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Freelancer here, 58 years old with almost 40 years experience, 10 as a freelancer/consultant. To succeed as a freelancer or consultant you have to build a repu
by gregjor 7y ago
Freelancer here, 58 years old with almost 40 years experience, 10 as a freelancer/consultant.
To succeed as a freelancer or consultant you have to build a reputation for delivering results and a network of contacts. You don’t want to apply for jobs or go through interviews. You want clients to find you and not ask anyone else to bid on jobs.
I don’t think what you call yourself matters. In the software business titles don’t mean much.
Customers outsource because they need specialized skills. Many small and medium-sized companies don’t have full-time staff, or can’t attract and keep people, so what qualifies as “specialized skills” can vary. One of my most lucrative clients pays me top rate to manage Wordpress sites.
Base your price/rate on business value, not on what other people charge. Business problems have costs, risks, and time value, base your fees on those. Delivering results right away without hassling clients with lots of questions and irrelevant details has significant value to your clients. The more you understand their business and can fix things without supervision the more value you offer.
My customers pay for solutions so they expect me to solve business problems, not just write code. That means I do some project management and sometimes people management.
My age does not come up, I don’t think any client has asked. I work remotely, that helps.
- oldfreelancer 7y agoA few years ago, I took up three on-site freelancer opportunities with different clients I met via LinkedIn. All of them initially agreed to not giving people/project management tasks because I told them upfront that I was neither good at them nor enjoyed them. Unfortunately, all three ended up with such tasks creeping in mid-project. Put me in a difficult spot of having to do fairly stressful unwanted work which I was not good at in addition to my actual technical work. This time, I think I'll try teaming up with a management specialist and approach clients as a consulting team. Working remotely is something I hadn't considered deeply, but will explore now. Do you have any tips on how to go about building a network of contacts as an older engineer? The typical tech meetups in my area seem to attract only employed engineers and very few decision makers. Thank you very much for your very useful and encouraging advice.
- gregjor 7y agoI built a network of professional contacts by working for 40 years and keeping in touch with people. Some of them still write code, some have gone into management or founder roles, some moved on to other things. I would not tell a client I can’t or won’t do something (within legal and ethical boundaries, anyway). I would tell them that’s not my strongest skill and then help them find someone for the task, or reframe the problem. For example I don’t do design/graphics work or CSS on web sites, but I can outsource that and make sure my client gets what they want. I want my clients to think of me as someone who can solve their business problems, not as a PHP or Rails or AWS expert. Just today a client asked me to look at a Hubspot workflow. I know next to nothing about Hubspot, but with my experience I can catch on a lot faster than a marketing agency guy can and understand the logic and see the problems in their workflow. They don’t always need an expert, just someone with more expertise than they have (which may approach zero), or another set of eyes. When clients ask me to get involved in project management or bringing someone into the team I might suggest a different approach to development, or letting me outsource to someone I can work with. When clients try to throw their solution at you try to step back and figure out the problem they intend to solve, then you can offer alternatives.