A freelance career means saying YES to as many clients as you can get, especially until you make a regular client base for yourself. But after a while, you learn the hard way that it is time to say stop to time (which equals money) wasting proposals. Check out these following situations:
1. Never work for friends and family, there is a 99% chance for chaos to happen, a disaster sprinkled with crocodile tears. This is probably the most difficult “No” you have to say, but be gentle and recommend someone else instead.
2. Don’t accept underpaid offers, not even if you think you have some free time and you might as well do the job for less money rather than doing nothing. You might think you have nothing better to do and all of the sudden something better will appear.
3. Say no to jobs that don’t match your experience and skills and you will save yourself and the potential client some valuable time. If you want to learn something from scratch, make sure it’s worth the trouble and that you will succeed in doing it in the future as well. After all, experience means the optimization of work and overcoming the learning process of a beginner.
4. Say no to overnight/too close deadline jobs - Your job is to deliver a quality design in a certain amount of time. The client’s job is to respect their own schedule and everybody else’s too, by making a timeline that includes a generous slot reserved for the creative process of their projects. The fact that the job must be done overnight is their problem, don’t let them try to make it yours.
5. Never work for shady clients when your instinct is yelling NO. Seriously, go ahead and trust your instincts. Check out the client’s background whenever possible. Look at their email address carefully. The language they are using in the emails is also a powerful indicator. Sometimes you might get requests to do unethical or illegal things.
6. Never work with bad-paying customers again. In fact, why would you? A collaboration relationship is based on respecting terms at both sides of the deal.
7. Say no to clients that don’t have a clear brief or idea of what they want. This can’t end well. After seeing your proposals based on what you think they want, they will come up with endless out of the blue re-do requests. They might not know what they want very well, but they are experts on what they don’t want and that is your work.
8. Don’t allow your work to be taken for free. Charity is a noble thing to do, but I never heard anyone paying their bills with it. There is a line between pro bono art and unpaid work. I never heard of a dentist saying yes to all the non-profit work proposals he gets. Sometimes people ask for free designs that are not even for charity, but for their money-making businesses. Even worse, some won’t even credit you for the free work, claiming all the effort and, therefore, glory as their own.
9. Say no to a profit-share proposal. As a freelancer, you need a regular cash flow. Most of the times you can’t afford to wait and see if a project will be profitable, so you have to say you work for a fee from the start. It’s not your project, why take a risk as if it was?
10. Decline barters if you are a pay-in-cash kind of freelancer. In fact, if the barter would bring you such enormous benefits, that means the client could pay your services with money.
Have you been in one of these situations? Let us know what your opinion on the subject is!
