A couple of months ago I decided I’d take a stab at this freelance consulting thing all my techie and communications friends have been raving about for the past decade. The conditions were right – my full-time employment seems to be falling apart, I’d just won a major award from SoftwareVendor who provides services to a huge slice of the progressive non-profit community, and the idea of flexibility seemed attractive enough to offset the uncertainty of the income stream.<\/p>\n
So with some help from the folks at the vendor’s shop<\/acronym>, I started circulating my name as an “outside partner” and I redid my professional web site to better showcase my achievements and make me seem, well, sane and hirable. And I started thinking about rates.<\/p>\n Given that I have more than a decade’s worth of experience in my field, having dealt with other vendors<\/acronym> looking to work in the same realm, and knowing what SoftwareVendor’s shop charges<\/acronym> for custom work on their platform, I settled on $90 per hour as a base rate with the idea that I would be prepared to offer discounts in certain circumstances.<\/p>\n One of those circumstances is not when you’ve sat on a proposal for nearly a month, call me up, and ask me to cut my rate while simultaneously asking me to do your work in less than two weeks. Here’s how the timeline of our relationship looks:<\/p>\n October 6: When I don’t hear back for a day or so I call and leave her a voice mail message explaining that I’m working with a new e-mail client, which I was, and wanted to make sure she’d gotten my reply. She replies the same day that things are busy and she’ll get back to me shortly.<\/p>\n October 11: October 12: October 14: I send them a two page proposal with an estimate for the maximum number of hours I think the project will take, an hourly rate quote that lets them know that if they choose hourly they only pay for the hours they use, and a project based quote that at the maximum number of hours estimated for the project represents a 10% discount<\/acronym> on my hourly rate. I also send them, as they ask, a rate card for retainer hours separate from this project.<\/p>\n October 19: October 22: October 25: So by now I’m down 90 minutes plus the time it took me to prep the proposal.<\/p>\n November 10th I get an e-mail from ExecutiveDirector asking me to call him because he doesn’t have my phone number<\/acronym>.<\/p>\n During the 30 minutes I spent on the phone with him<\/acronym> he proceeded to tell me that the Project Manager I’d been working with was leaving the organization for health reasons.<\/p>\n He also assured me that he recognized that I was fully worth the $90 per hour but finances had been incredibly bad for his organization in the past year, in fact they’d actually been unable to replace people who had left because they couldn’t guarantee the people they wanted to hire full-time salary, and would I be willing to cut my rate a little? He also holds out the promise of more business in the future. When I say I’ll take another look at the project and my rates and ask him what his budget is he keeps hammering the “we don’t have any money” key and even says “but we pay our bills.”<\/p>\n So, basically, they want me to do the work but they don’t want to pay for it and he pulled out both the non-profit sympathy card and the more business card and played them both.<\/p>\n Bearing in mind here that we’re talking about a project that would if I keep them within scope, take a maximum of 5 hours. That’s $450 if they pay hourly or $400 for the project rate.<\/p>\n
\nI get a blind e-mail contact from ProjectManager with no indication of where they got my name telling me about their new site in SoftwareVendor’s online community<\/acronym>, letting me know that they want to “use your service to get up to speed quickly,” and asking about my rates. I replied the same day indicating that I’d be happy to chat with her about the scope of work to determine what the best arrangement for them would be, hourly, by project contract, or a block of support hours.<\/p>\n
\nI get another e-mail late in the day with a draft Word document outlining what they want. I reply October 12 early in the morning letting her know I’ve looked it over, am checking on the feasibility of doing it how they are specifying, what my hourly rate is and that we’d need to get a contract signed and a deposit in before I can start work, and indicating my willingness to have a call with them to discuss the project as they’ve requested.<\/p>\n
\nAfter back and forth because she never got my reply<\/acronym>, she requests that I send a contract. I reply the same day letting her know that I need a better idea of the scope of work, deliverables, and timeline before we can write a contract, and when would she like to schedule that conference call? We schedule the call for October 14 for 45 minutes.<\/p>\n
\nIt’s a good call. I give them an answer about the best way to do what they’re asking, which is not the way they’ve suggested, that will position them better in the future to segment the supporter data they’ll be collecting and will also set them up to communicate strategically to get people who signed up for low-level involvement engaged at higher levels.<\/p>\n
\nI haven’t heard from them so I shoot ProjectManager and e-mail. She replies the same day that she’s trying to get ExecutiveDirector’s attention and will be talking with him that Friday.<\/p>\n
\nI get an e-mail request for a conference call the following Monday. It comes in at 4:12 p.m. Eastern (these people are on Central time<\/acronym>). I reply Saturday morning, because that’s when I see the e-mail, that Monday would be fine.<\/p>\n
\nI have a conference call with ProjectManger, ExecutiveDirector, and their ContractWebmaster to discuss everything I’ve already told ProjectManager, explain again why how they want to do it isn’t feasible<\/acronym>, and answer some strategic communications questions for free. The call takes 45 minutes.<\/p>\n