable outcome, not just a lucky turn of events.
Simply reminding people they aren't quite where you are, and that you are there and they are not, is not helpful. Again, they already know that anyway. Repeating the point time after time again is not helpful advice, it's more self-promotion (not that there's anything wrong with self-promotion per se, but let's just tell that one apart from helpful advice).
'You aren't doing it right,' is not helpful advice. They already know that. And if you keep focusing on how they aren't getting it right without being able to tell them how to do it right, then it gives an impression that you yourself don't quite know what it was that you did right — happens to all of us a lot of the time. The point is, it's not a recipe if it can't be followed with some assurance of achieving the intended result if nothing is done wrong along the way.
And again, people already know they are doing things wrong or at least not doing them right. Presumably they want to change that. So no point dwelling on these two. What everybody needs is some practical, followable, mumbo-jumbo-free advice on — and at least in the form of pointers toward — these two things:
(This presupposes the recipient of the advice already knows how to do the actual job and doesn't need to be taught that first.)
To the vast majority of people, myself included, I would suggest leaving the personality/mindset/coaching/esoteric/whatever stuff aside and just simply reading up on:
client acquisition
client retention
communicating your value, being assertive about it, persuading the clients/prospects you deserve the fees you charge or persuading them that it pays to pay what you charge
A lot of this is sales, marketing, negotiation and communication in general, with some aspects of economy and management thrown in, of which a lot of people are unaware simply because of being self-taught (or rather not yet taught) entrepreneurs and not having gone to business school. Some are naturals at it, some aren't. The latter need to learn the basics and expand on that. It starts with reading a book or two about the subject. But people need to be told where to look for the knowledge they need.
My own view is that there is simply not enough knowledge of the basics actually reaching most freelancers, i.e. those who are not business naturals.
Once you've got the basics, you can go on to more advanced stuff, such as image management, successful PR, streamlining your processes, selecting the right prospects, the right deals, honing your deal-closing skills, etc. Discussing these before covering the basics may in fact be counterproductive — confusing and discouraging.
Consequently, I would give people pointers, as specific as possible, to the right resources where they can learn basics and then pointers in the basics of the more advanced stuff they need. From A to B without skipping the basics, unless there is a valid single-issue question that somehow needs to be addressed right then and there (provided it actually can).
Where self-learning from books doesn't seem to cut it, perhaps class would be more helpful. Everyone's learning style is different, as is everybody's learning curve (and in fact slow learners initially are not prevented from becoming big successes in the long run).
Probably some personal practical advice will be necessary on how to apply book knowledge to life in one's specific line of business, which is perhaps what we should focus on when giving people advice — once they're back from the library having covered the basics we asked them to.
If they don't want to, well, that's their problem, I guess. You can't force them. You can't save those who don't want to be saved.
One other thing to consider is that some of us are bottlenecked not so much by any lack of business aptitude as by general life issues such as depression, anxiety, lack of confidence or self-esteem, lack of motivation or agency. All of these need to addressed on the plane they exist, which is not business but life in general. In those cases reasserting the need to get up, get down to work and get things going will generally not be successful advice (pun somewhat intended).
I am not qualified by reason of personal achievement to speak as an authority on that, but I want to look analytically and synthetically at where we are with those discussions.
I will inevitably be drawing on the collective experience of such discussions that fit in my attention span.
I will be applying a ruthless, no-nonsense method of intuitive analysis focused on getting right to the point without wasting time on too much mumbo jumbo.
So what does it take to succeed as a freelancer?
It is a platitude to say we need to define success first. It nonetheless needs to be said. It needs to be said because we can't keep comparing apples to oranges to strawberries and melons.
There are up to as many planes and criteria upon which success can be judged as there are the 'judges' of it. Some trimming is therefore necessary. Let's cut it down to two things:
1) Being good at what you do.
This one is easy to define and take further. There exist objective criteria to assess skill. Who wants to can use those, end of analysis for us here. Let's move on to the next one:
2) Money and other benefits to you.
For 'other benefits', generally see no. 1. Let's focus on money now.
Contrary to what some suggest, being successful on this front does not include frugal lifestyles. However you choose to spend your 'salary' does not affect how much you are paid, which is the primary question.
Frugality in *business* expenditure may count, however. Still, money is not created by spending less. It is created by earning more.
The more you earn, the bigger your business success, simple as that.
And that is a matter of:
- finding and landing clients and jobs, and secondarily keeping them
- justifying your fees
In other words, it's basically successful sales — generating enough leads and turning them into enough conversions at good enough fee rates to cut a nice profit. The rest is footnotes.
Therefore the kind of advice people need to hear is not a reminder after reminder of how they are not the people who succeeded and how they differ (at some level we aren't all brilliant scientists because we aren't all geniuses), but practical advice on how to actually:
- get clients/jobs
- get good rates
Just two things. The essentials.
The whole science of the 'get'. It can be a million words, a thousand books, but it basically comes down to the how to of getting things done.
We can expand this a little as we delve into more detail, viz. how to:
- get clients with jobs
- keep them coming/returning, get more coming
- avoid losing the ones you already have (which tends to be easier than winning new ones and has the same effect)
- avoid making other stupid mistakes that are easily avoidable (to avoid small mistakes that lose you big money is generally easier than to make the same amount of money back from scratch)
- keep keeping keeping up
The rest is a matter of degree:
- If the degree is low, you struggle. Your success is minimal and consists mostly in not having failed as of yet.
- If the degree is moderate, you get by. That is some success, if only in not failing.
- If the degree is comfortable, you make it. There is a modicum of success in that.
- If the degree gets closer to the wow point, congratulations, you're 'successful' in the typical sense of the word.
We don't really need to raise more awareness in people that they are not successful and that that is because they are doing something wrong — they already know that.
'Just do what I did,' is helpful advice provided you explain what you did, in a way that can be repeated, and in a way that demonstrates it was a methodical approach with justified expectations of a desirable outcome, not just a lucky turn of events.
Simply reminding people they aren't quite where you are, and that you are there and they are not, is not helpful. Again, they already know that anyway. Repeating the point time after time again is not helpful advice, it's more self-promotion (not that there's anything wrong with self-promotion per se, but let's just tell that one apart from helpful advice).
'You aren't doing it right,' is not helpful advice. They already know that. And if you keep focusing on how they aren't getting it right without being able to tell them how to do it right, then it gives an impression that you yourself don't quite know what it was that you did right — happens to all of us a lot of the time. The point is, it's not a recipe if it can't be followed with some assurance of achieving the intended result if nothing is done wrong along the way.
And again, people already know they are doing things wrong or at least not doing them right. Presumably they want to change that. So no point dwelling on these two. What everybody needs is some practical, followable, mumbo-jumbo-free advice on — and at least in the form of pointers toward — these two things:
- how to get clients/jobs
- how to justify nice rates
(This presupposes the recipient of the advice already knows how to do the actual job and doesn't need to be taught that first.)
To the vast majority of people, myself included, I would suggest leaving the personality/mindset/coaching/esoteric/whatever stuff aside and just simply reading up on:
client acquisition
client retention
communicating your value, being assertive about it, persuading the clients/prospects you deserve the fees you charge or persuading them that it pays to pay what you charge
A lot of this is sales, marketing, negotiation and communication in general, with some aspects of economy and management thrown in, of which a lot of people are unaware simply because of being self-taught (or rather not yet taught) entrepreneurs and not having gone to business school. Some are naturals at it, some aren't. The latter need to learn the basics and expand on that. It starts with reading a book or two about the subject. But people need to be told where to look for the knowledge they need.
My own view is that there is simply not enough knowledge of the basics actually reaching most freelancers, i.e. those who are not business naturals.
Once you've got the basics, you can go on to more advanced stuff, such as image management, successful PR, streamlining your processes, selecting the right prospects, the right deals, honing your deal-closing skills, etc. Discussing these before covering the basics may in fact be counterproductive — confusing and discouraging.
Consequently, I would give people pointers, as specific as possible, to the right resources where they can learn basics and then pointers in the basics of the more advanced stuff they need. From A to B without skipping the basics, unless there is a valid single-issue question that somehow needs to be addressed right then and there (provided it actually can).
Where self-learning from books doesn't seem to cut it, perhaps class would be more helpful. Everyone's learning style is different, as is everybody's learning curve (and in fact slow learners initially are not prevented from becoming big successes in the long run).
Probably some personal practical advice will be necessary on how to apply book knowledge to life in one's specific line of business, which is perhaps what we should focus on when giving people advice — once they're back from the library having covered the basics we asked them to.
If they don't want to, well, that's their problem, I guess. You can't force them. You can't save those who don't want to be saved.
One other thing to consider is that some of us are bottlenecked not so much by any lack of business aptitude as by general life issues such as depression, anxiety, lack of confidence or self-esteem, lack of motivation or agency. All of these need to addressed on the plane they exist, which is not business but life in general. In those cases reasserting the need to get up, get down to work and get things going will generally not be successful advice (pun somewhat intended).
Tuesday, 2 April 2019
Short Reflection on the Synergy Between Productivity and Comfort (and the Lost Profit)
The relationship between productivity and comfort has doubtless been the subject of much proper research and analysis, and I'm not going there now. For that we have Google. Instead, I want to focus on some obvious things we miss in everyday freelance life:
(1) Comfort improves productivity, and (2) productivity — the sensation, the experience of being productive, the sense of achievement — also improves comfort. (3) There is thus a mutually stimulating relationship between productivity and comfort. And (4) that is something we can use, because nothing prevents us — no corporate policies, no spending limits, no standardization, no employer branding, no issues of rank, paygrade, status, etc.
We all know we're in charge of the home office. But it somehow fails to fully sink in sometimes, and so we fail to employ the fact usefully and reap the benefits.
I'm not encouraging anyone to overspend and be wasteful just because there's no accounting department to vet and veto the spend. But it's important to fully realize that the typical constraints faced by inhouse employees within an organization and structure don't apply to us.
So get yourself the right chair, the right keyboard, the right monitor(s), move the desk around a bit, adjust, optimize. Your workplace is worth spending some time tweaking before you spend months and years in it.
It's important to note that scale of all things is not an issue. Whatever you buy, you buy it just once. $1000 for a super super comfortable chair is a thousand, because the upgrade doesn't apply to 999 other people in the same paygrade. If you overspend $200 of the amount, you overspend $200 and not $ 200 thousand. The same applies to an easily adjustable desk or a mechanical or ergonomic keyboard, or better monitor, or I don't know, furniture, flowers, whatever.
By getting the right equipment and figuring out the best arrangement for your long-term comfort and productivity, removing distractions and obstacles, your physical comfort will improve, you will tire less and at a slower rate, and your satisfaction levels will improve. You will work faster and need less rest, less often, and will find it easier to maintain focus.
The resulting productivity gain will soon translate into more income, and the investment will pay off before you even realize. Let's say you manage to squeeze one or two medium-sized projects more during the year — that will more than pay back for a proper 24/7 chair or a monitor that protects your eyes, or a keyboard that goes easy on your wrists.
If you don't, chances are you're being frugal to the point of gimping yourself in the thousands just to avoid spending hundreds.
(1) Comfort improves productivity, and (2) productivity — the sensation, the experience of being productive, the sense of achievement — also improves comfort. (3) There is thus a mutually stimulating relationship between productivity and comfort. And (4) that is something we can use, because nothing prevents us — no corporate policies, no spending limits, no standardization, no employer branding, no issues of rank, paygrade, status, etc.
We all know we're in charge of the home office. But it somehow fails to fully sink in sometimes, and so we fail to employ the fact usefully and reap the benefits.
I'm not encouraging anyone to overspend and be wasteful just because there's no accounting department to vet and veto the spend. But it's important to fully realize that the typical constraints faced by inhouse employees within an organization and structure don't apply to us.
So get yourself the right chair, the right keyboard, the right monitor(s), move the desk around a bit, adjust, optimize. Your workplace is worth spending some time tweaking before you spend months and years in it.
It's important to note that scale of all things is not an issue. Whatever you buy, you buy it just once. $1000 for a super super comfortable chair is a thousand, because the upgrade doesn't apply to 999 other people in the same paygrade. If you overspend $200 of the amount, you overspend $200 and not $ 200 thousand. The same applies to an easily adjustable desk or a mechanical or ergonomic keyboard, or better monitor, or I don't know, furniture, flowers, whatever.
By getting the right equipment and figuring out the best arrangement for your long-term comfort and productivity, removing distractions and obstacles, your physical comfort will improve, you will tire less and at a slower rate, and your satisfaction levels will improve. You will work faster and need less rest, less often, and will find it easier to maintain focus.
The resulting productivity gain will soon translate into more income, and the investment will pay off before you even realize. Let's say you manage to squeeze one or two medium-sized projects more during the year — that will more than pay back for a proper 24/7 chair or a monitor that protects your eyes, or a keyboard that goes easy on your wrists.
If you don't, chances are you're being frugal to the point of gimping yourself in the thousands just to avoid spending hundreds.
Thursday, 27 December 2018
What Do I Do if the Client Always Pays Me Late? (Adapt!)
I'll give you a straight answer: adapt.
It's not worth fighting over.
Or stressing over.
Just adapt.
Shrug it off and adapt your business model.
Your business model is far more adaptable than your clients' habits.
You get more and better rewards from adapting your conduct than from trying to adapt your clients' conduct.
Payment leniency is like any other need you can identify in the market — once you identify it, respond to it and profit.
There's really no point insisting on feeling offended/cheated/breached against etc. etc. when you can simply adapt and profit. And with a smile.
Challenges bring opportunities. Outplay life by taking the disadvantages it throws at you and converting them into advantages, coming out on top and profiting.
That said, here's some analysis:
What do you stand to gain if you press the matter?
Off the top of my head, I would expect a blend of conflict, guilt, apology and risk avoidance. In effect, probably:
Off the top of my head, things don't change, which can be either good or bad but is more or less the whole point. Old facts, new approach.
Make the choice — given their payment delays, would you drop them or keep them, supposing you can't change the way they act (and possibly they can't either)?
If you choose to part ways, there's no reason to make the split any more hostile or awkward than it has to be.
If you'd rather keep them, it's counterproductive to keep complaining and putting a strain on the relationship. In fact, they could even just start to avoid hiring you and think they're doing you a favour.
So take a new approach. Stop feeling offended, cheated, ignored or whatever is the case. Shrug it off, let it go, stop allowing negative emotions to hold you hostage.
Instead, make it your own policy to extend an unspoken grace period that isn't the client's right but makes your client's life easier, and yours too.
Integrate those delays in your business model. Client payment punctuality is unreliable? Stop relying on clients to pay punctually — as long as they pay at all and don't take too long.
Just keep some floating cash. Don't spend or invest everything. Invest in liquidity and thus security. Your comfort and quality of life will increase dramatically as a result. Ridding yourself of liquidity anxiety will make it so much easier for you to project the calm confidence that wins your clients over as a professional. It will also make you friendlier, and a little relaxed and forgiving attitude (or at least reasonable, at a minimum) will not go unnoticed.
… It enhances your reputation, your goodwill. And that is a great asset and a great benefit to you. It may be intangible, but it has a great effect on your life and can make or unmake your success. Or at least have a very tangible effect on your income.
It's easier to get yourself a 'pillow' — a month's, then quarter's, then semester's, and then perhaps a year's worth of income retained as a reserve — than to challenge your client's habits. Besides, as a service provider it's generally a good idea to challenge your own habits and expectations before your client's. And that's not just a chore — like I said, it can make or unmake a successful practice.
And be positive. Don't be too hard on yourself. Perhaps you're already making more than some people you know who are less flexible than you are. Make that flexibility your strength and your policy.
… Doesn't mean it has to be your stated policy. In fact, as you've probably guessed by now, the whole point is that it shouldn't be! If you extend the deadlines, a lot of your clients will still be one or two weeks (or months, or days) late whether the deadline is two or four weeks (or months, or days). Give them a deadline, but don't expect them to keep it — and don't tell them you aren't expecting them to keep it. Just base your own internal calculations on official deadline + grace period.
If you choose to provide an official grace period, which may well be a good move in some situations, still provide an unofficial one after that and base your calculations on it rather than on the official one.
There, you solved your liquidity problem! You removed the anxiety and lack of security resulting from late payments from your clients, without even talking to them, much less straining your relationships.
Bonus tip: Consider (and I only say consider) a 3% discount for expedited payment, for example 3 days where the deadline is 30. Perhaps also consider a 1% deadline for not exceeding the 30.
The goal of the 3% discount is not to reward your clients for not being late (for not failing to do what they are already obligated to do). And, as you can see, neither is it the effect. The goal is simply to see the money in your account as soon as possible. Once in, it can't be taken out — unlike when it's still in your client's account/reserve/provision for outgoing payments, let alone the client's general account. You have the money, you no longer have to worry, and that's it.
More elaborate theory is that early, as opposed to timely, payment is a legitimate novel benefit for you. Reciprocally, you provide a legitimate benefit, a small financial concession. However named or classified, it's simply a small financial benefit, and getting emotional about the reason or classification makes very little practical sense.
The 1% discount for not exceeding the deadline obviously does reward your client for not breaching, but the reward is smaller, and the benefit is real. And you don't care about all that, remember? What you care about is that the money is already safely in your account, so the risk of non-payment is no longer there.
The 1% discount is reverse-interest. People feel bad about being penalized, or even confronted about doing something wrong, let alone when they see themselves as not being at fault — and agencies will typically not see themselves as being at fault when they haven't been paid by their own clients yet (get used to that, as you can't change it, at least not you alone and not overnight). Applying late interest or some other form of late fees or penalties will be an antagonizing move and will damage the relationship. By contrast, nobody can complain about not receiving a benefit one, through fault or no fault, just simply didn't qualify for. There are no accusations, no implications of wrongdoing, there's just simply a missed benefit.
Don't want to give up 1% or 3% of your current earnings? Up your pre-discount rates, problem solved. Suppose you charge 100. So now it would be 97, and you don't like that, which is fair. So you need to charge 103.09.
Naturally, changing your rates and payment conditions in tandem would be a bit too obvious and defeat the point of applying incentives instead of penalties, so perhaps wait till your next increase and rather than 105 make it 108. Or make it 105 but earlier. Or only with new clients, or new projects for occasional clients. How to give yourself a smooth raise is a whole different topic.
Recap: As a freelancer, one of your biggest competitive advantages is the adaptability of your small, lean, flexible structure (or even sometimes almost total lack thereof). You can adapt more easily than your clients. And you can also adapt more easily than some of your competitors (including freelancers who don't want to adapt). Use that adaptability and profit. If your clients fail to meet their obligations, try to see beyond the breach and see the need that you can respond to — and profit. This can include the need to adapt your business model to a longer payment cycle. Instead of trying to to turn the tide, you can invest your energy and creativity in using it to your advantage — and there are various ways of doing that. At the end of the day your need is liquidity and security, and that can be achieved in more than one way, and some ways are smarter than others. Be guided by pragmatism, creativity and… empathy. Think outside the box. You're allowed to! You don't have a boss to say you can't. Sometimes you can have your way in the big picture by agreeing to not have your way in small things that are ultimately inconsequential.
It's not worth fighting over.
Or stressing over.
Just adapt.
Shrug it off and adapt your business model.
Your business model is far more adaptable than your clients' habits.
You get more and better rewards from adapting your conduct than from trying to adapt your clients' conduct.
Payment leniency is like any other need you can identify in the market — once you identify it, respond to it and profit.
There's really no point insisting on feeling offended/cheated/breached against etc. etc. when you can simply adapt and profit. And with a smile.
Challenges bring opportunities. Outplay life by taking the disadvantages it throws at you and converting them into advantages, coming out on top and profiting.
***
That said, here's some analysis:
What do you stand to gain if you press the matter?
Off the top of my head, I would expect a blend of conflict, guilt, apology and risk avoidance. In effect, probably:
- slightly faster payments but not always on time, and at a great energy/stress cost for the client that could be better spent
- a more strained relationship, with less goodwill capital than you could amass by being 'reasonable' and lenient
- a client less inclined to be forgiving when it's your turn to get late or otherwise slip (anything from stern to vindictive… or actually lenient and forgiving, putting you to shame)
Off the top of my head, things don't change, which can be either good or bad but is more or less the whole point. Old facts, new approach.
Make the choice — given their payment delays, would you drop them or keep them, supposing you can't change the way they act (and possibly they can't either)?
If you choose to part ways, there's no reason to make the split any more hostile or awkward than it has to be.
If you'd rather keep them, it's counterproductive to keep complaining and putting a strain on the relationship. In fact, they could even just start to avoid hiring you and think they're doing you a favour.
So take a new approach. Stop feeling offended, cheated, ignored or whatever is the case. Shrug it off, let it go, stop allowing negative emotions to hold you hostage.
Instead, make it your own policy to extend an unspoken grace period that isn't the client's right but makes your client's life easier, and yours too.
Integrate those delays in your business model. Client payment punctuality is unreliable? Stop relying on clients to pay punctually — as long as they pay at all and don't take too long.
Just keep some floating cash. Don't spend or invest everything. Invest in liquidity and thus security. Your comfort and quality of life will increase dramatically as a result. Ridding yourself of liquidity anxiety will make it so much easier for you to project the calm confidence that wins your clients over as a professional. It will also make you friendlier, and a little relaxed and forgiving attitude (or at least reasonable, at a minimum) will not go unnoticed.
… It enhances your reputation, your goodwill. And that is a great asset and a great benefit to you. It may be intangible, but it has a great effect on your life and can make or unmake your success. Or at least have a very tangible effect on your income.
***
It's easier to get yourself a 'pillow' — a month's, then quarter's, then semester's, and then perhaps a year's worth of income retained as a reserve — than to challenge your client's habits. Besides, as a service provider it's generally a good idea to challenge your own habits and expectations before your client's. And that's not just a chore — like I said, it can make or unmake a successful practice.
And be positive. Don't be too hard on yourself. Perhaps you're already making more than some people you know who are less flexible than you are. Make that flexibility your strength and your policy.
… Doesn't mean it has to be your stated policy. In fact, as you've probably guessed by now, the whole point is that it shouldn't be! If you extend the deadlines, a lot of your clients will still be one or two weeks (or months, or days) late whether the deadline is two or four weeks (or months, or days). Give them a deadline, but don't expect them to keep it — and don't tell them you aren't expecting them to keep it. Just base your own internal calculations on official deadline + grace period.
If you choose to provide an official grace period, which may well be a good move in some situations, still provide an unofficial one after that and base your calculations on it rather than on the official one.
There, you solved your liquidity problem! You removed the anxiety and lack of security resulting from late payments from your clients, without even talking to them, much less straining your relationships.
***
Bonus tip: Consider (and I only say consider) a 3% discount for expedited payment, for example 3 days where the deadline is 30. Perhaps also consider a 1% deadline for not exceeding the 30.
The goal of the 3% discount is not to reward your clients for not being late (for not failing to do what they are already obligated to do). And, as you can see, neither is it the effect. The goal is simply to see the money in your account as soon as possible. Once in, it can't be taken out — unlike when it's still in your client's account/reserve/provision for outgoing payments, let alone the client's general account. You have the money, you no longer have to worry, and that's it.
More elaborate theory is that early, as opposed to timely, payment is a legitimate novel benefit for you. Reciprocally, you provide a legitimate benefit, a small financial concession. However named or classified, it's simply a small financial benefit, and getting emotional about the reason or classification makes very little practical sense.
The 1% discount for not exceeding the deadline obviously does reward your client for not breaching, but the reward is smaller, and the benefit is real. And you don't care about all that, remember? What you care about is that the money is already safely in your account, so the risk of non-payment is no longer there.
The 1% discount is reverse-interest. People feel bad about being penalized, or even confronted about doing something wrong, let alone when they see themselves as not being at fault — and agencies will typically not see themselves as being at fault when they haven't been paid by their own clients yet (get used to that, as you can't change it, at least not you alone and not overnight). Applying late interest or some other form of late fees or penalties will be an antagonizing move and will damage the relationship. By contrast, nobody can complain about not receiving a benefit one, through fault or no fault, just simply didn't qualify for. There are no accusations, no implications of wrongdoing, there's just simply a missed benefit.
Don't want to give up 1% or 3% of your current earnings? Up your pre-discount rates, problem solved. Suppose you charge 100. So now it would be 97, and you don't like that, which is fair. So you need to charge 103.09.
Naturally, changing your rates and payment conditions in tandem would be a bit too obvious and defeat the point of applying incentives instead of penalties, so perhaps wait till your next increase and rather than 105 make it 108. Or make it 105 but earlier. Or only with new clients, or new projects for occasional clients. How to give yourself a smooth raise is a whole different topic.
Recap: As a freelancer, one of your biggest competitive advantages is the adaptability of your small, lean, flexible structure (or even sometimes almost total lack thereof). You can adapt more easily than your clients. And you can also adapt more easily than some of your competitors (including freelancers who don't want to adapt). Use that adaptability and profit. If your clients fail to meet their obligations, try to see beyond the breach and see the need that you can respond to — and profit. This can include the need to adapt your business model to a longer payment cycle. Instead of trying to to turn the tide, you can invest your energy and creativity in using it to your advantage — and there are various ways of doing that. At the end of the day your need is liquidity and security, and that can be achieved in more than one way, and some ways are smarter than others. Be guided by pragmatism, creativity and… empathy. Think outside the box. You're allowed to! You don't have a boss to say you can't. Sometimes you can have your way in the big picture by agreeing to not have your way in small things that are ultimately inconsequential.
Monday, 24 December 2018
As a Freelancer, I Want to Step It up a Bit and Improve My Agency Base. What do I do? (Pt 2 — 11 Pointers & 3-Step Action Plan)
Without much further ado — we did a lot of that in Pt 1 — these are two
quotes I'd like you to keep in mind before we cut to the meat. Both are
allegedly from Bill Gates and both lack a reliable source for that
attribution. ;)
In short, we want to look at our problem from the practical perspective of finding a no-nonsense way of making your life a little easier, with (almost) no mumbo-jumbo. Jokingly we could say laziness should be your guide. Not in the sense of actually being lazy but in the sense of going for simple solutions that actually work and make a difference instead of trying to prove theoretical concepts.
Laziness in this sense means you want to avoid having to do the same thing twice (kind of like I wanted this blog to help me avoid wording the same advice for different people time after time again), you want to create some capital that will keep working for you when you're doing something else. You want to invest and profit — the investment is the money and time you spend on getting some professional basics right, at least the bare minimum, and the profit is more jobs and better rates as a result.
And you want to keep it simple. For a freelancer this largely means focusing on your passive marketing and maxing it out — not instead of doing anything else, but before you do anything else, as a matter of having your priorities in good order.
So:
The goal is to:
(1) reduce, as far as possible, the work you still have to do when approaching them or being approached by them, because there's always going to be some such work to do; and
(2) make them approach you rather than you them, which reduces the amount of work you have to do in order to:
(1º) close the transaction at all; and
(2º) on as good terms for you as possible.
Either way, this means raising your passive attractiveness to a point where it compels them to action, and this is the opposite of you being compelled to action, which typically results in worse pay and worse other terms than the maxium you could get with your qualifications and your other circumstances.
Implementing these steps will make your life easier and better — this much I can definitely promise you. But you need to make the effort and actually get around to doing all this.
For example here's a simple implementation plan:
Don't be discouraged by the hundreds you need to spend so you can profit in thousands or tens of thousands. From my experience some people just won't make the initial up-front expense it takes to cover crucial parts of your professional image professsionally, and that is exactly what holds them back, by preventing them from being able to charge professional rates — which their semi-professional image can't support. Ironically, that's also similar to how clients end up having their sales materials machine-translated or translated by semi-professionals on the cheap side, with the obvious results that we often talk about in translator groups. By insisting on using selfies, beach photos and clumsy websites, and copy that sounds like a child asking a parent for a new toy, we make just the same mistakes. So let's not.
If you take this advice to heart — and, more importantly, act on it and do some work — I once again promise you're going to see some serious results. Also you can't get the results without the work. But if you don't do the work, you'll be in the same old place without being able to move forward. Once again, we aren't talking about any ground-breaking changes here, with overly ambitious goals. We're talking about professional essentials to not even help you get closer to fully realizing your potential but actually to help you stop bottlenecking yourself with inaction, passivity and defeatism.
… So for starters just go and have a nice picture taken of yourself. The results might give you the impulse and the energy to start working on your CV, brochures and other materials. Do at least this. If you see some improvement, spend some of the new income on a new website to amplify the effect and take a bigger step forward. Your bank account will thank you.
But if what you want to tell me is something along the lines of: 'Meh. Too much work. Too uncertain. Don't want to waste my money or time. Are you sure this will work?,' then I honestly don't quite care. Those are the thinking patterns of people who are in a rut and don't want out of it because being in a rut carries some sort of psychological reward for them, e.g. wallowing in self-pity and acting like a victim of fate. Shake that off. I'm not telling you to found a new Microsoft in a garage; I'm only telling you to get a professional photo, a professional CV and a professional website preferably. I'm not asking too much.
The final question — how this applies to your work with agencies?
The post honestly came out far less agency-specific than I expected, perhaps largely because my Facebook advice (from which this post eventually emerged) was more general than the question asked. But while this doesn't seem agency specific on the outside, inside it is. How?
For starters, agencies need translators. They are in a position to assess your qualifications on the basis of your credentials, the rest of your CV, and your samples, at least much more so than the typical end client. They are also repeat purchasers, and more concerned with whatever they're getting from you — which mostly means punctual deliveries and no quality issues to disrupt the flow, better still if you can impress their clients, hence keep those clients and win more by word of mouth and glowing testimonials — than with what sort of client service they're getting from you. Plus, you don't take such a big risk of losing them as a client if you aren't always available. In short, the marketing is so much easier than with direct end clients.
Getting your professional basics covered and continually improving, setting the bar higher and upping your game, gives you access to better-paying agencies and gives whatever agencies want to work with you more incentive to pay more for your work than if you had a barebones semi-professional image. The difference could be, let's say, 20% or 30% of your income, perhaps more. So what's that compared to some time or a couple hundred dollars/pounds/euros?
What you may not see so easily is that you need to keep upping your game to make any falls softer when you trip further down the road. Essentially, it's easier to win more ground than defend what you already have from shrinking. The same goes for your client base and income level. So keep growing, expanding, developing, improving etc., and that will make sure you still have plenty enough even in your worse weeks or months or years, even if you lose an important client or a couple of clients in one go, or if you stop being able to work full time, or some other misfortune happens.
… And the more agencies you have on the top end of 'nice to work with', the more leeway you have to avoid working with agencies on the bottom of the scale. For each new nice agency you land, there's a bad agency you can drop. And if you suddenly end up with a surplus of well-paying work… boy, we all wish we had such problems to worry about. (You'll just raise your rates, especially for the lowest payers, to reduce demand to a more manageable level. So nothing to be scared about.)
Pretty much the same will in fact apply to direct end clients, except getting them will be more complicated, as you'll need to go after them more proactively or at least be where they are and sometimes convince them that they need your services, which is far more work and which is less the case with agencies. Agencies, once again, are always there, usually on the lookout for translators and well aware that they need dependable, punctual, conscientious translators that are hopefully also on the higher end of the skill spectrum (and helping you show that was the goal of this post all along).
If you're born poor, it's not your mistake. But if you die poor, it is your mistake.
I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
In short, we want to look at our problem from the practical perspective of finding a no-nonsense way of making your life a little easier, with (almost) no mumbo-jumbo. Jokingly we could say laziness should be your guide. Not in the sense of actually being lazy but in the sense of going for simple solutions that actually work and make a difference instead of trying to prove theoretical concepts.
Laziness in this sense means you want to avoid having to do the same thing twice (kind of like I wanted this blog to help me avoid wording the same advice for different people time after time again), you want to create some capital that will keep working for you when you're doing something else. You want to invest and profit — the investment is the money and time you spend on getting some professional basics right, at least the bare minimum, and the profit is more jobs and better rates as a result.
And you want to keep it simple. For a freelancer this largely means focusing on your passive marketing and maxing it out — not instead of doing anything else, but before you do anything else, as a matter of having your priorities in good order.
So:
- You're in a better negotiating position when the agency approaches you than when you approach them. Again, this is where your passive marketing shines, as it both attracts them, which will get you their initial tentative interest, and, if you play it right, does much of the job of actually persuading them, so there's little left to be done when they get in touch with you. And if you play it right, you can invert the roles, so it's them wanting to work specifically with you rather than you having to explain and prove to them how you're a good fit for whatever client job they have and you don't. To get in this sweet spot you need: visibility, presence, projecting competence, confidence, moderate approachability/availability/attainability (not too eager, but not elusive to the point of not promising a good return on their invested time, effort and hope — psychology matters here).
- You have to be professional — be, act and look the part. This means acting and looking more professional than the average translator and in fact 90% of our casual and self-conscious lot. Not too laid back, too personal. Calm, collected, competent, confident. Not speaking out of turn, not afraid of silence or pause in conversation. Not jovial or airheaded. You don't have to and in fact shouldn't be dull, stern, pedantic or anything of the sort. Learn to see the difference if you don't already. There's gotta be a bit of healthy distance that inspires healthy respect, and getting too personable, as is the current trade in the freelance world, will that distance and will kill that respect. You need a bit of that ivory tower while still remaining moderately approachable — i.e. within achievable but not too easy reach (your road plan en bref) — and keeping them looking forward to the opportunity. Confident and slightly aloof professional professionals inspire this. Personal and personable hey look at me, hire me! choose me! choose me! I want to serve you! I live to please you! it would be the height of my day to take an order from you freelancers don't inspire it at all. In fact, they are like one of 20 desperate folks approaching a moderately attractive stranger and tripping over their feet bending over backwards and getting swatted like flies.
- Again, just like in dating, no desperation, no clinginess, etc., and for the same reasons. Plaintive behaviours and overeagerness are a low-value signal (LVS), meaning that you are in effect telling them your value is comparatively lower than theirs, and their market value (MV) is higher. Instead, you want to project high value, but without overdoing it.
- And the reason why you don't want to overdue HVS is because you don't want to have an attainability problem — like we said before, you must be within reach, not too distant to realistically work with. You must be reasonably responsive, just not tripping on your own feet running to the phone. But neither can you inspire so much respect and so much distance that people will… keep their respectful distance from you — and be afraid to disturb you at all, negotiate with you, ask about a potential rather than confirmed job, or project your rates as probably not being within their range (when you in fact don't charge as much as they imagine).
- Part of passive lure is samples. Overload your website with various samples of your best and most interesting work; almost. Make it just a little less than too much. Note that this doesn't mean your most complicated or most difficult work; this content has to be able to engage and resound with the reader, including those PMs who are relatively lay or green folks in translation. Those PMs (and their bosses, secretaries, HR people and sometimes clients) still have to be able to understand the text and see what you did there and why and what that is good — good for them. So make sure the samples are simple enough, simple but brilliant, and interesting; exciting even. This is part of your broader story; you're essentially doing storytelling marketing here, just like you do with your bio…
- … which, of course, (i.e. the bio) must be interesting, engaging, sending the right message, and getting the right exposure. It will probably attract like 60% of all of your website traffic, so give it some love. Have it professionally written or get some professional assistance, to the extent it wouldn't be dishonest advertising by misrepresentation of your own writing skill.
- Professional image relies much on… images! Get a professional executive shot done; the kind that costs quite a bit and is on par with the photos used by top management in your clients' organizations, as well as top authors and experts in the relevant field. Or even better than most of them have, but without clearly being overdone, as you don't want to cast the impression of trying just a bit too hard. The mood had better be more serious than sported by most translators, but without getting too uptight (unless you're in legal, medical or financial translation). For concept and background pictures, you want to spend some money on professional, high-resolution photos that don't look like clipart and aren't used on thousands of other websites. Even if you have to pay like five dollars, most people won't, so you're going to be unique. And that's your goal.
- Follow through with non-plaintive, confident presentation of your credentials as highlights — with no begging for validation! Translators constantly beg their prospects to validate them. You don't want to do that. Instead, you have to validate your prospects. You have to validate them in having chosen you or being about to choose you or having shortlisted you or simply having decided to give you five minutes of their reading time. Don't overpromise — it's better to underpromise and overdeliver than the other way round — but be confident.
- So credentials, samples, good story. To give you more detail, this means a good landing page that conveys the most important essence of your message — the best of your value proposal — in less than 10 seconds. But also expand on the story for those who do actually want to read, in way that is friendly to the reader, which generally means that the text should be broken up into smaller portions unfolding gradually in order to avoid the 'wall of text' effect but instead suck visitors in gradually as they click to unfold more information.
- Don't be told — by defeatists with self-esteem issues, a lot of whom give marketing advice to others — that prospective clients aren't interested in reading about you because you're allegedly so far beneath their attention! That's clearly low-self-esteem thinking (which screams personal issues), and it's markedly different from what the clients actually think. Except perhaps for a certain margin of entitled, toxic clients that you want to avoid if you can help it. Normal people want to read up a bit on people they work with an trust their projects to
- We've already mentioned professional photos, but of course you want a professional website and professional CVs and brochures. Professional Wordpress themes cost far under $100 apiece and are often easily configurable by a layperson with plenty of help from attached instruction materials, or you can pay a webdesigner several hundred to about a thousand to configure and customize the template for you (or several thousand for the best designers or more complicated jobs).
The goal is to:
(1) reduce, as far as possible, the work you still have to do when approaching them or being approached by them, because there's always going to be some such work to do; and
(2) make them approach you rather than you them, which reduces the amount of work you have to do in order to:
(1º) close the transaction at all; and
(2º) on as good terms for you as possible.
Either way, this means raising your passive attractiveness to a point where it compels them to action, and this is the opposite of you being compelled to action, which typically results in worse pay and worse other terms than the maxium you could get with your qualifications and your other circumstances.
Implementing these steps will make your life easier and better — this much I can definitely promise you. But you need to make the effort and actually get around to doing all this.
For example here's a simple implementation plan:
- Get a professional executive photo & bio. And by professional I mean someone who specializes in high-profile portrait pics, not just any photo service.
- Iron out your CV, portfolio and (less importantly) other materials such as brochures.
- Get your website professionally done. Don't waste your time trying to DIY it instead of doing paid work for your clients and then paying a real designer to do it better than you could. Same as with photos really.
Don't be discouraged by the hundreds you need to spend so you can profit in thousands or tens of thousands. From my experience some people just won't make the initial up-front expense it takes to cover crucial parts of your professional image professsionally, and that is exactly what holds them back, by preventing them from being able to charge professional rates — which their semi-professional image can't support. Ironically, that's also similar to how clients end up having their sales materials machine-translated or translated by semi-professionals on the cheap side, with the obvious results that we often talk about in translator groups. By insisting on using selfies, beach photos and clumsy websites, and copy that sounds like a child asking a parent for a new toy, we make just the same mistakes. So let's not.
If you take this advice to heart — and, more importantly, act on it and do some work — I once again promise you're going to see some serious results. Also you can't get the results without the work. But if you don't do the work, you'll be in the same old place without being able to move forward. Once again, we aren't talking about any ground-breaking changes here, with overly ambitious goals. We're talking about professional essentials to not even help you get closer to fully realizing your potential but actually to help you stop bottlenecking yourself with inaction, passivity and defeatism.
… So for starters just go and have a nice picture taken of yourself. The results might give you the impulse and the energy to start working on your CV, brochures and other materials. Do at least this. If you see some improvement, spend some of the new income on a new website to amplify the effect and take a bigger step forward. Your bank account will thank you.
But if what you want to tell me is something along the lines of: 'Meh. Too much work. Too uncertain. Don't want to waste my money or time. Are you sure this will work?,' then I honestly don't quite care. Those are the thinking patterns of people who are in a rut and don't want out of it because being in a rut carries some sort of psychological reward for them, e.g. wallowing in self-pity and acting like a victim of fate. Shake that off. I'm not telling you to found a new Microsoft in a garage; I'm only telling you to get a professional photo, a professional CV and a professional website preferably. I'm not asking too much.
The final question — how this applies to your work with agencies?
The post honestly came out far less agency-specific than I expected, perhaps largely because my Facebook advice (from which this post eventually emerged) was more general than the question asked. But while this doesn't seem agency specific on the outside, inside it is. How?
For starters, agencies need translators. They are in a position to assess your qualifications on the basis of your credentials, the rest of your CV, and your samples, at least much more so than the typical end client. They are also repeat purchasers, and more concerned with whatever they're getting from you — which mostly means punctual deliveries and no quality issues to disrupt the flow, better still if you can impress their clients, hence keep those clients and win more by word of mouth and glowing testimonials — than with what sort of client service they're getting from you. Plus, you don't take such a big risk of losing them as a client if you aren't always available. In short, the marketing is so much easier than with direct end clients.
Getting your professional basics covered and continually improving, setting the bar higher and upping your game, gives you access to better-paying agencies and gives whatever agencies want to work with you more incentive to pay more for your work than if you had a barebones semi-professional image. The difference could be, let's say, 20% or 30% of your income, perhaps more. So what's that compared to some time or a couple hundred dollars/pounds/euros?
What you may not see so easily is that you need to keep upping your game to make any falls softer when you trip further down the road. Essentially, it's easier to win more ground than defend what you already have from shrinking. The same goes for your client base and income level. So keep growing, expanding, developing, improving etc., and that will make sure you still have plenty enough even in your worse weeks or months or years, even if you lose an important client or a couple of clients in one go, or if you stop being able to work full time, or some other misfortune happens.
… And the more agencies you have on the top end of 'nice to work with', the more leeway you have to avoid working with agencies on the bottom of the scale. For each new nice agency you land, there's a bad agency you can drop. And if you suddenly end up with a surplus of well-paying work… boy, we all wish we had such problems to worry about. (You'll just raise your rates, especially for the lowest payers, to reduce demand to a more manageable level. So nothing to be scared about.)
Pretty much the same will in fact apply to direct end clients, except getting them will be more complicated, as you'll need to go after them more proactively or at least be where they are and sometimes convince them that they need your services, which is far more work and which is less the case with agencies. Agencies, once again, are always there, usually on the lookout for translators and well aware that they need dependable, punctual, conscientious translators that are hopefully also on the higher end of the skill spectrum (and helping you show that was the goal of this post all along).
As a Freelancer, I Want to Step It up a Bit and Improve My Agency Base. What do I do? (Pt 1)
Hi, guys. If you used to follow this blog, doubtless you must have noticed I've been writing less lately, lately meaning the last couple of months if not years. Today I thought about the original reason why I set up a blog — to prevent the long, meaningful posts that I sometimes make in translators' groups and forums from disappearing into the abyss of oblivion that is anything older than two weeks on Facebook and in forums. Later on, most of the posts here, almost all in fact, were written specifically for this blog and only a few actually served the original purpose — meaning a lot of potentially useful bits of advice or voices in discussion continued to be lost, partly because I don't even always remember I have a blog (apparently, adjusting to the thought and learning some new habits takes some time).
So today I want to do what this blog was supposed to do, and preserve a potentially useful post from a Facebook group about what to do if, as a freelance translator (as was the case), you want to expand or improve a bit without making the drastic step of dropping agencies altogether and plunging into the world of exclusively direct clients.
And why would you choose that?
Am I suggesting you should make a point of retaining some agencies in your mix when you might as well skip them entirely and still fill your calendar? Nope. Not unless some of the above applies to you. This is all conditional, situational, wholly governed by your circumstances and your unique personal preference. Not in all, but in a lot of cases at least some of the above considerations will apply, meaning you'll either have to or want to keep some agencies in the mix.
One thought about keeping some agencies in the mix is that you may still want to 'upgrade'.
And by upgrading, I don't mean dropping old, tried and true sources of reliable, somewhat comfortable and somewhat gainful work to embark on a goose chase or stake all you currently have on a slim hope that perhaps a new agency with a new approach will be a little more profitable to work with because it seems to pay marginally better rates. Nope.
But, a lot of freelancers work with agencies they don't quite like, where there are no warm feelings of friendship and loyalty, no long history of good old times to create a lasting bond, but just business the way it is with agencies, where the translator is getting the work because he or she is currently the best option in comparison to the alternatives and switching costs (i.e. it's better working with you than spending the time and effort, and incurring the risks, that replacing you would require).
… And some of those agencies can in fact be quite toxic, taxing your reserves more than is worth it. When talking about 'toxicity', I am focusing primarily on the result rather than the cause. This means I'm concentrating on the effect the behaviour has on you, rather than allocating the blame. Toxic behaviours include, for example:
Those are probably agencies you'd like to no longer have to work with, agencies you only work with because you have to. And why do you have to work with them? Because you don't have alternatives. So that's what we'll be talking about in Pt 2.
Or perhaps there isn't that much toxicity going on but neither is there anything to keep you other than that you need work from somewhere, anywhere. Those are agencies you don't have to dump but have no special reason to regret to move on from. And that will be the focus of Pt 2.
And, for the record, a lot of Part 2 will be applicable to direct end clients as well, just not framed with them in mind.
So today I want to do what this blog was supposed to do, and preserve a potentially useful post from a Facebook group about what to do if, as a freelance translator (as was the case), you want to expand or improve a bit without making the drastic step of dropping agencies altogether and plunging into the world of exclusively direct clients.
And why would you choose that?
- A 100% direct end client mix is not always viable to achieve.
- Nor is it necessarily optimal.
- Between costs and gains, keeping at least some agencies in the mix may be the best choice.
Am I suggesting you should make a point of retaining some agencies in your mix when you might as well skip them entirely and still fill your calendar? Nope. Not unless some of the above applies to you. This is all conditional, situational, wholly governed by your circumstances and your unique personal preference. Not in all, but in a lot of cases at least some of the above considerations will apply, meaning you'll either have to or want to keep some agencies in the mix.
One thought about keeping some agencies in the mix is that you may still want to 'upgrade'.
And by upgrading, I don't mean dropping old, tried and true sources of reliable, somewhat comfortable and somewhat gainful work to embark on a goose chase or stake all you currently have on a slim hope that perhaps a new agency with a new approach will be a little more profitable to work with because it seems to pay marginally better rates. Nope.
But, a lot of freelancers work with agencies they don't quite like, where there are no warm feelings of friendship and loyalty, no long history of good old times to create a lasting bond, but just business the way it is with agencies, where the translator is getting the work because he or she is currently the best option in comparison to the alternatives and switching costs (i.e. it's better working with you than spending the time and effort, and incurring the risks, that replacing you would require).
… And some of those agencies can in fact be quite toxic, taxing your reserves more than is worth it. When talking about 'toxicity', I am focusing primarily on the result rather than the cause. This means I'm concentrating on the effect the behaviour has on you, rather than allocating the blame. Toxic behaviours include, for example:
- always nibbling away at your rates
- always nibbling at service scope or added value, trying to squeeze something extra out of you
- dumping secretarial/technical/client-service tasks on you because they promise full service but don't have the staff to actually pull it off, or just want to save staff time
- trying to go back on confirmed arrangements
- requesting bookings for potential jobs that have a statistical 30% probability of materializing
- only coming to you with stuff nobody else can or will do
- being rude to you when talking or mailing
- hardball, manipulation and all sorts of dodgy tactics
Those are probably agencies you'd like to no longer have to work with, agencies you only work with because you have to. And why do you have to work with them? Because you don't have alternatives. So that's what we'll be talking about in Pt 2.
Or perhaps there isn't that much toxicity going on but neither is there anything to keep you other than that you need work from somewhere, anywhere. Those are agencies you don't have to dump but have no special reason to regret to move on from. And that will be the focus of Pt 2.
And, for the record, a lot of Part 2 will be applicable to direct end clients as well, just not framed with them in mind.
Saturday, 18 August 2018
Don't Get Too Tied Up in Your Current Project. At Least Respond to Quotation Requests.
Some of us are great multitaskers, some aren't.
Have you ever been so tied up in your current project you forgot about everything else, including your next project? Or your last project, for that matter. And how many times did a lucrative project miss you because of that? Potentially way more lucrative than whatever you were doing that prevented you from picking up the phone?
So let's not get sucked completely in like that. Or hire an assistant — and virtual assistants can be hired for short durations on a B2B service basis — if the practice can afford it.
Either way, those calls must be picked up, mail must be checked, invoices won't write themselves, and clients have no way of reaching us when we're isolated inside our own little worlds.
So let's not make our focus on the current task more exclusive than is necessary.
A lot of this is in the head. There's no law that says we can't. Nor a law of physics that makes us unable to. The blocks are real, but soft. Just like any other soft block that exists in one's head.
So without delving into 'mindset' nonsense, a freelance professional needs to learn to take breaks and check mail and at least return calls. Better still, make sure the phone is charged, not muted, and lying nearby and your clients know to call you the old-fashioned way when something is really urgent or a quick decision is needed — and mail you and wait an our or two or three if it's not.
Some things to consider:
It's worth noting that the last item on the list — the one about having a filter in your head — is a classic management exercise in prioritizing. It's a skill everybody needs to pick up at some point on the path of professional if not personal growth. The sooner, the more practical.
While perfecting the art by trial and error may take some time, you're probably better off developing some routines before you actually have to use them. Simply put, it's easier to stick with existing just-in-case procedures, however imperfect they are due to their untested status, than invent them as you need them.
Hence, just spend some time thinking about what filters to use when you have the luxury of sitting back with a cup of tea instead of having to think on the spot. Just don't overplan it and don't become too rigid.
Think about questions to ask and ways of getting to those questions fast. Think what sort of mail needs what sort of reaction time from you, assign the priority, compare it to the priority of whatever you happen to be doing right now, and so on.
Example 1:
What can you do?
Surely you can't or at least shouldn't jeopardize your current project. As a professional, your word is your bond, reputation is everything and so on. Hence you won't be replying to all those questions about hypothetical collaboration right away. And you don't want to, anyway. But this doesn't mean you can't try to get that specific project your client also mentioned. So send a quotation for the specific project and promise to get back to the client within a specified time-frame about the rest. Make sure you'll really be able to write before, and not after, that self-imposed deadline. Underpromise and overdeliver, not the other way round.
Example 2:
What can you do?
Wait for a pause (few people can entirely avoid one for longer than a minute), then go in for the kill. Make it a swift kill, you may not get one more chance. Say you're happy to hear from them. Of course you're available. Of course you can do it (if you really can). Your fee would be such and such. Please call when you have more specific information, now I need to get back to some really pressing stuff, or it's gonna cost me my head, thank you for understanding. Bye.
… And go back to work, focus on it, finish it, send it back and make sure you did (e.g. attachments really attached, you really hit the send button, etc.), then call back that other client. Start from thanking them for their patience and understanding. You may even have some time to chat at leisure, ask about their kids, whatever, show you care, show they're imporant to you.
Example 3:
What can you do?
Obviously, you can't just be late on your first project and probably don't want to ignore the other inquiry, either. So? Defer to your client. 'Do you prefer me to finish X first or should I put X on hold and get you a quote on Y first? What's more important to you?'
Example 4:
What can you do?
Obviously, you can't just be late on your first client's project, and you probably don't want to ignore your second client, either. But it is equally evident you just have no space to prepare a comprehensive quotation right now.
So what can you do?
Excuse yourself, saying there's a project you must be finishing very soon, in fact there are only 3 hours left on it. Your client will feel appreciated you still took the call or checked the mail and actually replied. Inform the client about the general rules you'd be applying to the quotation, without calculating the application to the specific case — that's something the client more or less can do. If not, the client can get a general feel of whether your rates are fair and reasonable and within the client's budget, or just what they are, give or take some, so there's something to tell the boss (or the client's client).
Or give a ballpark figure. Or an upper limit. Discount it a little if you think that's what it takes to avoid overcharging.
***
As you can clearly see all these examples typically result in some degree of panic if you aren't prepared. On the other hand, they are far from hard to think about in advance based on your own experience to date and your imagination.
So sit down, think for a while and come up with some such approximate procedures on a less busy day, like this Saturday was for me.
Bonus: Clients tend to appreciate preparation, confidence and calm. All of these project experience, professionalism, security and control. And these, in turn, put your client's minds at ease by demonstrating they've come to the right place.
The above remains true even if they also appreciate someone whose main asset or advance is flexibility and improvisation, as tends to be the case with freelancers, solos and small business operators.
You can in fact combine the best of the two worlds, and the way to do so is by pencilling in some basic scenarios in advance and developing on them as you go, on a case-by-case basis.
Those practical ad-hoc case-by-case decision-making skills which you need will still improve from considering theoretical scenarios. The more situations you consider in advance, the less time it will take to assess new situations as they pop up.
Of course, you can always analyse what you could have done better in this or that case, from an ex-post perspective — but obviously for the sake of learning only and not beating yourself up over it.
***
And one thing I almost forgot: Don't come up with ridiculously short deadlines. Don't make them shorter and shorter. Probe your client. Find out how urgent the job really is — which is also important in terms of, say, unnecessary rush fees that you may have a professional duty to help your client avoid (as tends to be the case in regulated professions). Make sure you have the time to do the job properly and without dropping dead at the end, and without becoming absolutely unable to pick up the phone before you finish.
Have you ever been so tied up in your current project you forgot about everything else, including your next project? Or your last project, for that matter. And how many times did a lucrative project miss you because of that? Potentially way more lucrative than whatever you were doing that prevented you from picking up the phone?
So let's not get sucked completely in like that. Or hire an assistant — and virtual assistants can be hired for short durations on a B2B service basis — if the practice can afford it.
Either way, those calls must be picked up, mail must be checked, invoices won't write themselves, and clients have no way of reaching us when we're isolated inside our own little worlds.
So let's not make our focus on the current task more exclusive than is necessary.
A lot of this is in the head. There's no law that says we can't. Nor a law of physics that makes us unable to. The blocks are real, but soft. Just like any other soft block that exists in one's head.
So without delving into 'mindset' nonsense, a freelance professional needs to learn to take breaks and check mail and at least return calls. Better still, make sure the phone is charged, not muted, and lying nearby and your clients know to call you the old-fashioned way when something is really urgent or a quick decision is needed — and mail you and wait an our or two or three if it's not.
Some things to consider:
- separate number and address for returning clients (versus general inquiries)
- separate address for specific quotation requests such as those sent through the quotation form & file upload on your website (versus general inquiries, broad RFPs etc.)
- separate number and address for urgent cases, i.e. a hotline established for those clients who may need some ASAP post-delivery service
- separate address for subscriptions, memberships, etc. (versus signing up with your main business address)
- separate monitor to keep your mailbox open at all times
- forcing yourself to learn to fish out the most important stuff and let go of the rest until its time finally comes
It's worth noting that the last item on the list — the one about having a filter in your head — is a classic management exercise in prioritizing. It's a skill everybody needs to pick up at some point on the path of professional if not personal growth. The sooner, the more practical.
While perfecting the art by trial and error may take some time, you're probably better off developing some routines before you actually have to use them. Simply put, it's easier to stick with existing just-in-case procedures, however imperfect they are due to their untested status, than invent them as you need them.
Hence, just spend some time thinking about what filters to use when you have the luxury of sitting back with a cup of tea instead of having to think on the spot. Just don't overplan it and don't become too rigid.
Think about questions to ask and ways of getting to those questions fast. Think what sort of mail needs what sort of reaction time from you, assign the priority, compare it to the priority of whatever you happen to be doing right now, and so on.
Example 1:
You have an urgent project due in 3 hours.
You can afford 10 minutes, but not 30.
A prospective client sends you a request for quotation for a specific service on short notice, and a broader inquiry about possible collaboration.
What can you do?
Surely you can't or at least shouldn't jeopardize your current project. As a professional, your word is your bond, reputation is everything and so on. Hence you won't be replying to all those questions about hypothetical collaboration right away. And you don't want to, anyway. But this doesn't mean you can't try to get that specific project your client also mentioned. So send a quotation for the specific project and promise to get back to the client within a specified time-frame about the rest. Make sure you'll really be able to write before, and not after, that self-imposed deadline. Underpromise and overdeliver, not the other way round.
Example 2:
You have an urgent project due in 3 hours.
Your other client calls, starts asking, it's all vague. You don't want to be rude, but you can't sense much potential either, and the clock is ticking, while your client keeps talking, and talking.
What can you do?
Wait for a pause (few people can entirely avoid one for longer than a minute), then go in for the kill. Make it a swift kill, you may not get one more chance. Say you're happy to hear from them. Of course you're available. Of course you can do it (if you really can). Your fee would be such and such. Please call when you have more specific information, now I need to get back to some really pressing stuff, or it's gonna cost me my head, thank you for understanding. Bye.
… And go back to work, focus on it, finish it, send it back and make sure you did (e.g. attachments really attached, you really hit the send button, etc.), then call back that other client. Start from thanking them for their patience and understanding. You may even have some time to chat at leisure, ask about their kids, whatever, show you care, show they're imporant to you.
Example 3:
You have an urgent project due in 3 hours.
You get a call or message, there's some large and somewhat complicated request. And they want a specific time-line and fee estimate on it.
And it's the same client.
What can you do?
Obviously, you can't just be late on your first project and probably don't want to ignore the other inquiry, either. So? Defer to your client. 'Do you prefer me to finish X first or should I put X on hold and get you a quote on Y first? What's more important to you?'
Example 4:
You have an urgent project due in 3 hours.
You get a call or message, there's some large and somewhat complicated request. And they want a specific time-line and fee estimate on it.
And it's not the same client.
What can you do?
Obviously, you can't just be late on your first client's project, and you probably don't want to ignore your second client, either. But it is equally evident you just have no space to prepare a comprehensive quotation right now.
So what can you do?
Excuse yourself, saying there's a project you must be finishing very soon, in fact there are only 3 hours left on it. Your client will feel appreciated you still took the call or checked the mail and actually replied. Inform the client about the general rules you'd be applying to the quotation, without calculating the application to the specific case — that's something the client more or less can do. If not, the client can get a general feel of whether your rates are fair and reasonable and within the client's budget, or just what they are, give or take some, so there's something to tell the boss (or the client's client).
Or give a ballpark figure. Or an upper limit. Discount it a little if you think that's what it takes to avoid overcharging.
***
As you can clearly see all these examples typically result in some degree of panic if you aren't prepared. On the other hand, they are far from hard to think about in advance based on your own experience to date and your imagination.
So sit down, think for a while and come up with some such approximate procedures on a less busy day, like this Saturday was for me.
Bonus: Clients tend to appreciate preparation, confidence and calm. All of these project experience, professionalism, security and control. And these, in turn, put your client's minds at ease by demonstrating they've come to the right place.
The above remains true even if they also appreciate someone whose main asset or advance is flexibility and improvisation, as tends to be the case with freelancers, solos and small business operators.
You can in fact combine the best of the two worlds, and the way to do so is by pencilling in some basic scenarios in advance and developing on them as you go, on a case-by-case basis.
Those practical ad-hoc case-by-case decision-making skills which you need will still improve from considering theoretical scenarios. The more situations you consider in advance, the less time it will take to assess new situations as they pop up.
Of course, you can always analyse what you could have done better in this or that case, from an ex-post perspective — but obviously for the sake of learning only and not beating yourself up over it.
***
And one thing I almost forgot: Don't come up with ridiculously short deadlines. Don't make them shorter and shorter. Probe your client. Find out how urgent the job really is — which is also important in terms of, say, unnecessary rush fees that you may have a professional duty to help your client avoid (as tends to be the case in regulated professions). Make sure you have the time to do the job properly and without dropping dead at the end, and without becoming absolutely unable to pick up the phone before you finish.
Saturday, 3 March 2018
It's Good to Cut Down on 'No' and 'If', up to a Point
First off, if you know me at all, you'll know I'm not one of the folks drinking the kool aid of client this client that. Where I stand is yes, we provide a service, but we don't need to make a circus of it, and there's no need for getting hysterical about it. We provide a specific service, according to our specific talents and skills and professional training, to the best of our ability and with the client's best interest in mind, but that's it. For example just because lawyers are service providers doesn't mean they should be ready to provide the service of cooking lasagna al forno or grooming a cat just because the client demands it. That's plain silly, and we should quit wasting our time listening to that nonsense. We should also consider the source where that nonsense comes from, especially whether it isn't a large buyer or intermediary.
That said, as practitioners we're there to solve or mitigate problems — specific problems within the scope of our profession, not general problems, but solve problems still — and not to create or exacerbate them. And most of our clients genuinely need some help and are genuinely somewhat clueless about getting it, rather than having totally unreasonable ideas (which I'd link more with interest-driven industry/market influencers trying to effect a wide change — such as bringing an entire formerly proud profession to heel — than the average individual client in a specific, concrete situation).
For certain professions this gets trickier because they are less at liberty to deny their clients, but most of us are entitled to at least a certain comfort zone. Still, this doesn't mean we should totally never expand it or go out of it for a client — especially when what the client asks is something reasonable for a client to ask and the pay is reasonable.
I bet the client's life isn't easy either, more likely than not being the provider of some other goods or services, or employee thereof, who also has to put up with people. And with problems. And with complicated requests. So let's make everybody's life just a little easier by not making it any harder than it has to be, and especially if we adhere to a system of beliefs or values that places importance on being there for people and helping them (most religions and philosophies do, it's just that their practitioners don't always remember).
Another thing is clients react — and we can't expect them to rewire their brains to stop reacting to the disappointments that happen to them in our business relationship, not any more than it would be possible to do so in, say, a romantic relationship. It's only up to a certain point that excuses can substitute for actually being there for someone.
The clients' or prospects' 'systems' register the displeasure or inconvenience or stress associated with being denied or left without help, or helped only grudgingly. They may understand, of course, but the damage may still be done. All the more so, even a perfectly valid excuse doesn't count the same as actually being there for them, not any more than we'd be entitled to a fee we didn't earn.
Besides, sometimes you just lose a lot of time pointlessly arguing about something that isn't going to change or fighting battles you can't win. Sometimes, of course, you have to go on the record expressing your firm and repeated opposition to a bad strategy or self-destructive move, but most situations don't really belong in this category. So it's probably better to avoid doing or taking unnecessary damage and instead save the relationship or help it grow. Relationships are important. Even to lawyers. ;) And time is money. That goes for stress too, if you're going to need time to destress later.
Next, it's probably not worth it pointing out all the small things and demanding recognition or payment for them. Chances are they're already being noticed and appreciated and working toward a greater, immaterial deposit of goodwill that it would be a waste to cash in for relatively small monetary rewards, or — less consciously — enjoyed as a smooth, hassle-free client/user experience that it would be a shame to waste.
Thus, a lot of the time it's just better to grin and bear it — if there's no harm, just bother, and if ethics are not at stake, which is the titular 'point'.
And for the sake of clarity, being expected to turn into a generalist all-purpose personal assistant where in fact you have a specific job such as lawyer, translator, designer etc. reaches that point. Likewise, if your freelance job description actually is personal assistant, then being expected to fill in for specialists such as doctors, lawyers, translators, designers, copywriters etc. and deliver the same results without the benefit of full training.
That said, as practitioners we're there to solve or mitigate problems — specific problems within the scope of our profession, not general problems, but solve problems still — and not to create or exacerbate them. And most of our clients genuinely need some help and are genuinely somewhat clueless about getting it, rather than having totally unreasonable ideas (which I'd link more with interest-driven industry/market influencers trying to effect a wide change — such as bringing an entire formerly proud profession to heel — than the average individual client in a specific, concrete situation).
For certain professions this gets trickier because they are less at liberty to deny their clients, but most of us are entitled to at least a certain comfort zone. Still, this doesn't mean we should totally never expand it or go out of it for a client — especially when what the client asks is something reasonable for a client to ask and the pay is reasonable.
I bet the client's life isn't easy either, more likely than not being the provider of some other goods or services, or employee thereof, who also has to put up with people. And with problems. And with complicated requests. So let's make everybody's life just a little easier by not making it any harder than it has to be, and especially if we adhere to a system of beliefs or values that places importance on being there for people and helping them (most religions and philosophies do, it's just that their practitioners don't always remember).
Another thing is clients react — and we can't expect them to rewire their brains to stop reacting to the disappointments that happen to them in our business relationship, not any more than it would be possible to do so in, say, a romantic relationship. It's only up to a certain point that excuses can substitute for actually being there for someone.
The clients' or prospects' 'systems' register the displeasure or inconvenience or stress associated with being denied or left without help, or helped only grudgingly. They may understand, of course, but the damage may still be done. All the more so, even a perfectly valid excuse doesn't count the same as actually being there for them, not any more than we'd be entitled to a fee we didn't earn.
Besides, sometimes you just lose a lot of time pointlessly arguing about something that isn't going to change or fighting battles you can't win. Sometimes, of course, you have to go on the record expressing your firm and repeated opposition to a bad strategy or self-destructive move, but most situations don't really belong in this category. So it's probably better to avoid doing or taking unnecessary damage and instead save the relationship or help it grow. Relationships are important. Even to lawyers. ;) And time is money. That goes for stress too, if you're going to need time to destress later.
Next, it's probably not worth it pointing out all the small things and demanding recognition or payment for them. Chances are they're already being noticed and appreciated and working toward a greater, immaterial deposit of goodwill that it would be a waste to cash in for relatively small monetary rewards, or — less consciously — enjoyed as a smooth, hassle-free client/user experience that it would be a shame to waste.
Thus, a lot of the time it's just better to grin and bear it — if there's no harm, just bother, and if ethics are not at stake, which is the titular 'point'.
And for the sake of clarity, being expected to turn into a generalist all-purpose personal assistant where in fact you have a specific job such as lawyer, translator, designer etc. reaches that point. Likewise, if your freelance job description actually is personal assistant, then being expected to fill in for specialists such as doctors, lawyers, translators, designers, copywriters etc. and deliver the same results without the benefit of full training.
Don't Flat Out Refuse to Negotiate
Flat-our refusals are usually bad for business. The fastest and most assured way to gain nothing at the negotiation table is to leave it, or leave early. Then, the deal is lost and with it quite possibly the entire relationship of the parties, because the goodwill is depleted, and from a dry spring no water will flow. And both your crops need the water to grow.
This is why people often grant concessions just so the other side could save face and both could save the relationship. Naturally, this is often abused (by those who game the 'system'), but the point still stands: flat-our refusing is generally bad for you.
As much as we may all be tempted, there are better ways of responding (however less epic) than:
… without actually having to give them what they ask.
The short version is don't give it to them but still suffer through the process. The long version will take a bunch of paragraphs, so how about you go grab a coffee? This post isn't going anywhere and will still be here when you come back.
For starters, don't be extra stingy with your time. If they need five minutes or one or two additional e-mails to decompress, give them that. There's no need for you to put on a hard face and give them a hard time, either — not getting their way is already hard enough.
More importantly, it's always possible that the fine folks you negotiate with have enough authority or sway (you know the saying about the head and the neck) to see the deal followed through but still have to comply with certain policies and procedures without bending them more than they perhaps already are. Show them some understanding, and you'll have a friend — and chances are a mutually beneficial agreement every now and then.
Let's say they are required — thanks to the inifinite and indisputable wisdom of some policy-maker up there who has five doctorates but can't tie his shoes — to never accept the first offer but always negotiate, notably because many people will in fact give in at least an inch, so in the grand picture this will work for them, at least from the balance-sheet perspective (though perhaps failing to see the potential negative impact of aggressive panhandling on the company's goodwill in the long run).
So, if failure to negotiate a lower fee is the one thing they need in order to pay your fees and be done with the circus, then why not give them just that? And sit through the ordeal. It won't kill you, it'll make you stronger.
Just keep declining politely, expressing some compassion with their position and citing the existence, if not the details, of some objective factors influencing your decision or forcing your hand. Even if that's something like:
Depending on the situation you could add something to the effect of: 'and to treat all my clients equally and fairly whether or not they decide to negotiate,' but I'd be careful with that because a lot of companies want preferential treatment and favoured status (even MFN) regardless of not having done and not intending to do anything to deserve it. We do live in uniquely narcissistic times. For others, however, notions of equality and fairness will be of top importance.
And try to dissociate the poor souls from the policies and superiors that make them do things they wouldn't normally think about. In some cases it's a good idea to let the little people know you aren't blaming them for the big people's screw-ups. And even if the little people do screw up, show them some patience; we're all human after all. Especially in the little-people league that the bulk of us play in anyway.
Exception: Time wasters abound. It's good to learn to spot them, and most people eventually will, though it may take years. Even so, you generally don't lost that much time by simply reiterating your proposal and using more than two or three abrupt words to say that you won't be going any lower. Just don't get involved in a lengthy discussion rehashing and rebuffing the same old arguments, don't leave too many openings, and so on. Don't be chatty, but don't leave the table just yet. Just keep your time investment and especially your hopes down to the absolute minimum you won't regret spending even if nothing comes out of it — which is the almost certain outcome when your initial positions are too far apart.
Still, avoid unnecessarily alienating your contact. Even when the boss's budget ideas are patently unrealistic, the secretary or assistant will sooner or later end up working for someone who is more reasonable or fill the same position when the old incumbent goes up or out. Practical experience teaches that does indeed happen, and people remember their past contacts.
This is why people often grant concessions just so the other side could save face and both could save the relationship. Naturally, this is often abused (by those who game the 'system'), but the point still stands: flat-our refusing is generally bad for you.
As much as we may all be tempted, there are better ways of responding (however less epic) than:
Dear Client,
No.
Sincerely,
Provider
… without actually having to give them what they ask.
The short version is don't give it to them but still suffer through the process. The long version will take a bunch of paragraphs, so how about you go grab a coffee? This post isn't going anywhere and will still be here when you come back.
***
For starters, don't be extra stingy with your time. If they need five minutes or one or two additional e-mails to decompress, give them that. There's no need for you to put on a hard face and give them a hard time, either — not getting their way is already hard enough.
More importantly, it's always possible that the fine folks you negotiate with have enough authority or sway (you know the saying about the head and the neck) to see the deal followed through but still have to comply with certain policies and procedures without bending them more than they perhaps already are. Show them some understanding, and you'll have a friend — and chances are a mutually beneficial agreement every now and then.
Let's say they are required — thanks to the inifinite and indisputable wisdom of some policy-maker up there who has five doctorates but can't tie his shoes — to never accept the first offer but always negotiate, notably because many people will in fact give in at least an inch, so in the grand picture this will work for them, at least from the balance-sheet perspective (though perhaps failing to see the potential negative impact of aggressive panhandling on the company's goodwill in the long run).
So, if failure to negotiate a lower fee is the one thing they need in order to pay your fees and be done with the circus, then why not give them just that? And sit through the ordeal. It won't kill you, it'll make you stronger.
Just keep declining politely, expressing some compassion with their position and citing the existence, if not the details, of some objective factors influencing your decision or forcing your hand. Even if that's something like:
My fees are already on the lowest level I could realistically accept after lengthy negotiations. So, in essence, you're getting the whole benefit up front to save you and me some time. Unfortunately, this misses all the adrenaline.(Here, you rationalize how you can't go any lower, and you let them know that they are already getting the best possible outcome, hinting they shouldn't feel less satisfaction with it just because they didn't have to fight you for it. Mentioning that you respect their time is a gentle nod to tip the scales and make the refusal effectively not a refusal but an explanation hinting that perhaps they're getting more than they were asking for. In the end, the tension is resolved with comic relief.)
Depending on the situation you could add something to the effect of: 'and to treat all my clients equally and fairly whether or not they decide to negotiate,' but I'd be careful with that because a lot of companies want preferential treatment and favoured status (even MFN) regardless of not having done and not intending to do anything to deserve it. We do live in uniquely narcissistic times. For others, however, notions of equality and fairness will be of top importance.
And try to dissociate the poor souls from the policies and superiors that make them do things they wouldn't normally think about. In some cases it's a good idea to let the little people know you aren't blaming them for the big people's screw-ups. And even if the little people do screw up, show them some patience; we're all human after all. Especially in the little-people league that the bulk of us play in anyway.
***
Exception: Time wasters abound. It's good to learn to spot them, and most people eventually will, though it may take years. Even so, you generally don't lost that much time by simply reiterating your proposal and using more than two or three abrupt words to say that you won't be going any lower. Just don't get involved in a lengthy discussion rehashing and rebuffing the same old arguments, don't leave too many openings, and so on. Don't be chatty, but don't leave the table just yet. Just keep your time investment and especially your hopes down to the absolute minimum you won't regret spending even if nothing comes out of it — which is the almost certain outcome when your initial positions are too far apart.
Still, avoid unnecessarily alienating your contact. Even when the boss's budget ideas are patently unrealistic, the secretary or assistant will sooner or later end up working for someone who is more reasonable or fill the same position when the old incumbent goes up or out. Practical experience teaches that does indeed happen, and people remember their past contacts.
Thursday, 1 March 2018
Non-Financial Terms
When it comes to fees, a lot of clients are price-conscious, cost-averse, addicted to bargain hunting or just have their hands tied. Or they are just simply maximizing their profit by minimizing their spend because hey, they can. And if we keep budging, then they will surely know they can. A lot of us budge too much; sometimes, however, there really is little you can do. However, just because you can't get better rates from your prospects doesn't mean there's literally nothing you could do to make your life at least a little less miserable.*
(* Sorry, spring depression.)
All of these things matter.
And now some negotiation points:
(* Sorry, spring depression.)
- By extending the deadline you can reduce overtime. You will have more time for other projects, CPD, sleep, or hey, free time. When did you last have some?
- By smartly downsizing the project you can make more money per hour while staying within the same total.
- By eliminating parts that don't require your personal involvement or getting your client to assign support staff, you can achieve a very similar outcome and also position yourself as an expert whose time is valuable and not a resource to dump chores on.
- By putting pressure on payment deadlines you get paid faster. Notably before they change their mind about paying you or run out of funds.
- By demanding advance payments or dividing the project into milestones or several smaller separately billed projects you can mitigate non-payment risk and out-of-pocket expenses.
- You can also reduce non-payment risk by explicitly restricting their rejection rights (especially important under the (not so, from the service provider's perspective) fine old contractual law of England and Wales).
- By asserting your moral rights and possibly demanding some form of promotion you make sure you at least get some exposure and perhaps catch bigger fish in the future.
All of these things matter.
And now some negotiation points:
- Securing concessions you don't really need — or withholding concessions you don't mind granting — can help you pace the negotiation for a better final outcome, or at least save face and avoid appearing too soft when you don't have too many options.
- Apart from overquoting your fees, you can also start from less advantageous non-financial terms and use that as the ground you eventually concede.
- Notably defeat the urge to pack your standard offering to the brim with goodies and extra stuff. Some people will always want something better than your first proposal; leave some room for that. Make sure clients know and appreciate what they get, to mitigate the desire to ask for more.
- Negotiate when you don't have to just to train for when you do have to, notably when you're already almost decided to quit. Test their limits or try something new, just to learn more about negotiating.
Friday, 27 January 2017
Limits of Flexibility
(Flexibility is not a goal unto itself)
First off, I don't want to discuss this from the perspective of flexibility as a value in itself, or a goal unto itself etc. That's just silly buzzword nonsense. I'm taking flexibility as a concept here, a thing of life, neither good nor bad, save perhaps in subjective, situation-driven judgement.
(People use the 'flexibility' as a cudgel to get what they want)
We don't have to be flexible, and especially not because an agency or client says that we aren't, as if we should be ashamed of ourselves or feel guilty and, more importantly, give them what they want. Let's make no mistake: they sometimes ask you to be flexible by… accepting they own inflexible demands, for example refusing to sign a non-editable 10-page contract written by their lawyer and full of language that benefits them over you. But it's you who are inflexible and making problems when you won't sign. Seriously?
(All the time, we all do, one just needs to understand this and react properly)
Obviously, we tend to already know something's off in cases like the above, but there are also a lot of cases that, while not with such extreme results, still follow similar basic logic. People stick labels on you when they aren't getting what they want. We all do. This is simply the inherent human subjectivity, the proverbial eye of the beholder. And one more potential accusation that you need to not accept as objective truth the moment a client or agency throws it at you.
After answering these questions to oneself, the decision should be much easier — and look much different too than the initial impression or the other party's perspective. (Where the other party's perspective is something that's both morally right and useful to consider, but it simply isn't automatically binding on you.)
(But it's still useful to be flexible)
In my experience it's useful to remain open-minded, suspend judgement and not make one's individual initial preference into an absolute. Frankly, sometimes other people's suggestions are better. Sometimes it doesn't really matter to you, whereas it matters to 'them', hence it would actually be unreasonable not to go out of one's way a bit for a fellow human being. And in some cases you could lose a prospective contract over some minutiae that aren't worth making a stand for.
(The point)
… The point is to approach this all with a level head and work out an informed decision based on a healthy appreciation of the circumstances and not pressure (intimidation, manipulation, guilt trips, crocodile tears etc.) from the counterparty.
(The point again)
It's perhaps quite worth spelling it out that flexibility certainly does not mean meeting the other party's requests, let alone demands, let alone onerous on unreasonable demands, in full. There is nothing so all-out in flexibility. Flexibility is more about meeting them halfway.
Speaking of which, halfway is a good, reasonable, fast tie-breaker — you split the difference (or the bargain) and cut time losses on the squabbling. It should be employed in business dispute resolution far more often. But, it doesn't work in ethical matters, such as when you're asked to introduce an error to your translation (or legal work, if you're a lawyer, but lawyers generally know this better) and isn't so simple when it's just poor practice either (e.g. sloppy style but preferred by someone who just wants to impress a personal mark on your translation).
(But, …)
But it's perfectly okay to not be completely rigid about fees and deadlines, and payment deadlines, and the way stuff is calculated, for example. Never budging on willingly introducing error into your work is not quite on the same level as never budging on the application of standard billing methods to non-standard situations, now is it? ;) So see, this is the difference.
(Final notes)
If you accepted a number of mistranslations and grammatical errors simply to please an agency's proofreader, you'd be doing it the wrong way, and it would be outright silly if you did it while knowing you could be liable but thinking you still owed it to them somehow to expose yourself to that risk just to please them.
On the other hand if you accepted such a request coming from a client who knew the rules but chose to depart from prescriptive correctness for the sake of his target demographic or his own natural experience, that would be the sort of situation where there are pros and cons, all outcomes are subjective, and there are hardly cookie-cutter solutions.
Finally, if you turned down an otherwise highly attractive contract just to avoid departing from your usual billing rules, such as zero discounts for numbers in accounting documents, then chances are you just might be harming your income stream for no good reason.
Okay, one last thing: If there is just one part of this post I'd like everyone to remember, it's that flexibility is on the one hand not capitulating to the other party's inflexible demands just because asked, dared, strongarmed or guilt-tripped to, and on the other hand it can be a good thing for you when it allows you to avoid taking unnecessary losses because of undue attachment to things that aren't really important. Common sense, basically.
First off, I don't want to discuss this from the perspective of flexibility as a value in itself, or a goal unto itself etc. That's just silly buzzword nonsense. I'm taking flexibility as a concept here, a thing of life, neither good nor bad, save perhaps in subjective, situation-driven judgement.
(People use the 'flexibility' as a cudgel to get what they want)
We don't have to be flexible, and especially not because an agency or client says that we aren't, as if we should be ashamed of ourselves or feel guilty and, more importantly, give them what they want. Let's make no mistake: they sometimes ask you to be flexible by… accepting they own inflexible demands, for example refusing to sign a non-editable 10-page contract written by their lawyer and full of language that benefits them over you. But it's you who are inflexible and making problems when you won't sign. Seriously?
(All the time, we all do, one just needs to understand this and react properly)
Obviously, we tend to already know something's off in cases like the above, but there are also a lot of cases that, while not with such extreme results, still follow similar basic logic. People stick labels on you when they aren't getting what they want. We all do. This is simply the inherent human subjectivity, the proverbial eye of the beholder. And one more potential accusation that you need to not accept as objective truth the moment a client or agency throws it at you.
- What is that about? What do they want you to be flexible about?
- Do you have any valid obligation to actually be 'flexible about that'?
- What would be reasonable in the circumstances?
- Is their own conduct reasonable?
- Are they flexible to or just want you to accept all their demands unchanged, with zero room for compromise or negotiation?
After answering these questions to oneself, the decision should be much easier — and look much different too than the initial impression or the other party's perspective. (Where the other party's perspective is something that's both morally right and useful to consider, but it simply isn't automatically binding on you.)
(But it's still useful to be flexible)
In my experience it's useful to remain open-minded, suspend judgement and not make one's individual initial preference into an absolute. Frankly, sometimes other people's suggestions are better. Sometimes it doesn't really matter to you, whereas it matters to 'them', hence it would actually be unreasonable not to go out of one's way a bit for a fellow human being. And in some cases you could lose a prospective contract over some minutiae that aren't worth making a stand for.
(The point)
… The point is to approach this all with a level head and work out an informed decision based on a healthy appreciation of the circumstances and not pressure (intimidation, manipulation, guilt trips, crocodile tears etc.) from the counterparty.
(The point again)
It's perhaps quite worth spelling it out that flexibility certainly does not mean meeting the other party's requests, let alone demands, let alone onerous on unreasonable demands, in full. There is nothing so all-out in flexibility. Flexibility is more about meeting them halfway.
Speaking of which, halfway is a good, reasonable, fast tie-breaker — you split the difference (or the bargain) and cut time losses on the squabbling. It should be employed in business dispute resolution far more often. But, it doesn't work in ethical matters, such as when you're asked to introduce an error to your translation (or legal work, if you're a lawyer, but lawyers generally know this better) and isn't so simple when it's just poor practice either (e.g. sloppy style but preferred by someone who just wants to impress a personal mark on your translation).
(But, …)
But it's perfectly okay to not be completely rigid about fees and deadlines, and payment deadlines, and the way stuff is calculated, for example. Never budging on willingly introducing error into your work is not quite on the same level as never budging on the application of standard billing methods to non-standard situations, now is it? ;) So see, this is the difference.
(Final notes)
If you accepted a number of mistranslations and grammatical errors simply to please an agency's proofreader, you'd be doing it the wrong way, and it would be outright silly if you did it while knowing you could be liable but thinking you still owed it to them somehow to expose yourself to that risk just to please them.
On the other hand if you accepted such a request coming from a client who knew the rules but chose to depart from prescriptive correctness for the sake of his target demographic or his own natural experience, that would be the sort of situation where there are pros and cons, all outcomes are subjective, and there are hardly cookie-cutter solutions.
Finally, if you turned down an otherwise highly attractive contract just to avoid departing from your usual billing rules, such as zero discounts for numbers in accounting documents, then chances are you just might be harming your income stream for no good reason.
Okay, one last thing: If there is just one part of this post I'd like everyone to remember, it's that flexibility is on the one hand not capitulating to the other party's inflexible demands just because asked, dared, strongarmed or guilt-tripped to, and on the other hand it can be a good thing for you when it allows you to avoid taking unnecessary losses because of undue attachment to things that aren't really important. Common sense, basically.
Wednesday, 25 January 2017
Don't Immediately Concede a Discount Just Because the Client Complains (and Seems to Expect One)
Sorry for the lousy title, but I need to focus on the contents.
In better times this is perhaps a rare oddity, if not unheard of, but these days whimsical and borderline incompetent checking and correcting of translations by clients and agencies is something we keep hearing about all the time. I've come to the conclusion it can't be just the coincidental subjective experience of a couple of people, there must be more of it, as in a trend, hence this post.
This is going to be a controversial statement, but in my opinion there is a general decline in competence, morality and manner (as in class act) worldwide, so no wonder professional ethics and courtesy also are slackening and people don't seen an ethical problem in biased adversarial examination of and complaints about goods and services they procure, in the hope of saving some money.
In our so-called translation industry (how I hate the term!), this is compounded by how agencies end up with cheap proofreaders due to all their cost-cutting, which means that senior external translators end up having their work checked and graded by junior inhouse staff. The same happens in corporations when, out of the same desire to cut costs, someone decides to DYI it. If not the translation, then the checking.
In either case it may be compounded by how the choice of expression is largely subjective, as are outlooks on equivalence, as are skill levels and judgements thereof. Egos are involved. Face-saving is involved, sometimes real cover-ups and damage control after someone botches the job, the project, notably by already having procedured translation on the cheap before, which not only backfired but also drained the budget.
Or, like in the old Indian tale of two wolves, there's not only good and evil in every single one of us but also intelligence and stupidity, controlled behaviour and freaking out, class act and poor manner. The one wolf that wins is the one we feed. Our clients and their staff, and brokers, also have wolves to feed and make their choices. Translation procurement tends to be inexplicably conducive to making just the wrong, stupid choices. And let's not forget about people who just don't know how bad they are, or at least not as highly qualified as they think, especially for work they haven't studied and trained for, or at least learned the language.
(This notably includes a great deal of native speakers of the target language in translation, retained by clients and brokers often for little merit beyond their native origin, who so often just don't know all the rules or just plain can't write. But it also includes a great deal of 'proficient' non-natives who think they're good enough to doubtless be the innocent party in a dispute with a qualified native writer or translator. And then loads of people who aren't particularly familiar with the field but go ahead and edit other people's writing anyway.)
The point? Stop overthinking. You won't likely find out which is the case, let alone find the comfort of certainty. What you need to realize is that shit happens — every day. Yes, it happens. Today, a fellow translator wrote about how an agency explicitly asked her to look for errors, find some, grade it down, help them save some buck. When confronted with this reality, you need to avoid compulsively looking for fault within yourself and taking the blame just to avoid having to acknowledge that the world is a bad place and people can be jerks.
Fend it off, cast off the fog, keep your mind clear. Check twice if you they don't have a point, but if you can't find legit errors, and serious enough, then you need to confront the reality that no, the client is not always right in general, and that your client is not right, right here and now, in particular.
If you still grant a discount, for example to avoid non-payment because you realistically need the money and have no other way to see at least some of it, or you just won't the client to go away without going out of his way to damage your reputation (you already damage it by making it look like you're admitting errors that just aren't there!), then I won't judge you, but it should be your decision, not an automatism.
Automatic discounts on every complaint — which is nb. sometimes the way things work with translation agencies — only encourage frivolous complaints. Remember, a lot of people are amoral in some degree in business. They just see numbers, cash flows, equations, impersonal operations to manage, they don't really think or feel much beyond that it makes sense to save money where you can. Which includes where a weaker 'vendor' will let you. So don't.
This said, I certainly don't encourage dismissing legitimate complaints, especially not as a matter of policy. And yes, this too is a policy companies have long discovered and tested in practice by now. Just consider how clients and brokers use the broken-record strategy to deflect your overdue payment requests, piling on outlandish excuses one after one, avoiding you or outright stalling. I certainly am not saying this is what we should do to our clients when they have cause to worry or outright complain or even demand a discount, a deserved one.
But simply wanting a discount covers exactly zero distance toward deserving it or proving that they do. Again, I'm not saying the burden of proof should by sky-high, but a nude demand or some sort of faux proofreading doesn't rise to the level. It doesn't rise much above floor level, and it rather goes quite lower than that. It's quite low indeed, and has no place from respected companies — as soon as you can establish it wasn't just an accident at work (you need to probe gently before they get defensive and start opposing you on principle), you need to let them know it won't fly and in fact it's quite bad of them to even have tried.
We need to send the message that changing times have not made the practice acceptable.
In better times this is perhaps a rare oddity, if not unheard of, but these days whimsical and borderline incompetent checking and correcting of translations by clients and agencies is something we keep hearing about all the time. I've come to the conclusion it can't be just the coincidental subjective experience of a couple of people, there must be more of it, as in a trend, hence this post.
This is going to be a controversial statement, but in my opinion there is a general decline in competence, morality and manner (as in class act) worldwide, so no wonder professional ethics and courtesy also are slackening and people don't seen an ethical problem in biased adversarial examination of and complaints about goods and services they procure, in the hope of saving some money.
In our so-called translation industry (how I hate the term!), this is compounded by how agencies end up with cheap proofreaders due to all their cost-cutting, which means that senior external translators end up having their work checked and graded by junior inhouse staff. The same happens in corporations when, out of the same desire to cut costs, someone decides to DYI it. If not the translation, then the checking.
In either case it may be compounded by how the choice of expression is largely subjective, as are outlooks on equivalence, as are skill levels and judgements thereof. Egos are involved. Face-saving is involved, sometimes real cover-ups and damage control after someone botches the job, the project, notably by already having procedured translation on the cheap before, which not only backfired but also drained the budget.
Or, like in the old Indian tale of two wolves, there's not only good and evil in every single one of us but also intelligence and stupidity, controlled behaviour and freaking out, class act and poor manner. The one wolf that wins is the one we feed. Our clients and their staff, and brokers, also have wolves to feed and make their choices. Translation procurement tends to be inexplicably conducive to making just the wrong, stupid choices. And let's not forget about people who just don't know how bad they are, or at least not as highly qualified as they think, especially for work they haven't studied and trained for, or at least learned the language.
(This notably includes a great deal of native speakers of the target language in translation, retained by clients and brokers often for little merit beyond their native origin, who so often just don't know all the rules or just plain can't write. But it also includes a great deal of 'proficient' non-natives who think they're good enough to doubtless be the innocent party in a dispute with a qualified native writer or translator. And then loads of people who aren't particularly familiar with the field but go ahead and edit other people's writing anyway.)
The point? Stop overthinking. You won't likely find out which is the case, let alone find the comfort of certainty. What you need to realize is that shit happens — every day. Yes, it happens. Today, a fellow translator wrote about how an agency explicitly asked her to look for errors, find some, grade it down, help them save some buck. When confronted with this reality, you need to avoid compulsively looking for fault within yourself and taking the blame just to avoid having to acknowledge that the world is a bad place and people can be jerks.
Fend it off, cast off the fog, keep your mind clear. Check twice if you they don't have a point, but if you can't find legit errors, and serious enough, then you need to confront the reality that no, the client is not always right in general, and that your client is not right, right here and now, in particular.
If you still grant a discount, for example to avoid non-payment because you realistically need the money and have no other way to see at least some of it, or you just won't the client to go away without going out of his way to damage your reputation (you already damage it by making it look like you're admitting errors that just aren't there!), then I won't judge you, but it should be your decision, not an automatism.
Automatic discounts on every complaint — which is nb. sometimes the way things work with translation agencies — only encourage frivolous complaints. Remember, a lot of people are amoral in some degree in business. They just see numbers, cash flows, equations, impersonal operations to manage, they don't really think or feel much beyond that it makes sense to save money where you can. Which includes where a weaker 'vendor' will let you. So don't.
This said, I certainly don't encourage dismissing legitimate complaints, especially not as a matter of policy. And yes, this too is a policy companies have long discovered and tested in practice by now. Just consider how clients and brokers use the broken-record strategy to deflect your overdue payment requests, piling on outlandish excuses one after one, avoiding you or outright stalling. I certainly am not saying this is what we should do to our clients when they have cause to worry or outright complain or even demand a discount, a deserved one.
But simply wanting a discount covers exactly zero distance toward deserving it or proving that they do. Again, I'm not saying the burden of proof should by sky-high, but a nude demand or some sort of faux proofreading doesn't rise to the level. It doesn't rise much above floor level, and it rather goes quite lower than that. It's quite low indeed, and has no place from respected companies — as soon as you can establish it wasn't just an accident at work (you need to probe gently before they get defensive and start opposing you on principle), you need to let them know it won't fly and in fact it's quite bad of them to even have tried.
We need to send the message that changing times have not made the practice acceptable.
Monday, 9 January 2017
Why It Is OK to Limit Liability (12 Pointers)
Wait? What? Limited liability? Isn't that avoiding responsibility for your own actions?
Nope. Not necessarily anyway. And certainly there's more to it. We could argue the details to no end, so let's just state some general pointers. Food for thought:
My opinion: Yes, your mistake is yours. But the size of the damage and the probability of the damage occurring is mostly controlled by the client. Don't be a hostage. Don't be a scapegoat. Don't be set up like that. Get professional insurance. Double-check your work. But demand sufficient information about all risk factors affecting anything that your client wants you to be potentially liable for, and sufficient budget to take all the precautions you need. If the client won't give you the information or the budget, you just don't give your client free insurance against unknown risks generated and increased by the client at will without so much as notifying you so you could prepare.
You also need to take additional precautions with any intermediaries involved, as risks relating to restricted or distorted information grow exponentially the more people or companies are in the chain. So does the risk of your mistake — let's say a small mistake that's undeniable and undeniably yours — leading to huge consequences because of someone else's risk-taking attitude. And it's simply not fair for you to incur something to the tune of $20M liability because the agency wouldn't spend $200 on a proofreader or editor — of which the client may not even be aware, or, if aware of it, then not aware of the consequences.
You just don't get enough infomation to promise unlimited liability. You don't even know what exactly you would be liable for and what sums would be involved. You certainly don't know what risks they are taking and what else they're not telling you. You aren't told quite possibly because you would refuse the job if you knew. Or you could want a higher budget or longer deadline. Remember this.
Also, look up information asymmetry.
Nope. Not necessarily anyway. And certainly there's more to it. We could argue the details to no end, so let's just state some general pointers. Food for thought:
- Don't presume that it's natural or obvious for malpractice liability to meet the full extent of the first quantifiable value of some sort of damages that comes to your mind or someone else brings up. Things aren't so simple. The first quantifiable value someone intuitively comes up with is not likely to coincide with what the outcome of full, objective and exhaustive analysis would be after properly gathering and processing all the information available. For example it may occur to you — or someone else — that if a translation agency loses a client because of a translator's mistake, then the responsible translator should pay damages to the value of the entire turnover with that client. However, that seems reasonable only superficially. It doesn't account for the possibility of replacing that lost client with a new one after a couple of cold calls or just having spare capacity that will soon get all used up by other existing clients. So should the agency get the compensation and get to sell the freed capacity anyway, for double the money? Or should the agency be allowed to call it a day and send the sales rep home early because the translator is paying? This is the kind of nonsense that results from coming up with and too easily accepting arbitrary values based on emotional notions, as opposed to proper analysis.
- By contrast, it's natural to expect businesses to take precautions (forward looking) and act (react) to avoid or mitigate damage. If they don't, notably because they want to save the cost, then why should the increased risk be yours and not theirs? It would be like a general partnership in which you get 0% share in the profits but only a worker's wage, plus 100% share in any hypothetical loss. Who in his right mind would agree to that? There is no rational or ethical reason for a client's recklessness, carelessness or risk appetite (gambling) to allocate gains to the client and losses to the professional service provider.
- Some risk-creating or risk-increasing choices by clients are legitimate because they respond to a reasonable need or pursue a reasonable objective. However, should the risk so created or increased — for example because of restricted access to information — be borne by someone who doesn't even know about it? Someone who doesn't even get the opportunity to reject the deal based upon the knowledge of the risks involved, which is withheld from him by the other party? Should companies be allowed to have their cake and eat it too like that? Should professional service providers be doomed to not even know the risks they assume against their will?
- The last point holds true about the value and kind of the transaction in general, but it is all the more true in respect of any special risk factors, notably ones that may lead to special or consequential damages or anything else you wouldn't normally presume or foresee or prepare against anyway. The business client should be acting to prevent them, not outsource them to someone who isn't even aware of effectively becoming the client's insurer for the client's gainful transaction with some other entity. Again, should the client have the cake and eat it too?
- Professional service providers are not insurance companies. Insurance per se is not even an explicit added value included in the transaction. It's just a convenient by-product that companies sometimes seek. And if they are allowed complete secrecy and zero disclosure, then they might as well seek professional services specifically to get free insurance, not even to get the service per se
- Insurance companies are the first to want to know about all the risks involved — type, size, probability, impact etc. They spend their precious time doing proper, mathematical calculations for all of those things. Does the though of having to do such calculations feel over the top to you? Would it feel the same if you knew $20M was at stake? Which is probably more money than you'll make or at least save in your life but which a single contract in international trade may be worth more than — just to give you perspective.
- Are you actually paid for guaranteeing the safety of your clients' transactions? This is essentially what we're talking about: the justice and the price of such a guarantee of safety being included in your fee. This is still true even if the safety would be from the consequences of your own mistakes. Why, you may ask: Because the probability and especially the impact of bad consequences of your mistakes still depends on factors that are beyond even your knowledge, whereas they are usually in your client's control, such as withholding information from you. Or are you only being paid for labour, i.e. the actual time and toil you expend on your client's behalf regardless of the value of the client's business transaction involved? If you're only paid what is essentially a labourer's wage and not an agent's commission corresponding to the value of the transaction, then you aren't being paid for being an insurer against all sorts of stuff that isn't communicated to you — precisely because you would likely refuse if you only knew.
- Remember that people who are professionals in assuming liability — insurers namely — always require full disclosure and disclaim liability, or increased liability, for anything you fail to disclose.
- They also give their clients instructions to follow. Taking more risks or more lightly, more haphazardly than your insurance policy allows voids it. You don't get any compensation if you forget to fix a broken alarm or replace your lock after losing your keys, or divulge your passwords. Ironically, some of these client-generated risks we're talking about are precisely precautions dictated by insurance companies (notably your restricted access to information about whatever you're helping them achieve).
- The premium you have to pay for an insurance policy depends on the type and size (probability and impact) of the risk covered, as well as the precautions you as the insured or beneficiary agree to take in order to avoid or reduce that risk. How much would a policy have to cost to cover all the property in your house, with no limits on value, and still allow you to not even lock your door and still claim compensation? Just simply because you have a policy? Why should such insurance effectively be provided by professional service providers and within a labourer's wage rather than an agent's commission? Should business companies get more insurance — with no restrictions or obligations — from their service providers simply because they pay for a service than they get under insurance policies when they pay so much more money to their insurers specifically for insurance coverage?
- Remember: For business clients and brokers, agencies etc. this whole issue isn't about ethics or morality as they may claim when trying to silence your objections with an inapplicable, logically flawed appeal to justice such as 'you should be resposible for your actions'. Nope. It's about changing the owner of the risk involved in the whole thing. Risk which they themselves create or increase for example to save some money or protect their secrets or otherwise benefit. Ordering the service from you conveniently places you as the new owner of the risk they want to get rid of on the cheap, i.e. without taking proper precautions themselves and without paying someone else to take them or just assume the liability in case something happens.
- Ethically, however, their argument is still fundamentally flawed: Why should you be expected to automatically and with no additional pay assume greater risks because your client elects to create or increase a risk or skip sensible precautions? Why should the client be entitled to the savings but free of the risks created by them? — So that someone who didn't create the risk gets 0% share in the gain and 100% share in the loss? How is any of the foregoing fair or ethical or reasonable?
My opinion: Yes, your mistake is yours. But the size of the damage and the probability of the damage occurring is mostly controlled by the client. Don't be a hostage. Don't be a scapegoat. Don't be set up like that. Get professional insurance. Double-check your work. But demand sufficient information about all risk factors affecting anything that your client wants you to be potentially liable for, and sufficient budget to take all the precautions you need. If the client won't give you the information or the budget, you just don't give your client free insurance against unknown risks generated and increased by the client at will without so much as notifying you so you could prepare.
You also need to take additional precautions with any intermediaries involved, as risks relating to restricted or distorted information grow exponentially the more people or companies are in the chain. So does the risk of your mistake — let's say a small mistake that's undeniable and undeniably yours — leading to huge consequences because of someone else's risk-taking attitude. And it's simply not fair for you to incur something to the tune of $20M liability because the agency wouldn't spend $200 on a proofreader or editor — of which the client may not even be aware, or, if aware of it, then not aware of the consequences.
You just don't get enough infomation to promise unlimited liability. You don't even know what exactly you would be liable for and what sums would be involved. You certainly don't know what risks they are taking and what else they're not telling you. You aren't told quite possibly because you would refuse the job if you knew. Or you could want a higher budget or longer deadline. Remember this.
Also, look up information asymmetry.
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