Count the emotional cost

When contemplating this kind of situation, which is mercifully rare, the thing that looms largest for me is the emotional cost of pursuing the debt. I’ve chased plenty of clients in the past (and taken one to court), and I found that the constant weight of resentment, paranoia and self-righteousness took a toll that ultimately outweighed the value of the actual cash at stake. And if I didn’t get the money at all (which I mostly didn’t), that just made it worse.

Maybe if you’re a more confrontational, hard-bitten character than I am – someone rather like Paulie in Goodfellas, with his ‘f— you, pay me’ – you might actively enjoy the debt-chasing process. But even if you do, you have to accept that you’re expending energy that might be better directed towards developing your business – or just serving some nicer clients.

Business bad? F— you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning? F— you, pay me

I’ve always felt that incorporating as a firm, and thinking of yourself as a business, is a positive step for freelancers. It creates a useful distance between yourself and your work; between your personal money and your work money; and between your emotions and what’s right for ‘the business’.

But this is one case where I think it’s OK to let emotions into the picture. As I’ve said, chasing a debt can put you through the wringer. If you’re longing to write it off just to be rid of the baggage, give yourself a break and move on. Forget the principle – and forget the money too.

Don’t honour sunk costs

Not all debts are equal. The value of the invoice comes into play, and this has to be weighed against the opportunity cost of pursuing it.

For example, if your unpaid debt is for two days’ work and you might spend a day chasing it, the net result will be, at best, one day’s pay. You could just as easily forget the debt, do a day for another client, build a useful relationship and get the same outcome.

Of course, you’ve still lost those previous two days, but those are what economists call sunk costs – they’re spent and gone no matter what you do. What matters is the choice you make now. Honouring or chasing sunk costs is a cardinal error; it’s the commercial equivalent of ‘throwing good money after bad’. And although you lose, remember that what is lost is ‘only’ your time; the money requested by the invoice was never yours, no matter how much you might have counted your chickens.

Revenge is a dish best not served at all

If the invoice is larger, you may feel that the extra time is worth it. But in my view, you should be absolutely sure that this on the basis of a financial or business calculus, not an emotional one. The quest to ‘show’ the client or ‘teach them a lesson’ is futile – if they cared about you at all, they’d have paid, and that won’t change just because you sue them. All you can do is turn passive indifference into active dislike. Respect can only be earned, not demanded.

A similar logic applies to the idea of ‘naming and shaming’ the client, which is much easier now with the advent of blogs, Facebook and Twitter. But again, what will you gain? You take yourself down to the perpetrator’s level, look a bit petty (to potential clients, among others) and ultimately gain nothing.

It’s the freelancer’s destiny to be jerked around; non-payment is just a more brutal manifestation of that eternal truth. So forget seeking revenge or trying to prove a point; it just binds you to an old situation and a rubbish client when what you need is closure and renewal.

Remember the good times

In considering whether to walk away from a bad debt, it’s important to have a sense of proportion.

We have a natural inclination to focus on the dark side, often by letting one piece of bad news drive out hundreds of pieces of good news. Cognitive psychologists call this negativity bias.

Fortunately, an objective sense of proportion in money matters is quite easy to achieve. For example, by my very rough calculation, my bad debts to date represent 0.5% of my total turnover as a freelancer since I started out. So while it’s infinitely galling to have someone walk away from a debt, it’s crucial to see the bigger picture – the vast majority of clients are honest and pay without hassle.

Trade on trust

Whenever I Tweet about a non-paying client, someone usually suggests demanding an upfront payment, and/or using a formal contract.

I can see how these approaches might limit the damage – or flush out potential miscreants before the dancing even begins. But the problem, for me, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I’m unwilling to impose delays and obstacles on every client because of the few bad apples, or make smaller projects top-heavy with administration. An email or even a phone conversation is legally binding, after all. And it would represent a waste of energy to red-tape the 99.5% of clients who pay without complaint – as with chasing debts, I could spend that time actively generating revenue.

Moreover, on a purely personal level, I simply prefer to do business on a basis of trust. Maybe that’s naïve, lazy or hopelessly weak. But at the end of the day, freelancing means being free to work the way you want and run your relationships the way you want. For me, that means picking my battles, sidestepping resentment and focusing as much time as possible on creating value. Paulie might not agree – but look what happened to him…

Unusual leverage. Despite the previous point, there’s no need to reduce the price. Indeed, this is one of the very rare occasions where the freelancer can actually punch their weight in negotiations, particularly if they already know the client or the brand. You might even get away with a premium for quick turnaround.

Now, can you get something to me by 10am tomorrow?

I’ve had this feeling before
My heart is crawling in the mud, mud, mud
I’d feel much better, I’m sure
If I had a helicopter

Lyrics to ‘Helicopter’ by Dan Gillespie Sells (performed by The Feeling)

As regular readers know, my freelance career began in 2005, when I was made redundant. With the reassuring structure of the working day and a ‘career’ removed, I started looking for something else to organise my life around. Appropriately (or perhaps inevitably) I found it in writing – specifically, self-help books and Zen Buddhist literature.

Self-help is often ridiculed by those afraid of its implication: self-responsibility. But when you’re setting out as a freelance, it’s just the ticket. Self-help gives you the ways of thinking and seeing you need to live deliberately and consciously, rather than according to someone else’s design. In principle at least, it shows us how to lift ourselves out of what Jean-Peal Sartre (in La Nausée) and Samuel Beckett (in Comment C’est) termed le bout: the ‘mud’ of everyday existence.

Zen teaches even more fundamental skills: mindfulness, acceptance and self-discipline. If genuinely taken to heart and experienced fully (as opposed to just being understood on an intellectual level), Zen offers the potential to transform our entire perception – our whole existence. That hasn’t happened to me yet, but Zen still seems more real and true to me than any other religion, including the low Protestantism of my upbringing.

Culture clash

At first, all these ideas went into the melting pot together and I took whatever value I could from them, mixing and matching to create a worldview that helped me freelance. But as time went by and I thought about them more deeply, I realised that there were fundamental incompatibilities between the two schools of thought. While there is some common ground in terms of self-discipline and self-awareness, the differences are bigger than the similarities.

While self-help dresses itself in New Age clothes, there’s often a strong undercurrent of materialism – particularly with US authors. Progress and growth soon shade into acquisition and possession. That might be explicit (as in Napoleon Hill’s classic Think And Grow Rich) or more implicit, with a narrative of achieving ‘goals’ that can be anything you want – but are probably worldly rather than spiritual.

Zen, however, proposes ‘non-attachment’ to material things and engagement with the present rather than a focus on the future. It rejects dualism and ‘gaining ideas’, emphasising that the mind is already complete and sufficient in itself. Enlightenment is something already present that we discover or realise, not a goal ‘out there’ that we attain or achieve. And instead of changing things (ourselves, our thoughts, our circumstances, the world), Zen teaches ‘radical acceptance’ of our experience.

Freelancer’s dilemma

These two worldviews go squarely head-to-head in the context of a freelance business.

On the one hand, running your own business is obviously about worldly success and material gain. Building and developing a business is inevitably about growth, addition and returns on investment – getting more. It’s also about change, development and adaptation. It’s about building the circumstances you want, not accepting them.  If it isn’t, your freelance business isn’t going to last very long.

Set against that we have the much-vaunted benefits of freelancing – having time to smell the roses, breaking away from the nine-to-five and generally living a more controlled, less driven life. But enjoying these Zen-like benefits means setting aside the ideas of success and self-improvement, even if only for a while. As the saying goes, true wealth is not about having what you want, but wanting what you have – in other words, being in the present and accepting it as it is, rather than constantly grabbing life by the scruff of the neck and dragging it onwards to an imagined future.

Everything begins with choice

Ultimately, everything the freelancer does is a choice. Every job, every client, every step along the road is the result of a decision. Sometimes, it might not feel that way – or we might not want to accept the responsibility. But it’s undeniably true.

So every freelancer has to answer some tough questions. How much success do we really want, or need, and what price are we prepared to pay to get it? How much time will we give up in order to get more money – and how much money will we give up in order to enjoy more of our time? Are we prepared to let some future opportunities go in order to appreciate the present?

We can’t afford to relax too completely, or our business will fall apart. But on the other hand, we don’t want to be eaten up by materialism, clinging to the delusion that owning a helicopter (or whatever) will somehow drag us out of the mud. So we all have to decide what we ultimately want from our freelancing. Just how much is enough?

Fran: What are we gonna do?
Joe: That’s what everybody wants to know.
Dialogue from Heist, by David Mamet

Why do some people do well, and others badly – whether in freelancing, or life generally? Our personalities play a part, as does chance. But far more important are the choices we make – our strategy.

What is strategy?

At the simplest level, business strategy is about choosing where and how to create and capture value. A business creates value when it does or makes something that people want or need. And it captures value when it benefits as a result of what it does.

Generic 'strategy' image No. 237

A freelance business is no different from any other business. In order to do well as a freelance, you have to make choices about where and how you will create and capture value. And you’re far more likely to make the right choices if you think carefully about them first – in other words, if you have a strategy.

Strategy focuses and channels our energies towards a goal. Without strategy, our actions are scattered and impulsive – things happen, but they don’t come together in a coherent narrative. With strategy, the things we do have meaning and purpose.

Who, what and how

In his book All The Right Moves, Costas Markides suggests that crafting a strategy is about answering three very simple questions:

• Who will you create value for?
• What products or services will you offer them?
• How will you make it happen?

Let’s explore this beautifully simple framework in the context of a freelance business.

Who will you create value for?

Deciding who your customers will be means deciding who you would like to work for – and, by implication, who you don’t want to work for.

You can define your freelance clients in many ways: their location, the industry they work in, the size or age of their company, their culture, their budget.

You might bring several attributes together to form an ideal client profile, or profiles. For example, an IT consultant might define their ideal clients as ‘SMEs within 50 miles of central London with 20 to 50 workstations’.

Defining your clients is an essential stepping-stone to a host of marketing activities: building a website, direct mail, networking and many others.

Many freelances probably feel that their careers are shaped by clients selecting them, rather than the other way around. That may be so, but there are still choices to be made.

For example, it helps to decide which new-business prospects are worth pursuing, or which clients are worth going the extra mile for, so you can put your efforts where they’ll bring most benefit. Attuning yourself to your ideal clients helps to identify or attract them; as the saying says, ‘chance favours the prepared mind’.

Finally, considering your customer base is a valuable reminder that you always have the choice about who you’re going to work for. That choice may get buried under financial worries, but it’s there – and staying in touch with it is crucial when you come to set prices.

What services will you offer?

Answering this question is about developing a service portfolio – which is just a flashy way of describing a list of things you can do for your customers.

At the simplest level, every freelance must know how they will create value for clients. This sounds obvious, but the nature of in-house careers means that many freelances approach their work from a different perspective: what they’d like to do, what they’ve done before or what they studied at college rather than what clients want.

Knowing how you can create value means matching skills with needs. What can you do that would add value for a client business? Answering this question often involves thinking outside the box of academic disciplines or job descriptions. Non-work skills and interests might be relevant.

If you’re starting out as a freelance, think about all the skills and knowledge you have and list them. Put everything into the pot, including out-of-work interests. Then discard the genuinely irrelevant ones, sort the rest into services, and see how they hang together as an overall offering.

Value innovation

Ideally, you’ll be able to offer some kind of value innovation. This simply means creating more value than competitors in one or more dimensions. For example:

• Price. You could offer a lower price than competitors, or more value for the same price.
• Focus. You could become a specialist in certain tasks, or working with certain types of client.
• Location. You could come to customers rather than them coming to you, or offer a very location-specific service.
• Convenience. You could offer online ordering, flexible payments or something else that makes life easier for customers.
• Service. You could offer a more comprehensive or responsive service than competitors.
• Format. You could add service elements to a product, bundle services in a new way or ‘productise’ a service by turning it into an off-the-shelf purchase.

An example of service innovation is First Direct, the first internet-and-phone-only bank in the UK. They realised that face-to-face interactions and fixed opening hours at bank branches didn’t suit every customer, so they got rid of them, instead focusing on adding more value in terms of convenience and service.

It’s easy to see how value innovation forms the basis for marketing messages. Whatever makes you different is going to be a big reason why people choose you.

Labelling yourself

Having defined your services, you’ll probably want to choose (or create) a description for yourself. Sometimes an established job title will fit – like ‘copywriter’, ‘web designer’ or ‘sound technician’. The advantage here is that people will easily understand what you do; the challenge is differentiating yourself from everyone else who uses the same title.

If you opt for an unusual or unique title, like ‘business content consultant’, you’ll have the exact opposite problem: you’ll sound different and exotic, but you’ll have to explain what you do. However, if your skillset or service is unusual, you might feel that an unusual title is essential.

How will you make it happen?

One view of strategy is that it’s all about obtaining and directing resources in order to achieve a goal. You decide what you want to do, assemble the resources you need, and get on with it. Resources are just the things that enable a business to create and capture value.

That makes it sound ridiculously simple. But the story of every successful business can be understood as a process of identifying, obtaining and using the right resources. Remember, resources aren’t just physical things like buildings and computers. Some are intangible – like ideas, know-how, relationships and brand equity. Unlike tangible resources, intangibles can’t be ‘used up’ – and they can enable you to access other resources in turn.

Consider a new freelance business. (It’s really just a person, but it’s helpful to think of yourself as a company sometimes.) It might have tangible resources such as a computer, a phone, a suit and a car, as well as intangible resources such as skills, motivation and professional relationships. To get started, it might need other resources such as premises, client relationships, marketing material, capital and so on. How can it use the resources it has to get the resources it needs? Well, the professional relationships might turn into, or provide, some client relationships. Premises can be sourced on the market. Buying marketing material requires knowledge of marketing, which can be found in blogs and books… and so it goes on.

The resource view of strategy makes everything simple. If you don’t have a resource, or if you don’t have enough of it, you need to find a way to make, obtain or access it. The resource mindset breaks everything down into manageable chunks.

Note that you don’t have to own or control a resource to be able to use it. Once, getting knowledge meant spending time and/or money visiting libraries or buying books. Now we have Google. Professional advice is easier to access too. Even tangible resources like premises can be shared through hotdesking.

Bringing it all together

For much of the time, your strategy will probably live in your head. But I’d suggest writing it down. Writing has an awesome power – whatever we commit to paper tends to come true! So a one-page summary of your strategy is definitely worth spending 30 minutes on. Here’s an example:

XYZ Web Design: Business strategy

I will serve small and medium-sized businesses in the London area – primarily those who do not yet have a web presence, or are new to digital marketing.

I will offer them a competent and competitive ‘off the shelf’ web design service, so they can get online for a reasonable cost. I will also offer some related services such as SEO, although for larger projects in these areas I will partner with other freelances.

To do this, I will draw on my experience as an in-house web developer. My experience running a small cleaning franchise will help me organise the business and also relate to my clients as a fellow business owner.

Resources available: web design skills, business skills, some SEO skills, laptop, mobile phone, website

Resources required: premises, bank account, local network of contacts, overdraft, mailing list, sales letter

A final thought: strategy isn’t a one-time deal. It needs to be revised and revisited. That’s why writing it down can be so productive. Return to your strategy document a year later and see how far you’ve come – and where you’d like to go next.

Stage 1

I build this site while still an employee, thinking of using it to find another job. It’s a simple online cv, but the graphics are animated in Flash. Although the design is lamentable, you have to bear in mind that this was developed around 2000 – lots of sites looked a lot worse than they do now.

The basic problem here – one that I wouldn’t solve for several years – is wanting to show off my feeble web skills rather than offer information in a way potential employers might actually like.

Stage 2

Freshly redundant, I create this site as a way to showcase my skills to potential freelance clients. The cyan and grey identity is done for me by a designer friend. Unfortunately the design I build around it is spindly, meek and rather self-effacing – reflecting my level of confidence at the time.

At this stage, I’m trading under my own name: this site was at the URL tomalbrighton.co.uk. (I think my reasoning was that success would be about selling my skills and building personal reputation.)

It’s still essentially a cv site, with none of the marketing copy you’d expect from a commercially minded freelance. Although I have given myself a tagline, ‘flexible editorial ability’ – I remember my sister laughing out loud at ‘flexible’, presumably because it evoked a circus contortionist.

The word ‘editorial’ shows that I’m still thinking of my skills in terms of the job descriptions I’ve had in publishing, rather than the words that potential clients might use to find someone like me. Lacking agency experience, I don’t yet feel I can use the word ‘copywriter’ to describe myself. Similarly, the ‘services’ are actually my own skill areas, rather than things a client might actually need done.

Stage 3

A slight improvement in design and a new tagline: ‘business content consultancy’, with a theme to match. I’m edging towards saying something clients might want to hear, but I’m still constrained by self-limiting beliefs about the applicability of my skills. Three self-indulgent pages on my ‘approach’ add nothing.

There are many more businesses calling themselves ‘content consultants’ these days, but I’m sure they all suffer from the same problem: ‘consultant’ sounds like someone who doesn’t do anything.

Stage 4

A new day dawns. I’ve now incorporated as a company – ABC Business Communications – and moved into a rented office. Having gained clients and confidence, my dream is to build my business up into an agency. (It never came true – or hasn’t yet.)

I’ve got a new logo (by the same designer) and some corporate colours, deployed to reasonably strong effect on this site. Unfortunately the domain I’ve chosen – abcbusiness.biz – is an absolute stinker. But I’ve still come on a lot since stage 1.

I’ve written a new tagline, ‘Are you reaching those who matter most?’ It’s not bad, but I’m not sure I’d use a question these days. It leads the reader into introspection and uncertainty, not clarity and action.

I even have some leaflets designed with this tagline and some more stock imagery. Nowadays I’d spend that kind of money on AdWords clicks rather than printed collateral – and I advise most sole-trader clients the same.

Stage 5

Now we’re cooking. I’ve finally woken up to the fact that, whatever my experience, potential clients use the word ‘copywriter’ to describe what I do. So I’ve adopted the trading name ‘ABC Copywriting’, got a new domain (this one) and built a new site.

Delighted at my discovery of <div> tags, I’ve built something that looks like it’s made from children’s building blocks. But at least it’s interesting, and shows signs of wanting to conduct visitors through information to an actual enquiry. It’s also the first site built with SEO in mind, and gratifyingly hits #1 for ‘copywriter norwich’ as soon as it’s spidered.

I’m still using the same tagline, but it’s woven into the copy much more tightly. If you’re going to use a headline, your copy needs to make good on its promise (or answer the question that it asks).

Stage 6

Boo-ya! How ya like me now baby? This is the first iteration of ABC Copywriting I’m really happy with; the first that looks and feels genuinely professional.

I’ve cleared out the solid colours and adopted a simple, flexible four-column layout (4x200px = 800px wide in total). White space gives a more relaxed feel, so visitors don’t feel so hemmed in by lines and blocks. Only the cutesy photographic images spoil the party – but imagery is a problem for almost every B2B site.

There’s another new tagline – ‘We’ll choose your words carefully’. It retains the second-person focus with ‘your’, but integrates some implication of skill on my part (which its predecessor didn’t). I’m still too close to it to tell whether it’s any good – you decide. The owner of a very reputable Norwich creative agency told me he liked it, and that’s good enough for me.

My blog’s appeared, but at this stage it’s still using an off-the-shelf theme (iBlog), so moving to the blog means encountering a completely different design style. It might as well be on a different domain.

Stage 7

Although I had a lot of enquiries with the site looking like this, I now regard it as a mis-step.

I feel the previous site is too self-effacing and discreet, so I make the home page different from the rest of the site and add these shouty all-caps headings to get in visitors’ faces a bit more. I also add a forceful (perhaps over-forceful) call to action, top right.

I scrap the imagery, realising that it serves no semiotic or cognitive purpose and also wanting to make a point about communicating only with words. But the end result is a bit obtuse and blocky, and arguably too copy-heavy too. In six months I will be itching to rework it again.

The biggest step forward at this stage is getting a custom theme built for my blog, so the WordPress pages have the same look as the main site.

Stage 8

You’re looking at it! I finally started looking at sites I really liked and thinking about how I could use those ideas on my own site. I’m not a designer, so I played it safe and kept things ultra-simple, ranged left, with lots of white space.

The 4x200px column layout is still here, but I’ve moved the navigation up top to make more room for content – such as the ‘Read more’/‘Where to go next’ column on the right, which aims to keep visitors on the site a little longer.

We’re back to icons again, but the design was just too dry without them. The ‘marker pen’ style just adds a touch of warmth and softness that acres of Helvetica can’t quite deliver.

The home page is much more tightly constructed, with the tagline, lead paragraphs and icon working together on the theme ‘words people love’. Time will tell whether this works better than previous iterations.

The blog theme is updated too, with more thought put into how lists of posts will look and a better home page. Also, the blog is more tightly integrated into the main site, with links from service pages to relevant articles. The aim is to build an impression of authority – I don’t really expect potential clients to wade through dozens of blog posts.

And that’s the end of the story – for now, at least. Your comments are welcome, but whatever you do, please don’t say you like an earlier version better than this one. It took me ages…

• It’s scary. Well, it is for me anyway. Walking up to strangers and introducing myself would be right up there on my list of least favourite activities, just ahead of sticking pins in my eyes and coming a close second to camping. Or ballroom dancing.
• It’s egotistical. For me, actively pushing my services has always gone against the grain. Yes, I know you have to do it, and I’ve got my head around doing it online. But in person, I always get the sickening sense of necessity clashing with personality. It’s just not me.

Wallflowers are attractive, fragrant and low-maintenance

• It’s expensive. OK, some events are free, but many aren’t. They remind me of the days when I paid a tenner to get into a club on a Thursday night, only to find myself in a dimly lit room with my mates and two other blokes even less glamorous than us.
• It’s ineffective. ‘I’m looking for a copywriter actually. In fact, that’s why I came here today.’ Just one of the things I will never, ever hear at a networking event. Because when my prospects want my services, they go straight to the web, or to a colleague for a recommendation. Not to a hotel near the airport.
• It’s a waste of time. Instead of spending an afternoon failing to sell myself, I could create a blog post that’s got a fighting chance of getting backlinks from authority or related sites in my niche. Or cold-call a few promising-looking prospects. Or take my daughter to the park. All arguably deliver more benefit.
• It’s insincere. No, I am not remotely interested in your rivet-making company, or its newly introduced rivet. Yet for appearances’ sake I must feign interest – as must you, hah! But the eyes are the window to the soul, and our mutual disdain cannot be completely hidden.
• It’s boring. Meeting a load of strangers at 7.30am? At a golf club? I might just take a rain check, thanks. Although, thinking about it, I don’t have that much work coming up… Now, where did I put those business cards?

What you’re feeling is freelance fury. It’s always there, waiting to get out: the primal, all-consuming, incandescent anger that can only be experienced by the self-employed white-collar worker. Here are a few ideas for cooling your jets and redirecting your energies towards something more productive than chewing the carpet.

Email in haste, repent at leisure

First and foremost: don’t act hastily. Communicating with the client might well be part of the solution, but don’t grab the phone or send off that angry email just yet. Work through some of the ideas below first. While you might feel that the client ‘should’ hear what you’ve got to say, venting your rage is unlikely to resolve the situation to your advantage.

One way to release the pressure is to compose that email without sending it. Write it, but just save it as a draft. You can read it through tomorrow and then decide how much needs to be said.

When I do this, I usually find that 90% of the content is righteous anger or self-justification, and 10% is pragmatic stuff that the client actually needs to hear. So I cut the email to the essentials and then send it.

Control your response

Self-help guru Stephen R. Covey defines ‘responsibility’ as ‘response-ability’ – your ability to respond. His key point is that while there are always aspects of a situation that you can’t control, your own response (whether mental, verbal or physical) is always a choice.

Understanding this is the foundation of self-responsibility: our actions are never really forced by outside circumstances, however much we might like to think so.

In the context of freelance fury, response-ability means separating the events that have made you angry from your own response to them, instead of trying to grapple with a confused, seething tangle of thoughts, emotions and memories.

The table below shows how actual, real-world events (left-hand column) might be distinguished from the interpretation, speculation, imagination and judgement you’re bringing to the situation (right-hand column).

This is the first step to getting a grip on your thoughts and throwing out the ones that are unhelpful. Speculating on what the client might think, or what might happen in the future, is particularly pointless. You’re just fiddling about with imaginary ideas in your mind. Focus back on the real world and what needs to be done now (see below).

Another way to work through your responses is just to talk through the situation with someone else. When you have to describe events and reactions to another, the distinction between them becomes much clearer.

Experience anger fully

In order not to leave any traces, when you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely. If you do not burn yourself completely, a trace of yourself will be left in what you do. You will have something remaining which is not completely burned out… That is what [Zen master] Dogen meant when he said, ‘Ashes do not come back to firewood.’
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

This quote, which may seem rather opaque at first reading, refers to the Zen idea of complete experience. In Zen, meditation is a way to experience existence in the fullest possible way. But other acts as well as meditation can – and should – be experienced in the same way: with a single-minded, focused concentration and appreciation.

Mr Angry was furious that he'd gone out wearing nothing but a hat again

Unfortunately, modern life is full of fragmented, incomplete experiences that are intrinsically unsatisfactory. Surfing the internet while watching TV, for example, or eating while reading a book, delivers an incomplete experience of both. Yet we persist with the idea that we can somehow kill two birds with one cognitive stone. In fact, as Suzuki points out, such incomplete activity leaves unwanted ‘traces’ in our minds and in our character; the firewood has not been completely burned.

Because anger can be so powerful, it can be difficult to experience it completely. As discussed above, our own reactions quickly cloud the waters, and before we know it we’re locked in an internal dialogue with our own fears and interpretations. As a result, a trace of the anger remains, and we can’t let go of it.

To remedy this, try ‘sitting’ with your anger. Just sit quietly and observe what’s happening in your own mind. (You don’t have to adopt the lotus position, but it’s worth finding a time and place without distractions.) Remember the events that made you angry and note your reactions. Don’t judge your client, or yourself – just observe the thoughts arising and passing away, like clouds passing the sky. After a few minutes, you’ll usually find that past events feel truly past, and your own perspective is much more balanced.

See yourself taking action

One of the most powerful anti-worry techniques is to vividly picture yourself taking action to address the situation. Instead of going round and round in your mind, fuming, focus on what you could actually do. For example, you could:

• talk to a fellow freelance and get their views
• go online to see how others have dealt with the situation
• call up the client or send them an email to raise your concerns
• tell the client you’re going to have to charge more to cover extra work or time
• decide to walk away from the client (perhaps without even charging for work to date, so there’s no dispute).

(I’ve used this last tactic recently and it worked really well. I proposed my best solution. The client didn’t like it. So instead of endlessly trying to revise it, or become something I’m not, I cordially ended the project, letting them use what I’d done if they wanted to. Quick, angst-free and effective, freeing me up to go where I can add more value. Nothing owed on either side, and the client at least respects me, even if they don’t like my work.) 

You don’t have to follow up on all your ideas – or any of them. You just need to give yourself a realistic set of options that you could take. Just having these options generates a sense of freedom and choice – and that takes the pressure off.

Criticise the act, not the person

A lot of the time, we react to our conceptions or perceptions of how people are, not what they actually do. We might also characterise them in particular ways – ‘difficult’, ‘fickle’, ‘demanding’ or whatever. If unchecked, this can become a feedback loop where everything they do just reinforces our perception of them.

The key is to criticise a person’s acts, not the person themselves. For example, instead of saying ‘They’re so critical’, say ‘They’ve criticised me’. This may seem a trifling or semantic distinction, but it’s crucial. The first sentence judges the person as being a certain way, while the second simply describes an action they took.

People’s basic characters tend not to change, but they can always choose different actions. If you characterise them as being a certain type of person, you’re shutting off the possibility of change. But if all they’ve done is take a certain action, they can always choose another action in the future. That gives you (and them) more options and a sense of hope and purpose about the whole relationship. (This technique is also recommended for telling off children.)

Hold on tightly, let go lightly

I’ve quoted this phrase before in another article aimed at helping freelance writers. I think it illustrates perfectly the balance of commitment and flexibility that freelances need in order to operate without going mad. Obviously, you want to put effort into your work, and do the best job you can. But in some situations, you need to switch to a more arms-length, practical approach where you’re less of an artist, more of a business person.

Personally, I find it easiest to cultivate a consistent sense of distance between me as a person and my work – although this can be difficult, particularly when social media is furiously muddying the distinction between personal and commercial. For me, deciding to trade as a company was a key step in establishing this distinction between what I might want and what’s best for ‘the company’ – even though the company is really just me.

While you might get enjoyment from doing a good job, if things go wrong you’ve just got to be dispassionate and work through the difficulties in an unemotional, clear-sighted way. Don’t invest too much of yourself, or you’ll end up being consumed by freelance fury.

I have commissioned freelances before, but not so much since becoming one myself. Naturally, my freelancing years have seen me acquire and, yes, perhaps even cultivate, the standard gripes about clients. So it was enlightening to see the process of working with a freelance from the other side of the fence.

At one point, the designer had produced some first layouts that looked great. But I felt they lacked a little something. So I asked him to go back to the drawing board and add in some more colours and graphics – to add some ‘movement and life’ to the design, or so I thought.

The result was complete rubbish.

Thankfully, he put up with all this with grace and tact. He understood the situation and had no doubt experienced similar ones many times before. But why couldn’t I accept that he might have found the best way forward? Why did I feel things would automatically get better with my input?

Seeing is believing

From my point of view, I wasn’t trying to steamroller or humiliate the designer – I just needed to see my ideas on the screen before I could evaluate them. To some extent, the problem was down to my own skillset – strong on words, weak on images and layouts. Lacking the visualisation skills to foresee the way things would pan out, I had to force a detour to a dead-end just to make sure it didn’t go anywhere.

On a psychological level, we could put my intervention down to illusory superiority, a decision-making bias that leads us to overestimate our own positive qualities and abilities and underestimate our negative qualities, relative to others. For example, 93% of US drivers rate themselves as having above-average driving skill, yet by definition only 50% can be above the median. Parents who raise a child together know the phenomenon very well, and from both sides of the fence (‘you’re doing that wrong!’).

From my point of view, my ideas felt ‘right’ – even though objectively, as I later realised, they added no value. We may know, on a rational level, that we’re dealing with an expert who knows more than us. But that doesn’t stop us from questioning them.

Of course, this is familiar to me from the freelance side of the fence. Many are the times I’ve been asked to try a rewrite, restructure or copy concept that I already know won’t work. But from the client side, I realised that asking for things to be reworked flows from a desire to improve things, however misguided.

Praise you like I should

Another thing I’ve realised, while writing this post, is that I haven’t complimented the designer on what he’s done, even though it’s fantastic. While reviewing his work, everyone else on the project has been raving about how great it is. But I haven’t yet conveyed any of that to him.

I’m really not sure why. Perhaps I’ve just forgotten, or I feel a need to be ‘all business’ when we discuss the project, or maybe I unconsciously fear that giving praise somehow weakens my hand. Whatever the reason, I intend to rectify the situation – because I know how much positive feedback means to freelances.

But I’ve also come to realise that clients who don’t give praise aren’t necessarily displeased – in many cases, it really is a case of ‘no news is good news’. If you’ve hit the target, and nothing needs changing, you hear nothing – but that doesn’t mean the client isn’t pleased. For myself, I’ve learned to interpret complete silence as rapturous delight.

Cut ’em some slack

My takeaway from all this is that freelances have to learn to give their clients a lot of slack – even more than they do already. A lot of the much-maligned ‘client behaviour’ can be put down to clients’ anxiety over the need to get it right. Attitudes that might seem pushy, tactless or self-regarding are just the manifestation of a deep concern that the project delivers what the client needs.

And I do mean ‘needs’, not ‘wants’. After all, what might be a ‘bread and butter’ project to you or me might be the only creative project they handle this year – or ever. It might be a website that’s going to be the basis of their livelihood, or a brochure that their boss has delegated to them for the first time ever. Small wonder that the freelancer’s delicate feelings aren’t at the forefront of their minds. 

True professionals know how to deal with their expertise being questioned. If you want to sell your advice for cash, you have to expect to make a case for it. Expecting clients to fully understand copywriting, or design, or any other discipline, is naïve and probably a bit self-centred.

And if you need to approach the goal by a circuitous route, so what – the point is that you get there, and (crucially) that the client is still with you when you arrive. And at that point, you might get a little bit of praise – but don’t hold your breath.

Please note that this post refers only to UK law on copyright.

Who owns copyright in text?

In simple terms, if you write something, you own the copyright in it. No-one else can copy, distribute, publish or adapt it without your permission.

Written materials – or ‘literary, dramatic and musical works’ – are protected by law under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA). They must be recorded in writing or otherwise to be granted copyright, and copyright subsists from the date at which recording takes place.

The fact that a third party is a subject of the work makes no difference. For example, if I take a photo of you, I hold the copyright in the photo, even though it contains your likeness. If I interview you and write it up into an article, I hold copyright in the article, even though it contains words that you spoke.

Only content can be copyrighted, not ideas. If you’ve written a book and I write a summary of the ideas in it, copyright in that summary belongs to me – regardless of how unique or new your ideas are. However, I can’t quote your text word for word, only quote short passages to review or refer to your work.

How do I acquire copyright?

You don’t have to do anything to get your writing ‘copyrighted’. You automatically have copyright in anything you write. You can assert this with a statement somewhere in the work (such as ‘© 2010 ABC Copywriting’) but this is purely for information – you hold copyright whether you say so or not.

How long does copyright last?

Under the CDPA, copyright in written works lapses 70 years after the death of the author. Given the likely lifespan of most written marketing material, that effectively means that copywriters hold copyright in their work forever.

Assigning copyright to copywriting clients

Even though a client might pay you to create some text for them, you still hold the copyright in that text unless you assign it to them. They have paid you to do some work, not for the right to exploit the product of your labour.

(Note that this only applies to freelance writers. If you are employed and you write something as part of your work, your employer holds the copyright in it.)

In practice, most writers and their clients act as though copyright passes to the client when the invoice is paid. But legally, that’s not the case. To make it so, you need to include a clause somewhere that explicitly states how and when copyright in text you write will pass to the client. You could put it in your terms and conditions, on your invoice or even ask a lawyer to draw up a contract (something you might consider for longer works, such as books).

Wherever your clause appears, you need to make sure the client actually agrees to it in writing – by confirming their acceptance of your terms in an email, for example. This is the method I use. My own terms and conditions include the following clause:

Copyright in all published content (such as text and designs produced on your behalf) will pass to you on payment of your invoice.

Before I start a job, I make sure the client confirms their order in an email, along with their acceptance of my price and my terms and conditions. Then, if there’s any query later on, I can state with confidence that they have copyright once they’ve paid.

In some cases, you might want to retain copyright in your work – for example, if you write an article for publication in a magazine and you want to retain the right to publish it elsewhere as well. In this kind of situation, it’s probably worth having some sort of letter of agreement that clarifies exactly what rights you’re granting to your client in return for the fee, just to avoid any doubt or confusion.

Protecting against copyright infringement

One interesting question is whether you could have recourse to legal action if a client uses your text without paying. For example, if they published your text on a website without settling your invoice, they would technically be infringing your copyright, and you could take (or threaten) legal action. However, I’ve never tested this in practice or received legal advice about it – so consult a solicitor before you consider it.

Another possible scenario is writing material as a sample of your work, or as part of a proposal. If you don’t know the client well, you might feel there’s a risk of the content being used without permission or payment. To give yourself ammunition for a dispute, you can send your content to a trusted third party (I use my accountant) and simply ask them to retain it. You need to use a despatch method that incorporates the date, such as email or post. This allows you to establish later on, perhaps during a dispute, that you had created the content at a particular time.

To make it clear that any copyright infringement will be challenged, you can include a warning somewhere in your proposal, alongside an explicit claim to copyright. I use a form of words along these lines:

The content of this proposal is © 2010 ABC Copywriting and is not to be used without permission. ABC takes active steps to protect its intellectual property.

Finally, just in case you were wondering – the keystroke for the © symbol is alt-G on Macs, and Ctril-Alt-C on PCs (in Microsoft Office). In Microsoft Word, you can simply type (c) and it will be corrected to © if you have AutoCorrect activated.

This post is listed at W3C Software Directory.

Often, there will be a discussion about what I could do for them before they commit to buy. And that discussion is usually pretty wide-ranging. To illustrate the services I can provide or broker, I’ll propose many SEO tactics that would be specifically useful for them – as opposed to generic tactics that would work for anyone.

In fact, if they were taking careful notes, they’d end up with a passable SEO strategy just from the conversation. What’s more, the follow-up tasks involved are sometimes relatively mechanical (directory submissions, article marketing), allowing them to be handled in-house or overseas. The prospect could easily take what I’ve given them for free and use it to create significant value for themselves – and I’d never know. In other words, my effusive proposal could easily lead straight to being jilted at the altar.

It’s a serious issue for freelancers, and service providers generally. When does advice stop being an incentive to purchase and start being a product in itself? Where does a comprehensive proposal become a suicidal value giveaway? How much valuable knowledge should you share without payment? And just what is your advice really worth?

What you want

Let’s say you’re submitting a proposal to a client. On the face of it, your aim couldn’t be simpler: convert the prospect to a sale. But there are subtler concerns. The negotiation or proposal stage offers a valuable insight into how the working relationship might pan out. What will the client be like to work with? What if they question your advice, or refuse to act on it? How will differences of opinion be dealt with? Working through a proposal now could give you a chance to find out before any commitment is made. That gives you the option of walking away, or (more likely) quietly incorporating some ‘messing around money’ into your price.

Even if they’re not going to buy right now, you want them to remember you fondly and come back later – possibly after trying someone cheaper. And even if they’re never coming back, you should be mindful that people do talk to each other. Not just locally, but globally, through social media and other networks. Deal or no deal, you’re putting your reputation out there every time you pitch.

What you don’t want

So there are lots of reasons to submit a detailed proposal, offer useful advice and answer your prospect’s questions in some detail. But there are just as many reasons to hold back, or at least carefully consider what you want to share.

The first and most obvious reason is that you’re not being paid. The time you spend preparing and discussing your proposal must be either written off as an overhead (effectively, spreading the cost across all your clients) or charged to this particular prospect when they become a client (not explicitly, but as a tacit element of the price). For freelances, this sort of accounting is largely notional, since they rarely tot up every hour and assign it to a cost centre. But it’s still worth considering how much time you’re investing for an uncertain reward. Think of the opportunity cost – the money you could have earned elsewhere with the time you’re spending. Is this prospect actually worth that many hours?

The second reason is that you don’t want to give away valuable knowledge for free. For freelances who are paid for tangible deliverables (text, designs, websites), it can be tough to get clients to recognise the value of advice. The idea that ‘talk is cheap’ is pretty powerful. Indeed, it can be hard to recognise the value of your own consultancy, if you’re stuck in the same materialistic mindset.

Remember: if your free proposal can help someone add value to their business, in any way at all, you’re effectively giving them something for nothing. From this perspective, it’s worth thinking more like a lawyer, who charges for every conversation regardless of its content. That might be an impossible goal for most freelances, but it’s still a worthy principle: the band don’t play for free.

Thirdly, you don’t want to cede negotiating power. You want the prospect to understand what they’re buying, but not gain the ‘little knowledge’ that would allow them to misguidedly pick and choose from the service menu, or attempt to impose an alternative pricing model (for example, hourly rate instead of price-per-service). You also don’t want to give them the confidence to go back to the market for a different provider (say, one from a low-cost economy) – or, again, use the threat of doing so to secure a lower price.

Finally, and most subtly, you don’t want to seem too needy. Giving away the farm at the proposal stage suggests you’re desperate for work, which won’t instil confidence in the prospect. Remember the negotiation adage: ‘she who cares least wins’. So you need to respect yourself and do the right thing by your business – although, obviously, without striking an arrogant tone that will turn the prospect off.

What they want

It’s worth considering the client’s viewpoint too. They want to understand what they’re buying, but they’re probably making a foray into an unfamiliar market where they must buy with incomplete knowledge. They’re not going to splurge on a ‘black box’ solution where money goes in and results come out – most firms will stick with the status quo rather than take that sort of risk. (A notable recent exception is social media – in its infancy, firms were clearly spending on ‘gurus’ with little idea of what would be delivered in return for their fees.)

Most firms also appreciate that experts must have trust in order to deliver, but they don’t want to pay for snake oil. And behind the business rationale lies the deep-seated and very powerful need of human beings not to feel humiliated in front of peers by making a mistake or being taken for a ride.

Setting the boundary

In such a situation, only those in-demand suppliers with stellar reputations can set their personal ‘paywalls’ at the outer limits of their expertise. Like film stars who no longer have to audition, they don’t have to prove their worth. The rest of us need to do our little dance to make it rain.

So somehow, you have to set the boundaries on the advice you’ll give away for free. In theory, this will dictate the point in the conversation at which you will say (or imply), ‘If you want to know more, you must pay’. And it’s clearly worth deciding where this point is before you get talking, so you don’t end up putting the phone down with the sinking feeling that you’ve given away far too much.

General knowledge

One solution is to provide loads of advice, but keep it generic. You could have a ‘one size fits all’ template that you simply adapt for each new client, tweaking the content a little and changing the title page.

This can work, but most firms have already moved this type of content one stage earlier in the sales process by offering it for free in the form of web pages, blogs, white papers or free ebooks. Available to everyone online, it serves a dual purpose: building credibility before the client approach, and building SEO profile. So you might not win many client hearts by serving up this kind of content as a proposal.

Also, it’s not really about what you know, but how it’s applied. You may have testimonials, articles and past clients in abundance, but your prospect is still asking themselves whether you can do it for them.  Will you understand what they do? Will the service benefit their business? Generic content won’t deliver that kind of reassurance.

A better approach is probably to indicate the general themes of the service you’d deliver, without going into great detail on what will be involved. This can still be very valuable to a client who knows nothing, but it should be possible to leave them a lot of work to do if they want to exploit it without you.

Buying with the heart

Another perspective on the proposal dilemma is the emotional mindset of the prospect.

No-one likes buying stuff they know nothing about. And yet most of us buy far more with our hearts than with our heads. At some point in the process of appraising a product or supplier, we’ll decide (perhaps unconsciously) that we’re going to buy. This might happen, for example, when we first step over the threshold of a property, or when we see a pair of shoes on someone else’s feet. Our subsequent ‘research’ or ‘shopping around’ is actually about building up confidence and gathering data to support a decision that’s already been made – or, perhaps, so we can justify it to others. The intellect serves the emotions, not vice versa – and we may never admit how and when the true decision was made.

So you need to be attuned to the point at which your prospect clicks emotionally with your offer. If you feel they have decided to use you, you can force the free consultation phase to a close with confidence. Continued unpaid dialogue adds no value for you and could even risk unselling them. Prospects will carry on listening to free advice even though they’re ready to buy – they won’t want to look stupid or gullible by thrusting cash into your hands for something you’re willing to give away. People need a cue to act, so give them it.

I’d be fascinated to hear your own experiences on this topic, and how you decide where to set the limits on proposals you submit to clients.