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The author hasn't accounted for the unpaid time freelancers have to spend looking for work. Clients don't just fall from the sky. You should be budgeting 15% of

The author hasn't accounted for the unpaid time freelancers have to spend looking for work. Clients don't just fall from the sky. You should be budgeting 15% of your time at least to just looking for the next job, meeting with potential clients, doing marketing things like social media, blogging, going to events etc. At the start, before you have a bank of regular clients, that can account for anything up to 100% of your time (if you don't have any work in). The reality is that you need to be making $140k at $70/hour to earn $100k, but you also have to invest about another day's worth of unpaid hours every week to maintain that income.

coderdd 5y ago
Jerry Weinberg asserted that you need 5x the hourly rate as a consultant, due to overhead, to get even. I really recommend Secrets of Consulting. I was vary since it sounds a BS title, but excellent book.
- playing_colours 5y ago
  It is a great book. Unfortunately, here in Germany it is hard to apply due to generic lack of demand in high level software consulting.
  - em-bee 5y ago
    do you have any idea why that is the case? is this culture? do germans simply not hire consultants? or is it more a problem with employment law because a consultant working fulltime is legally forced to become an employee, and companies don't want part time consultants?
roofwellhams 5y ago
If you are familiar with contracting in the UK, you know that a 30 minutes interview gives a job and you never have free time in between contracts... Unless you need a break
hobofan 5y ago
Really depends on your setup. When I was freelancing I had 2-3 contacts that did freelance marketing/product management gigs that I liked working with. Whenever I needed a new client I hit them up and asked if they needed a dev for one of their current projects, which basically always worked. Since I had a good honest relationship with them they would also tell me beforehand how much/little of a nightmare the client would be, which protected me from a lot of bad scenarios that other freelances seem to encounter. For a typical 3-6 month full-time gig the overhead comes to around ~5 hours, which is less than 1%. Overall a great symbiosis between freelancers, that I would recommend to anyone that is looking for non-consulting freelance work as a developer.
- blagie 5y ago
  I did this thing early in my career. I had two scenarios: - No work - Too much work And very little in between.... "No work" requires a ton of time to generate leads, network, etc. You're asking people to hire an unknown. "Too much work" happens once the pump was primed. People found I did good work, and started hiring / referring me to do a lot more stuff. The trick was to not unprime the pump. That was actually tough to manage, since e.g. clients would want me for 40 hours per week for a multiyear commitment (essentially employment), at which point, I'd get off of other people's radars. If you turn down too much work, people stop asking. I think I'd manage this a lot better late career, but on the whole, I found employment to work better for me, at least with a good employer.
  - hobofan 5y ago
    > since e.g. clients would want me for 40 hours per week for a multiyear commitment I didn't have multiyear/long-term commitment offers often, as in Germany companies are very weary of doing "false self-employment", which comes with hefty fines and hiring a full time freelancer that doesn't have other clients for a year+ is basically the definition of that. Basically every client I've had, wanted to have me for 40 hours/week, but just like with employment contracts, there is always room for negotiation. I usually had 2 clients at the same time with optimally 16 hours (= 2 days) each, leaving me with a 4 day work week, but I sometimes budged and gave one of my clients an additional day. If you tell a potential client "I've already given a commitment of 3 days/week to my other client", they normally recognize that there isn't too much wiggle room and from what I can tell generally take it as a sign of professionality that you honor your commitments and can expect the same from you if they are also your client. The individual gigs were usually 3-6 months and offset with their starting time, so that if one of the 2 gigs runs out, I still have the other one. Once there were 1-2 months remaining on one of the gigs, I hit up my contacts and arranged a new client as a follow-up. That way you have a semi-regular turnover which reduces the pump primed/unprimed problem to some degree. Since I arranged 90% of my jobs through those few freelance contacts I rarely ran into that problem anyway, as the general (unspoken) arrangement with them was that I'm busy by default and they would only ask me if a potential project was really interesting and if I'm looking for a project I'd ping them. > I think I'd manage this a lot better late career, but on the whole, I found employment to work better for me, at least with a good employer. The main reason I started freelancing was because from everything I can tell most employers are not good employers, and if they are good employers it's usually a temporary situation that rarely lasts for more than a few years. Most jobs include working on relatively boring products in relatively bad engineering process setups, which is so unfulfilling that I'd at least want to get a good pay/a lot of free time out of it, which always seemed most attainable via freelancing. Having said that I'm not strictly against employment, and if an interesting employment opportunity with a interesting product and great team comes my way I'm open for it. In fact, I've just started employment again last month, and so far I'm pretty happy with it :)

coderdd 5y ago

Jerry Weinberg asserted that you need 5x the hourly rate as a consultant, due to overhead, to get even. I really recommend Secrets of Consulting. I was vary since it sounds a BS title, but excellent book.

playing_colours 5y ago
It is a great book. Unfortunately, here in Germany it is hard to apply due to generic lack of demand in high level software consulting.
- em-bee 5y ago
  do you have any idea why that is the case? is this culture? do germans simply not hire consultants? or is it more a problem with employment law because a consultant working fulltime is legally forced to become an employee, and companies don't want part time consultants?

roofwellhams 5y ago

If you are familiar with contracting in the UK, you know that a 30 minutes interview gives a job and you never have free time in between contracts... Unless you need a break

hobofan 5y ago

Really depends on your setup. When I was freelancing I had 2-3 contacts that did freelance marketing/product management gigs that I liked working with. Whenever I needed a new client I hit them up and asked if they needed a dev for one of their current projects, which basically always worked. Since I had a good honest relationship with them they would also tell me beforehand how much/little of a nightmare the client would be, which protected me from a lot of bad scenarios that other freelances seem to encounter. For a typical 3-6 month full-time gig the overhead comes to around ~5 hours, which is less than 1%. Overall a great symbiosis between freelancers, that I would recommend to anyone that is looking for non-consulting freelance work as a developer.

blagie 5y ago
I did this thing early in my career. I had two scenarios: - No work - Too much work And very little in between.... "No work" requires a ton of time to generate leads, network, etc. You're asking people to hire an unknown. "Too much work" happens once the pump was primed. People found I did good work, and started hiring / referring me to do a lot more stuff. The trick was to not unprime the pump. That was actually tough to manage, since e.g. clients would want me for 40 hours per week for a multiyear commitment (essentially employment), at which point, I'd get off of other people's radars. If you turn down too much work, people stop asking. I think I'd manage this a lot better late career, but on the whole, I found employment to work better for me, at least with a good employer.
- hobofan 5y ago
  > since e.g. clients would want me for 40 hours per week for a multiyear commitment I didn't have multiyear/long-term commitment offers often, as in Germany companies are very weary of doing "false self-employment", which comes with hefty fines and hiring a full time freelancer that doesn't have other clients for a year+ is basically the definition of that. Basically every client I've had, wanted to have me for 40 hours/week, but just like with employment contracts, there is always room for negotiation. I usually had 2 clients at the same time with optimally 16 hours (= 2 days) each, leaving me with a 4 day work week, but I sometimes budged and gave one of my clients an additional day. If you tell a potential client "I've already given a commitment of 3 days/week to my other client", they normally recognize that there isn't too much wiggle room and from what I can tell generally take it as a sign of professionality that you honor your commitments and can expect the same from you if they are also your client. The individual gigs were usually 3-6 months and offset with their starting time, so that if one of the 2 gigs runs out, I still have the other one. Once there were 1-2 months remaining on one of the gigs, I hit up my contacts and arranged a new client as a follow-up. That way you have a semi-regular turnover which reduces the pump primed/unprimed problem to some degree. Since I arranged 90% of my jobs through those few freelance contacts I rarely ran into that problem anyway, as the general (unspoken) arrangement with them was that I'm busy by default and they would only ask me if a potential project was really interesting and if I'm looking for a project I'd ping them. > I think I'd manage this a lot better late career, but on the whole, I found employment to work better for me, at least with a good employer. The main reason I started freelancing was because from everything I can tell most employers are not good employers, and if they are good employers it's usually a temporary situation that rarely lasts for more than a few years. Most jobs include working on relatively boring products in relatively bad engineering process setups, which is so unfulfilling that I'd at least want to get a good pay/a lot of free time out of it, which always seemed most attainable via freelancing. Having said that I'm not strictly against employment, and if an interesting employment opportunity with a interesting product and great team comes my way I'm open for it. In fact, I've just started employment again last month, and so far I'm pretty happy with it :)