 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rossell here bringing you another video from this very, very varied YouTube channel where, at least judging by the recent output, there's a totally new theme here every day. And today's theme is going to be about something to do with freelancing. The input is for this video. I got an email a few days ago from somebody who'd followed a bunch of my articles over on medium.com. I'll put a link in this video description for anyone interested in following me across platforms. I'm definitely not writing as much as I did previously because I'm really getting into this video stuff. But over the years I have written quite a lot, especially about freelancing. Now this person asked me, do I intend making a course or do I have a course or a book about freelancing? And the answer was no. And the answer is probably going to be for a while. No, because even though I've been doing this freelancing business for seven years at this point, which is a lot of time, I still really feel like I'm learning every, if not every day, at least every month about how to run a freelance business. And I do think there is this kind of dynamic that I've criticized before. So it'll be hypocritical of me to play into that of people who are freelancing for a year or two and putting out these kind of dubious courses that have that kind of just feel of a get rich quick scheme for themselves. And I don't want to be that person. So I'm at the moment to regard myself as sort of in the trenches of the crazy world of freelancing, the roller coaster. And when I when I feel really confident that I've learned, you know, a lot enough to teach people, I will do that. For the moment, I'm just kind of putting what I have learned in dribs and drabs via YouTube, via my blog. So the answer is, if you're interested in my takes on freelancing, especially the type of freelancing that I've done a lot of, which is freelance writing, freelance marketing communications, just continue following me on these platforms. So what I want to talk about today is the differences, the pros and cons between what I regard is this three quintessential type of clients, you're going to have freelancing. Now, again, I do freelancing mark on marketing communications. I started off pretty narrow in just a writing service. My background is in doing mark on a tech companies started out really narrow just in writing and then kind of felt after a couple of years as they need to widen out to do more of the kind of work I used to do in house. So adding a strategy component, et cetera. So that's what I do now. So this what I'm talking about here may not be applicable if you're doing freelance video editing or freelance architecture, freelance graphic design, or basically any of the fields one can freelance in. But if you're also operating in my wheelhouse of freelance writing and marketing, I think this will be applicable. So what I want to talk about is, as you said, the three quintessential type of clients in the pros and cons of working with each. Now, I have these listed out on my website. And this is the classification I'm used to using the classification is as follows. Firstly, there are companies. Secondly, there are agencies. And thirdly, there are individuals. And I'm going to talk about my experience working with each of them, because over the course of my seven years freelancing, I have worked with multiple clients within each of these groups. So firstly, let's talk about working with companies. And if you're doing a providing a freelance service, companies might be the lion's share of your work. Now, a lot of freelancers distinguish themselves on the basis of whether they're a you see an awful if I had a dollar for every time I've seen a freelance writing website that said B2B Tech freelance writer, I would be a very rich person. That's always struck me as kind of a logical because whether company sells B2B or B2C or B2G, it's referring to a sales method, a sales channel. And there are companies who sell, you know, some B2B and some B2C. For me, I have never really been able to understand the logic. And I think a lot of people are just grabbing onto a buzzword. Because for me, the meaningful difference between companies as a freelancer has been firstly, what the company does is fundamental and broadening out a little bit from that we have the company industry. So within technology, there's an awful lot of technology writers out there vying for work. So where I've had success to date has been in specializing in a couple of slightly off the beaten track fields, where I actually have a lot of interest and expertise, a couple of those are backup and disaster recovery. Yes, as talking about backup, that's actually a really big enterprise technology space. And the second is Linux and open source because I've been a Linux user myself for many, many years, more than 10 years. So that's really the distinguishing factor for me. If I'm considering working with a client, is it subject matter that I am familiar with? That's much more important to me than whether it's a company who's selling to other businesses or selling to consumers or doing both or selling to the government. That's a irrelevant detail from my perspective for the most part. It is true that B2B and B2C can have different types of collateral produced, different sales cycle. But again, I put that in the category of less important details. The first one is what the company does. The second factor that's made a big difference in my experience is the size of the company. So you have small companies, medium, medium size companies and large companies. Now every country differs slightly in terms of where it draws a line between a small company and a small and medium enterprise. And a large company, typically the headcount, it varies quite a lot. Let's just leave it at that. And then you have startups that are typically on the smallest side of the spectrum. But you have also larger startups that are really established and generating their own revenue. So again, startup versus non startup to me is more an indicator of working culture than something that really matters to me. I will say, having worked with small companies, medium companies and large companies, my personal preference today has been actually working with medium size companies. The reason for this is as follows. I'm based in Israel. There's a huge amount of startups here. A lot of startups when they are at the very early stages, maybe they've had seed funding. Maybe they have literally no funding. They're being bootstrapped. You'll find a lot of startups. I don't want to say they don't know what they're doing, but they don't have a very strong direction and they can be difficult to work with. I just put it like that. They can also be great to work with, but money and budget can be an issue. And for me personally, after having been doing this for enough time, I'm definitely not on the entry level of the rate scale. So for me, I kind of feel like I grew startups. Now some people really enjoy working with startups and there definitely is that kind of quick turnaround work culture. I think it really matters how you prefer to work personally, especially as time has gone on and my business has grown. I like kind of more regimented organizations. I like companies that are organized that they have, they don't change their mind halfway through the day. Some startups really drive on that kind of more edge of your seat atmosphere. And if that's how you prefer to work, you may have an easier time working with startups. The reason I actually really like working with medium sized companies is I find and again, this is a generalization based on headcount, that they've grown that initial phase of startup chaos, they're established, they have decent funding, they're not looking for stuff on the cheap. And they're big enough that there is scale within that client. I'm always talking about the value for freelancers of internal referrals. I don't know a better word for it. I'm talking about when you have a, when you didn't work for a company, and you can approach your account manager and say, Hey, maybe some other department or maybe your colleagues are looking for my services. I find that a really effective way of growing your business. It's much easier than starting a completely new client, you've already signed an NDA, you already have a contract, you're already on the payroll, the company already knows you, you know the company, you know the company's industry. Personally, as a freelancer, I've always had difficulty working with more than five clients because my head starts spinning at about the five or six client mark. Each company has its own competitive industry. It has its relationship to manage, et cetera. So just to roll back for a second, medium-sized companies, they're a bit bigger than startups. That's been the sweet spot for me, but a lot of people's experience differ. Then you have enterprises. Enterprises, the main advantage of my experience of working with enterprises is the portfolio you build through working with enterprises. You get samples on your portfolio from well-known brands. You can say, hey, yeah, I did this piece for Dell or I did this piece for IBM or I did this piece for HP and it has a kind of gravitas that it's kind of hard to get when you said, oh yeah, I've done this, I did this white paper. It might be a great white paper, but if nobody's ever heard of the startup and a lot of my early clients were pretty obscure startups, that kind of has less calling power. So I think working with enterprises, the pro is that the brand recognition is great. If you can get them to let you use their logo on your website and that's not, by the way, such an easy thing, that can be golden for you. To have that logo up of a well-known brand can show that you're established, can show that major companies are trusting in you. The negative of working with these large companies is that the onboarding process can be painful. In other words, the amount of paperwork they require, sometimes larger companies or government contractors will only work with a freelancer or they won't work with single person freelancers. That's the case where I'm based in Israel, may not be the case where you are in the world. Let's talk about the second category of companies to work for and that is agencies, the pros and cons of agencies. Agencies come in many different types. You have content, marketing agencies, you have generalist marketing agencies, you have PR agencies, you have SEO agencies, you have digital marketing as agencies. There is a gigantic world of agencies out there and agencies very commonly work with freelancers. So what's the advantage of working with an agency versus working directly with a company? So let me give you my thoughts because I've worked with a lot of different marketing agencies over the course of my seven years and freelancing to date is ongoing the journey. The main advantage of working with an agency I found is that if you can get in with an account manager or account managers, in other words, they like you, they're happy with your work, that can be you can tap into a huge pool of work because agencies are doing all the business development work that as a freelancer it can be a real grind to do. I'm talking about calls with prospective clients, etc. When an agency comes to you saying we have a client, this is the work they need, this is our budget and that's something I like about working with agencies is they tend to do that. They tend to say, hey, this is a work. These are our rates. This is how we brief our freelancers. This is our standard contract. Do you like the package? And if you say yes, great. You can get an ongoing stream work. Now, some something I talked about in freelancing or advocated for is never putting too much of your income in one client because you kind of negate the benefits of freelancing if you go ahead and do that. Different people will give you different percentages. Some will say no client should be more than 20% of your income. Others will say no one client should be more than 33% of your income. The truth is there is no rule. So it's not a good idea in my opinion. If you can easily fall into this pattern with an agency whereby they like your work, they think you're good, you scale up that account by working with different people on the account, but ultimately it is just a relationship. It is just a contract. The agency can walk away from you. So I think the same rule applies to agencies as companies. So the benefit of working with an agency and my experience having done a ton of writing work, they tend to be really good at working with freelancers because they do it all the time versus a company, especially a smaller company. It might be their first time ever having hired a freelancer and you might have to push back a lot in the face of unreasonable requests. Like I've dealt with plenty of companies that expect and want their freelancers to join Slack channels and to be available for seemingly unlimited calls. And that's just stuff that as a freelancer. In my opinion, you just can't accept because time is money when you're freelancing and you can't just jump on two hour long calls with the CTO. So that's a problem I've encountered with companies to a much greater extent than when I'm working with agencies. The downside of working with agencies. So I talked earlier about portfolio and the value of logos for brand recognition with agencies that can be extra difficult because they have contracts with their clients. So you have the end client, the agency and you. I typically find it quite hard to get agencies to give me permission. You might have a grace client. Let's say you did work through an agency for let's use IBM as our example again or Telso or some big company. You say, yeah, great, I really want that in my portfolio. In my experience, agencies are very reluctant to give you portfolio permission because they don't want to do your small little freelancer and they don't want to take a gamble on their big contract with the company by letting you put your white paper in your little freelance writing portfolio. So that's something to bear in mind with agencies. So the plus really for agencies in my experience, work volume can be great. You don't have to do that tedious business development work that comes with landing clients. Of course, you still need to land the agency, but that's the relationship and that relationship can bifurcate into four different end clients. So it just kind of streamlines that for you. Another disadvantage I forgot to mention there is that with agencies, they're charging their clients. So typically I price for agencies a little bit less than companies. Now that's controversial. Some people say your prices should be the same across the board. Agencies are going to have to mark up your rate and make a profit. So I typically try to go a bit lower with agencies to give them headroom to make their profit. So that's just my personal practice. May not be yours. Finally, the third category is working with individuals. This isn't this in my opinion is actually the most interesting of the three relationships. I'd also say this, it's the least common. Now my seven years of freelancing, I have no idea how many agencies and companies I've worked for. It's probably at least a dozen in each. It's probably dozens of companies. Probably a dozen agencies. I've worked with lots of them. For people, I've actually only worked with three, maybe four. And those have been my book ghost writing projects. And I'm also now doing a consulting project for a figure in the world of finance. So this makes sense when you think about what kind of a person has the resources to pay out of their own pocket for a freelancer or for a marketing consultant or for a writer. So typically you're looking at high net worth individuals or you're looking at celebrities who've got a book to write or that kind of a clientele. You're not your average person doesn't have a couple of thousand dollars a month just kind of free to spend on someone to manage their communications, nor for that matter, do they have a need to have somebody professionally managing their communication. So this is a much smaller part of the market. And I would say that for a lot of novice freelancers, it's not a part of the market you're going to touch for number of years or potentially ever. The difference differences in working with a individual versus working with a an entity like an agency or a company is with an individual is a much more personal relationship. So every business relationship is personal to some extent. But when you're working for somebody, the chemistry really makes a big difference. Do you actually get along with that person? Are your worldviews accordant? So my advice for anyone thinking of doing freelance marketing work for an individual would be to just make sure, you know, go through the relationship carefully that that typical biz dev process, but you're really trying to see is this someone I'm going to enjoy working with because there's no typically there's no boss between you. It's this is the guy or the lady you're going to be working with. So it's important to get almost them on the plus side, it can be really interesting work. You can have book writing in this area, you can have speech writing, or you can just have general communications management for someone who's of, you know, somewhat high profile. Downside is that there's less of this work is actually and it can be hard to get because in my opinion and take this for one person's opinion, these kind of personal relationships are harder to guess through channels like inbound marketing or outbound marketing, which I don't really recommend. When someone's looking to hire someone to work for them, it's often a sort of recruitment process that happens on the DL through networks and stuff like that. So this may be harder work to access, you may need to network more actively in order to land work of this variety. But if you are interested in working with people, I think it's probably fair to say that it's actually an underexplored part of the market across freelancing domains is doing this kind of work for individuals versus doing it for companies and agencies. What's the best thing to do? In my opinion, if you're new to the world of freelancing, I would try to get experience with all of these areas. If you can, I would try working with companies, I try working with agencies, right to local politicians, if anyone needs a speech writer or general communications person and get a feel try them all out and see who you actually prefer working with. But ultimately, that's just one factor. It also comes down to working style. It also comes down to what the company does. What's the mission? Is it going to be subject matter expertise that you have that you know a lot about? You're going to be able to contribute value. And are you going to be able to charge appropriately? Depending on where your rates are, that factor loan is going to cut out a considerable chunk of the market because especially as you move up the freelancing totem pole, you will just find that you're there's a lot of clients that are just not a fit anymore because your rates are beyond what they're willing to pay for, whatever it is you're doing. And in my experience, not have many, many, many freelancers before me. When you work with higher paying clients, it's actually typically a better working relationship. It's more fulfilling, it's less stressful from the freelancer's end. You're not worried about trying to make everything fit within a small budget. And my advice is to get to that point as soon as you can. Hope this video has been useful. If you are new to the world of freelancing, starting a freelance business, already freelancing, scaling at whatever stage of the journey you're at. And I'll put a link in the description to my medium channel if you want to read more of my thoughts on all the interesting facets of the tumultuous, but interesting journey that is freelancing. Thanks for watching. If you want to get more videos from me, subscribe to this channel here. Until the next time.