 Hi, so today I'm doing a video on the ideal number of clients. As you can imagine, there is no ideal number of clients, real, specific, optimal number of clients. End of the video. That's it. I'm going to give a better answer. And then later I'm going to explain what I actually, it's my personal recommendation, but what I recommend doing and how to get there. It'll depend on you, it'll depend on your clients, it'll depend on the time available, how much money you want to earn, how much time you want to dedicate to working and, you know, to other things like family or friends or whatever. If you have a great client who you work extremely well with and pays you well, pays you on time, it's a pleasure to work with them and everything's going smoothly just working for that one client and you're able to earn a living and be happy with that, then you might think, okay, there's no reason to get, you know, any other client that might as well keep working for this client. There are a couple of issues with that. First of all, you're, you basically become an employee for that client, right? Obviously you can still do it working from home and kind of on your own time. So it's not exactly an employee. So it's better. On the other hand, hey, the client's going to figure it out at some point. So suddenly you'll start getting say rush jobs or, you know, they'll start pushing you more for this, that and the other. And you kind of feel obligated to do it because you don't want to lose your only client or, you know, the client, you know, they might either go out of business or maybe not need your services anymore, find someone else. They prefer for your services, anything along those lines. A bunch of stuff could happen. And so if they drop you, then suddenly you lost a hundred percent of your income and you have zero clients. That's why you don't want just one client. That's why you don't want too few clients because you could say, well, I have two clients, but then if, you know, for some reason or another, you have to drop one client or they have to drop you. That's 50% of your income, right? This is something you should always keep in mind. Would you be fine losing 50% of your income or 30% or 25 or whatever it might be. At a certain point, you'll feel more comfortable. Like say 25%, you'd be like, look, worst case scenario, if I lose 25% of my income, I'll still do fine on 75% and, you know, it'll give me a few months to find another client that I prefer or something along those lines. So what do I recommend doing? Again, this is what I personally recommend. And it sort of follows what I did with a lot of fits and starts. As I, as I mentioned, I made a lot of mistakes when I first started out. Which is why I'm making these videos and why I created my course and my book and everything so that other people don't have to make the same stupid mistakes. But eventually I got there and this is what I did. And this is what I recommend doing as well is to, when you first start out, go for as many clients as you can. Remember, you don't have to be picky about your clients because you're not going to be their employee. Anytime you pick a new client, you're not stuck there for life. You're not going there day in, day out and working for them. In fact, most clients you get, it'll be a one time job and that's it. So at the beginning, go for all the clients you can. Seriously, the worst case scenario is that you get one client to, it's a pain to work with, it's a bother, or you have to chase their payments. But at least then, you know, it's basically a very cheap lesson and saying, okay, I'm never working with that client. Again, that's it. But at the beginning, go for anyone you can. You really shouldn't be picky. And again, this isn't like your normal job search. Too many people treat this because that's all they know. They only know the normal job search that you do after college or whatever, where you're looking for new employment and you have to be, there you have to be very picky because they're going to be spending all your time with this new employer. You don't have to be that picky for this. Go out, see what sticks and try everyone and everything. I would say to keep doing that though, keep shooting for every client you can find and keep going for it until you find yourself swamped. The moment you find yourself swamped too busy, you can't take on new jobs because you have old jobs and, you know, you have too much going on. That's when you can decide what to do. My suggestion is to conduct an 80, 20 analysis. I've, I've made a different video talking about 80, 20 analyses, um, in case you haven't heard about them. You can also just look at the clients you have and decide on which ones are best and which ones you could drop. I would really recommend the 80, 20 analysis because it works fabulously for this stuff, but in essence, try to whittle it down. Find out which clients are a pleasure to work with. Make you earn the most money are not a pain. Don't give you a whole bunch of crap and, you know, you can get regular work from, keep these and drop the other ones. It doesn't have to be anything drastic. What happens is, you know, the next two, three times that they won't work for you, that they won't work from you. Then you just tell them, sorry, I, uh, you know, I'm too busy. I can't do it. I have other stuff going on. After you say that three times in a row, say, or something like that, they'll kind of get the idea and they'll move on and find someone else. If since you're a freelancer, you don't need to worry about, uh, about reaching a contract or about, uh, or about giving notice or about having to, yeah, tell people that you quit or anything along those lines. You just, I mean, you should reply to your email. I would say, I mean, don't like not reply to email, but just say, sorry, I'm busy. Can't do it. That's it. Boom. Just concentrate on the clients that are good for you. And then you whittle it down to a pace that you're comfortable with. See what works best for you. Once again, it depends because a lot of people want to keep working and earn more money and accumulate now for later. Other people want to spend more time with their family. Other people would rather spend a half, if you can spend a half day working and be comfortable with what you get from that half day, by all means, and spend the rest of the half day surfing or hiking or reading or whatever you like doing, spending time with family, friends, anything along those lines. That's the beauty of freelance translation is that it isn't, it isn't one size fits all. I mean, everyone can just figure out what they prefer. But anyway, that's the method that I recommend. I would say start trying to get every single client you can because you really have no idea what's going to work and what won't at the beginning. And then once you have too much to handle, then you can start whittling it down and trying to come up with an optimal number, the optimal mix and optimal clients. I hope that helps and let me know if it does or let me know if you have a different system or if you think a different system will work better. I'd love to hear about it. Otherwise, if you want more tips and tricks like this about freelancing or about freelance translation, then subscribe and you'll get more of these. You'll get more of these videos. Don't forget to click like as well because that always helps. And I read every comment and I try to reply to every comment as well. Anyway, thanks. I'll catch you on the next video. Bye. Same Doom. And so if, so I will, so that's fine.