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Question from a per-hour freelancer: Does this mean you only work on one project at a time? I seem to maximize my billable time by doing one project at 20 hour

Question from a per-hour freelancer: Does this mean you only work on one project at a time? I seem to maximize my billable time by doing one project at 20 hours/week plus a few long-term relationships with smaller ad hoc projects. Sometimes the "big" projects overlap briefly but I try to avoid that. If I moved to weekly billing, I'm afraid I'd need a longer sales process and I'd have to turn down a lot of work that I can slip in with my current approach. So I'm curious: do you work one engagement at a time, and what is your time between engagements?

alinajaf 12y ago
I'm usually working with one client at a time, but as you surmised spend considerable effort keeping the sales pipeline bubbling. Haven't had any time without work for the past couple of years unless I wanted it.* I should probably point out that "maximising my billable time" isn't really an important goal for me as a freelancer, so we're likely talking about a different business model. You'll hear this a lot from patio11 and tptacek, but overwhelmingly, my goal is to provide as much business value to my clients as possible and charge accordingly. You don't necessarily have to position yourself as a content marketing/CRO/Security/Sandwich-making consultant to do this, just find a way to make or save your clients buckets of cash and you can charge them whatever you want. *: That makes me sound like some sort of rockstar freelancer, but in reality I'm a boringly average Rails developer. I get and keep clients by working really hard on sales and treating existing, long-term clients like my family's financial security depends on them (hint: it does!).
tptacek 12y ago
You can bill daily and still rotate through work for 3 different clients at a time. You don't even need to make special arrangements to do it. Just do it in the background, get your work done competently for all your clients, and be honest. You'll be fine. The only thing we're telling you not to do is to break your bills out by the hour. A whole lot of bad stuff happens when you start billing in sub-day increments.
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- danenania 12y ago
  How do you deal with the expectation that 1 day means 8 hours exactly and clients who think in those terms? How precisely do you specify upfront what a 'day' means? Are you just keeping it vague and not working with anyone who takes issue with that? Or are you specifying it as 6 hours so you have time to handle other things? I recently attempted a move to daily billing but had a client who was anal about 1 day = 8 hours and this caused significant friction/lack of flexibility. The client was a somewhat difficult/overly-controlling person but willing to pay well for quality. Would you simply turn down someone like this?
  - sarciszewski 12y ago
    "How do you deal with the expectation that 1 day means 8 hours exactly and clients who think in those terms?" I suppose this only matters if the clients vocalize this assumption?
  - tptacek 12y ago
    I think a bit of intuition you might need here is that the delivery date for a project and its fee structure are not the same thing. You carefully negotiate delivery dates. You do not carefully negotiate the definition of a day. You will find, when you do this, that most reasonable delivery dates are just fine with most clients, even if they account for more weekdays than you're billing for. I think that with all sane clients, you will also find that once the delivery date is negotiated to both sides satisfaction, nobody gives a shit about what happens in the intervening days. Good clients are happy to know that they're going to get something on a specific date. They are thrilled to have a black box that they can put money into and get value out of. Don't open up the black box and explain it. They don't need to know how the fuel injectors work, and if you explain electronic fuel injection to them, some of them will just get neurotic about whether it's functioning correctly.

alinajaf 12y ago

I'm usually working with one client at a time, but as you surmised spend considerable effort keeping the sales pipeline bubbling. Haven't had any time without work for the past couple of years unless I wanted it.* I should probably point out that "maximising my billable time" isn't really an important goal for me as a freelancer, so we're likely talking about a different business model. You'll hear this a lot from patio11 and tptacek, but overwhelmingly, my goal is to provide as much business value to my clients as possible and charge accordingly. You don't necessarily have to position yourself as a content marketing/CRO/Security/Sandwich-making consultant to do this, just find a way to make or save your clients buckets of cash and you can charge them whatever you want. *: That makes me sound like some sort of rockstar freelancer, but in reality I'm a boringly average Rails developer. I get and keep clients by working really hard on sales and treating existing, long-term clients like my family's financial security depends on them (hint: it does!).

tptacek 12y ago

You can bill daily and still rotate through work for 3 different clients at a time. You don't even need to make special arrangements to do it. Just do it in the background, get your work done competently for all your clients, and be honest. You'll be fine. The only thing we're telling you not to do is to break your bills out by the hour. A whole lot of bad stuff happens when you start billing in sub-day increments.

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danenania 12y ago
How do you deal with the expectation that 1 day means 8 hours exactly and clients who think in those terms? How precisely do you specify upfront what a 'day' means? Are you just keeping it vague and not working with anyone who takes issue with that? Or are you specifying it as 6 hours so you have time to handle other things? I recently attempted a move to daily billing but had a client who was anal about 1 day = 8 hours and this caused significant friction/lack of flexibility. The client was a somewhat difficult/overly-controlling person but willing to pay well for quality. Would you simply turn down someone like this?
- sarciszewski 12y ago
  "How do you deal with the expectation that 1 day means 8 hours exactly and clients who think in those terms?" I suppose this only matters if the clients vocalize this assumption?
- tptacek 12y ago
  I think a bit of intuition you might need here is that the delivery date for a project and its fee structure are not the same thing. You carefully negotiate delivery dates. You do not carefully negotiate the definition of a day. You will find, when you do this, that most reasonable delivery dates are just fine with most clients, even if they account for more weekdays than you're billing for. I think that with all sane clients, you will also find that once the delivery date is negotiated to both sides satisfaction, nobody gives a shit about what happens in the intervening days. Good clients are happy to know that they're going to get something on a specific date. They are thrilled to have a black box that they can put money into and get value out of. Don't open up the black box and explain it. They don't need to know how the fuel injectors work, and if you explain electronic fuel injection to them, some of them will just get neurotic about whether it's functioning correctly.