“Where do you find clients (or how do I start finding my first clients)?”

The majority of my clients come from referrals. Previous clients usually have connections who are in similar fields of work, or are starting new businesses. If their experience with you has been good, they will not hesitate to refer you. This is why establishing a good relationship with my clients has been a big focus in my work.

If you are just starting out and do not have previous clients to work as referrals, start by letting people know you are looking for freelance work. I generally do not like taking close friends/family as clients, but these are the people most willing to vouch for you as a person and a professional if you do not have existing clients. Also focus on contributing to communities where your (target) client base will be. Be present in these communities, actively provide suggestions and feedback, and have your work or information easily accessible if they would like to contact you. Reach out to businesses and entrepreneurs with insightful feedback that will help their business. All of this relies on you to have a strong existing skill set, so if you are not confident with your skills, work on establishing them first!

“How do I compete with offshore workers, like people in India who charge $5~$15/hour?”

This is a very common worry among newcomers. The truth is, depending on where you are, you already have a huge advantage over cheap, offshore labor. Major businesses will want to be able to communicate and work with you during business hours. They don’t want to have to deal with language and cultural barriers that often come up dealing with offshore labor. That’s something that cannot be fixed when it comes to offshore hiring.

Also, you will often hear complaints about the low quality of work delivered from offshore workers. There are many talented people, even in places like India, China, etc, but more often then not, clients do not get anything near the quality they expect. The cost of living may be lower offshore, but often the low hourly rates come with a cost. It may take 20 hours for them to do what you do in 1 hour, which means the client has to spend $100 just to get 1 hour of work done. In addition, the offshore clients may be inexperienced, they may be delivering low quality work, and they may be billing work dishonestly (which could happen anywhere, really). On top of all that, it’s generally expected that when you hire someone offshore, you give them specifications and they do exactly that. Miss any details, or run into any problems, and they will bring in hacky solutions, so they don’t need to ask clients questions over a 12 hour timezone difference.

How do you differentiate yourself from offshore workers and command a higher rate? Easy. Take advantage of the existing differences between yourself and someone offshore. You don’t have a 12 hour timezone difference, you can provide instant feedback and lower turnaround times. But that’s not what will bring in the big money. Focus on why you are being hired. Does this client just want a new website for the sake of having one, or is there a need they are trying to fulfill? Do they really just want a new billing system? Or do they want to save the additional costs they are paying by using a 3rd party solution? Do they want to lower the turnaround time between transactions? Do they want to bring in more customers to their business? Often times, clients will think they want one thing, but if you dig deeper, you will find a bigger need. Explain how you will resolve this need, and what impact your solution will bring to the business. Focus on the value being provided to the client, not how many lines of code you are writing, or how many memory leaks you fixed. Businesses care about reputation and money. Until you can recognize the value you bring to the business, you are an expense. An expense easily mitigated by hiring someone else offshore.

“How much should I charge?”

How much you should charge is dependent on a few factors. What are your costs for doing this work? Is the client expecting you to be available outside of reasonable hours? How much expertise do you have with this work, and would your expertise bring additional value to the client? Similar to my response for the previous question, how much value is your work bringing? If doing this project will bring the client $400k in additional revenue, it’s certainly logical for you to charge a higher rate, especially if the client can’t earn as much hiring someone else. Also keep in mind that you should almost always be charging more as a freelancer than you make at your typical day job. The reason being that as a freelancer, you do not have any benefits; no bonuses, no stock options, no healthcare coverage, no perks, no vacation days, no sick days, nothing. The time it takes for you to go to the washroom is (probably) money wasted. As a freelancer, you market yourself. For free. You discuss projects with potential clients. For free (sometimes). You pay for any books, conferences, training, tools you need to advance your skills. Every aspect that is taken care of for you in a typical day job is now your responsibility. Taking these differences into account, most freelancers will charge between 80% to 150% more than their day job. Some freelancers will charge more when they find out a client is difficult to deal with, or the project is not something they particularly enjoy. Some will raise their rates if they constantly get more projects than they have time for. I do not do this, but hey it’s your business, charge what you like.

“What is the schedule like?”

As a freelancer, you will have a lot more flexibility than any job you could take. This is what attracts many people to do freelance work full-time in the first place. Don’t feel like working today? Sure. Want a 3 month vacation in Australia? Been there, done that. Want to read during the day and do work at 4 in the morning? Why not? You are your own boss (of course, you still need to show your client respect and be a team player if you work with their employees), set your own schedule, do what you want, just stay accountable to your clients and keep them informed. You will hear some freelancers go through “dry spells” where they can go weeks or months without any work. Given the nature of running your own business, this is normal, and there can be many reasons for that. Their rate may be so high and they only serve a certain niche of clients. Maybe they don’t have a lot of clients to begin with. There may not be much demand if what they do is “seasonal”. They may have pissed off all their clients (ouch…?). There might not be any clear reason, maybe they just don’t have any work right now. Being a freelancer, it’s important to recognize that this may happen to you. You might even have a car accident and can’t do any work at all. Anticipate large influxes of work, or none at all; if you’re able to manage that, you will be fine.

“How do you deal with unreasonable or difficult clients?”

I’m sure we’ve all run into difficult people. Since you are not a salaried employee, whether you work with this client is your choice. You should be able to pull out of a project if need be (you do have a contract right?). Maybe they have too many unreasonable demands. Maybe they’re calling you at 4 in the morning (again, contract?). Maybe the scope of the project keeps increasing and you are not being paid to account for that (need I say it again? Scope should be in your contract and if the scope increases, you can talk it over with your client). I generally get some information regarding the client’s expectations, the project, the people working on it, the timeline, and any processes they may have. You should be able to fairly accurately gauge how working with the client is going to turn out before you sign a contract. If I sense that the client has unrealistic expectations and they are unable to discuss the expectations with me civilly, then this is an early warning sign. There are many other warning signs I look for, but in terms of a difficult client, they generally appear in the form of attitude, behavior, and expectations. I will respectfully let them know that I don’t think we are a good fit for each other, and move on. No amount of money should be able to buy your happiness and dignity (hopefully).

“Do I really need a contract?”

I don’t think I am alone when I say you should always have a contract with the client in place. A contract is a nice, legally binding agreement detailing the people involved, the scope of the project, any timelines, payment terms/costs, non-disclosure clauses, termination of work, and how to deal with unexpected issues that arise. Unless you are a student and are making websites for $500, and don’t really care about getting paid, you need a contract (even if you are, you should get one). Don’t just write it up yourself, hire a lawyer (yes, they can be expensive, but not having a contract will cost you much more). A good contract will save you many headaches down the road, including clients refusing to pay, scope creep, intellectual property rights on deliverables, terminating contracts, etc. There’s a good talk by Mike Monteiro, Co-founder of Mule Design called “F*ck you. Pay Me.” about the importance of having a good contract in place.

Hopefully that clears up some common questions about doing freelance work. If you have any questions about freelancing, feel free to reach out to me.

The post Things you should know about freelancing first appeared on Jay Huang.

Recently, I had the opportunity of working in a B- environment and experiencing it first hand. Let’s start this environment off with a self-proclaimed “results-oriented” manager. What this implies is a manager that wants to deliver value to the business, while giving employees freedom over the details (design, implementation, etc). What it really means is “help me accomplish what I said I would so I get a good multiplier on my bonus.” Of course, no one can be blamed for wanting a fat paycheck. Which is why I need to explain, but later.

Let’s also start off each year with a Learning Plan for each employee, where employees recognize the strengths and goals of the team, and develop skills (technical or soft) to further those goals. On paper, this is great, but while everyone can create a Learning Plan, there is no guidance or even support for this plan. The contents of this plan will never be brought up again throughout the year.

Now let’s add some favoritism. Blind favoritism. It is inevitable that there will be people you like and dislike in the workplace, but a manager should make a conscious effort to put aside any personal opinions, and push the team to work as one and accomplish great things. A B- or even C environment would be one where the manager picks his/her favorite employees, essentially allowing them to do what they want (less work, shift the objectives of the team completely, or worse) while never recognizing the efforts and accomplishments of others. Also, if you have interns or co-ops on the team, please, do not treat them as 2nd class citizens. They can be just as capable or even more capable, but you need to start by expecting that of them, and treating them as equals. Many people I know seem to say Google does this very well.

Vision, anyone? One of the biggest responsibilities a manager has is providing the team with a vision. More importantly, helping to shape the team’s personal goals around this vision, and allowing them to see the correlation and impact their work has in regard to the vision. The inability of achieving this, or neglecting this, will certainly help you create that B- environment.

Value to the company/business, not just you. The company pays your paychecks. Most employees would love to see their company succeed, and our work within the company makes that success a reality. If you want 15% of your team to work on upgrading an internal system that is over 2 years in upgrades behind, first recognize what those upgrades provide. I’m not saying we should let everything rot, but if you’re going to upgrade something, and get your employees to spend hundreds of man hours doing it, the reason should not be “because I want to upgrade it.” What value does this upgrade provide to the company, its employees, or its customers? Can we expect productivity increases? Will those upgrades introduce more ease in a critical piece of our workflow? Will it generate more revenue? Why have we not upgraded it for 2 years in the first place? When the only reason your manager can give your team to spend huge amounts of time doing something is “because we should” or “because I want to”, you are definitely not in an A+ environment.

Most importantly, if you want to create a B- environment, don’t respect your employees. Think poorly of them, expect them to work harder for you as a result, and they will come to work all happy and joyous. Even having great co-workers won’t help if your manager insists on creating a B- environment.

The post How a B- environment is created first appeared on Jay Huang.

John already purchased the domain, along with hosting, but other than that, he had a very vague idea of how he was going to execute this idea. After all, he was a student pursuing business, and although he spent lots of time on the internet, John had never grown or developed a website. I worked with many clients who were either establishing, or established, and had a fair amount of experience growing forum communities. There wasn’t really a website dedicated to information and news on Windows 7 at that point, so our partnership began.

We worked together to come up with the design, and I developed the website. We took turns writing articles, and very quickly, decided to go live. Once it had gone live, John was disillusioned. He thought surely with a domain name like windows7center, we would be getting lots of traffic, right? I reassured him this was quite normal, and that our focus should be writing quality content and establishing presence. I went on some forums that I was a regular member of, and let them know of the site’s existence.

Slowly, we got some steady traffic (with the help of some enthusiastic people from other forums).  The question of how the site would pay for itself and generate some “loose change” quickly came up. I decided that we would use Google Adsense like nearly every other news site out there, but also would have to focus on the user experience and not scare people away with ads everywhere.

Having moderated a couple successful forums in the past, I had become attached to the idea of a forum community, and suggested that a forum would help us greatly. It would allow us to more closely interact with our visitors, invite them to discuss new changes, get feedback and suggestions, paint a more accurate picture of our visitor demographic (along with Google Analytics), host contests, and get ideas and content for our future articles. This proved to be a success. My primary focus became to grow the forum community and convert once-in-a-while visitors into avid forum participants.

Revenue passed “lunch money”, and soon we had another problem. John wanted to bank his money and just continue with the site/forum at the current state. I was not satisfied, I believed that the forum still had lots of room for growth, and lots of revenue to be created. After the huge amount of criticism about Windows Vista, and all the blog posts on the internet bashing Windows Vista, I was sure Windows 7 would receive a lot of attention. Our forum members were definitely excited about Windows 7, and most had already been using the Release Candidate. I convinced John that we should hold contests and give out a few free copies of Windows 7 (out of our own pockets of course), and if executed well, it could bring us a lot more attention and ad revenue than we ever had previously.

John was sold. Somewhere between “buying Windows 7”, and “much more traffic and money”, his eyes had lit up. For the first time in a while, I could see he was excited about what we were doing. Within the next couple of months, our traffic and revenue would multiply even more, and we found a few young and talented writers on the forums who wanted to help with writing articles. We had 3 other moderators for the forums who did a great job furthering engagement and ensuring no obscene content or toxic behaviour took place. They were all volunteers passionate about the forums, and I guess in a sense, enjoyed the sense of control and power. Windows7Center became more or less self-sustainable. John and I could leave it alone for a month, and it would still be doing great. I only worked on it because it was something I enjoyed; in no way was it a chore, and I did not tire from committing time to it.

Outlook was positive. Sure, I had thought about what would happen once Windows 8 was announced, and John had purchased the domain for windows8center.com too. We knew that we could easily launch Windows8Center, and have everything ready for our members to move there. It would all go fine, the site that is.

I had run into some personal troubles/difficulties of my own, and no longer had much time to dedicate to Windows7Center/Windows8Center. Seeing my creation thriving had been my goal, and together, we had done it. We had trudged through the early days of seeing single digits in Google Analytics. The early days where people questioned how viable it was. The community had some great writers and moderators, and I was happy to have started this, but sadly, I no longer had time for it. So I decided to leave. I would still visit once in a while, but I would not be the administrator/owner/moderator anymore.

As I had expected, everything went fine. John would take on a more hands-on role, the administrator of the site, Google Adsense, Google Analytics, forum events, everything else I had previously done. It went great, at least that’s how it seemed. Windows7Center/Windows8Center was popular. We became the second largest Windows 7 community on the internet. We ranked around 2000 on Alexa, and served millions of pageviews.

While I had been more quiet about it in my personal life, lots of John’s friends and classmates knew he was a founder. Within 2 months after I left, all 3 moderators that worked with me on the forums were “demoted”. 5 of John’s friends took their place. I did not like where it was going, but I had already handed off everything to John, and promised myself I would simply be an observer. They seemed to manage fine, a few seemed a bit abusive of their new-found superpowers, but overall it didn’t go too bad.

What happened next still makes me shake my head to this day. John decided that the steady growth the site was having was not enough. More revenue was needed, and as he was a business student, he knew best. And so he started cutting costs. The hosting fees were relatively cheap, and necessary, the moderators and writers were voluntary, so what costs were there to cut? Oh yes, the free copies of Windows 7 they gave out. Of course, he suspected that if he gave out less copies it wouldn’t help too much, so he started pointing people to torrent links of cracked copies of Windows 7. Costs? Gone. More revenue? Yes.

Unfortunately for him, many users started complaining and pointing out that it was illegal. So he stopped doing it and bought the copies again. Nope, not a chance. Him and his moderators started banning people who had anything bad to say, posted rude remarks, and happily showed the door to unsatisfied forum members. His way or the highway. Around this time, I deleted my account and never went back. I heard that many users still stayed, the forum was active, but vulgar language and negative comments became the norm. The site slowly died off, and around mid-2012, John pulled the plug.

We never discussed exactly what happened after I left, his reasoning for moving to piracy is mostly my speculation, and we haven’t spoken since then. It’s made me sad to see the site take such a turn, but we all make mistakes, and I’m sure John has learned a valuable lesson. I certainly have.

The post How Windows7Center died first appeared on Jay Huang.