 Hey So when I walked up here, I factored in time to get my laptop plugged in and switched on and booted up and everything I didn't factor in time of how long it's going to take to get this mic on So I'm running a bit behind but while my laptop's beating up and I get the slides going This talk is aimed at freelancers, but it's not freelancer specific So if you are a freelancer, I think you can benefit from this if you're thinking about becoming a freelancer I think you can benefit from this But there are some things that you could benefit from even if you work for an agency or you work remotely This is not Specifically freelancer content. I just happen to be a freelancer and I believe you talk about what you know My slightest idle don't panic a developers guide to freelancing The talk is not about not panicking I just like Douglas Adams books and movies So I'm stolen that straight out of Hitchhiker's Guide a little background about myself I've been an open-source developer for about 15 years now. I'm a husband and father of two I'm a business corner co-owner with my wife and a freelance developer at the same time I'm also a wordpress community deputy meet-up organizer and word camp organizer And you can find me online at Jonathan Bosinger comm or Twitter John underscore Bosinger I'd like to start with a little bit of admission I Hate the word freelancer. I hate it and the reason I hate it is because whenever I meet a new client They usually tell me about the previous freelancer who didn't deliver the project on time or correctly or didn't finish the project Or was unreliable or was unresponsive and had to take the money and run attitude Okay, some of you are smiling about that because you get it, right? These slides will be online so you can see them later. There's nothing really special. It's just my notes really And we always have sort of the angry client situation and the client is the problem and the client whenever you talk to these Freelancers that took the money and run it's always the client was this and the clients was a scope creeper And the client was unresponsive and the client didn't give me the information I need I'm gonna make a statement which is my opinion, but might be a bit. Don't worry about it might be a bit controversial I Believe there are no such things as bad clients only bad freelancers who don't manage their clients specific expectations okay, so Let's talk about a timeline of my bad clients. I left agency work at the end of 2015. I started working as a freelancer It's not that's not gonna work because it's a bunch of By July 2016. I was burnt out and ready to give up on this whole freelancing thing Okay, and I actually wrote a blog post on it You can go on to my website and you can Google so you can search on my website Remembering why and it was the day after I had been up working until two in the morning killing myself to get something done Because I had failed not because the clients had failed and that's when I realized that's when I had this epiphany In September 26. I joined a company called codable They're there a European based country a freelancer platform where they bring in clients and you work with those clients They're similar to freelancer and up work and I say similar. They're not the same and the reason they're not the same Is because they teach their what we call experts Not about how to write code not about how to build products because if you're an expert You're reading out how to do those things they teach their experts how to work with clients and Since joining codable in September 2016. I'm kid you not I have doubled My earning potential because I now know how to work with clients better So I realized that the clients were not the problem. I was the problem The three things the three keys to success I learned from codable key number one money key number two quality key number three customer service Now those sound obvious They really do But the problem is when you get into a project what tends to happen is That we forget about those things. We may be focus a bit on the money We maybe start focusing on quality and things go wrong during a project and the reason those things go wrong is because we haven't got a plan So let's talk about the getting paid part first talking about the money This is this is a quote from somebody who I I've strongly believe in his name is Jonathan Boston Joe He said this in 2018. He said the number one reason freelancers burn themselves out is because they don't charge enough Okay, and I believe this is partly a South African thing I think we have a tendency to not charge enough because either we don't understand what we're worth Or we feel like we need to charge less than the other guy to get the project and you don't as far as I'm concerned All of these links are on my website, but they're not I'm not putting them up So you come to my website if you find them somewhere else That's fine, but there's a article on my website Jonathan Boston slash rates where I've got this amazing Spreadsheet from somebody who's also in this sort of freelancing game and organizing how you calculate your billable rates Most of the time when freelancers calculate the billable rate They look at what that sort of average prices of people charging and then they go well I want to get works. I'm going to come in just under that they don't think about their living costs and their laptop costs and their internet costs and how much actual work time They're going to get so that's a good place to start, but It's not a good idea to charge by the hour It's a better idea to charge by the value that you give to that project. So how much work is this really? Okay, yesterday. I was doing a workshop and things went wrong even though I had everything prepped up things went wrong This is 15 years worth of development. This is a truth folks There will be something that either goes wrong or that you don't know or that you didn't expect I can guarantee it. If you tell me you've had a project that's never had that happen It's another person. I'm going to over be a today. Okay Can anybody put up a hand and say there's been a project that's been perfect all the way through nothing happened Nothing unexpected happen. No, it's going to happen. You need to plan for it How complex is the problem that you're solving for the client? Okay, how urgent is this to the client? How important is this to them? That that is more value that you're adding to the situation To give you an example Codeable estimates are calculated based on the total scope to be completed The complexity of the project and the urgency we don't When our clients ask us, what is your hourly rate? I don't give it to them I have my hourly rate and I know how I work it out for the project and my hourly rate is my actual hourly rate plus 30% every single time and if it's a difficult clients and I'll talk about difficult clients in a second If those red warning bells go off I had another 30% Okay, it's hard, but I have to do it because I have to plan ahead There's another there's another estimation thing that you can use it's called pert estimation or three-point estimation If you go on wikipedia.org And search three-point estimation. They talk about that and it's basically You start with the first hourly figure that you came up with in your head that you know This is how long it's going to be Right, that's your base value. Then you go worst-case scenario everything goes wrong What's the worst-case scenario and usually I go three times what my base value was then you go perfect Nothing's gonna go wrong and that's usually about half of my base value You take all of those three and then you calculate an estimate, right? That's one way of doing it from the from the CEO of codable he used to run an agency his way of doing it He takes whatever estimate of time the developers give him And he multiplies it by pie And he said every single time he was closer than the developer Okay, it might not work. It's a bunch of it freaks out with projectors and things So that's money. Let's talk about a commitment to quality Right, it is important that you think about the time that you're gonna need to write and make quality work If you could if you're doing test-driven development, that's gonna take time If you're doing testing that who here estimates for testing time Like I can count those the hands on my one hand If you're not estimating for testing time, you're gonna lose out, okay So you need to make sure that you're including that time in your project Okay, thank you three minutes So basically it boils down to a failure to plan Things like finding your niche don't take projects that are so far out of your scope You're not gonna manage them because that's gonna take even longer and you're losing out Have a project scope work out with a client what their requirements are Get it nailed down so that when they complain and say you didn't do this You can go here's the document. This is the document that I agreed to for this amount of money Okay, I spoke about the pie factor on estimates earlier Sweat the small stuff. How many of you estimate for time to email back and forth? even less That takes time that that cuts into how much time you have to develop Generally when we work out Development time for a project we go this is gonna take me four hours. So we quote for four hours You don't think about the two hours of email back and forth. You're losing that time. Okay Then Test and I don't mean test your work. I mean test your plan of working with clients Measure go back off to every project and see how much time did I work on this project? How much time did I spend communicating with this client? Measure the project process not just the work to get an understanding of the next time you know what to look for Now I'm not knocking on customers Okay, for those of you can't see my screenshot I don't watch the show but I know who King Joffrey is and I've got a nice picture of King Joffrey And it says the customer is the king the customer is still king. I still believe in that right? I do believe in that so it is important to build a rapport with your customer gets to know them a little bit communicate with them Understand what their needs are right? When you start building a rapport what happens is you start seeing some warning bells You start seeing how they work with you what information they give you how far they're willing to go with you So that you can learn to say no if it's the wrong project or the wrong clients Okay, you can either say no or you can increase your estimate because you know They're gonna be difficult line. I had a I had a situation recent recently where I passed up on a hundred and thirty thousand ran project Because the the person that I was dealing with signed off not one but two emails with abbreviation DFU The D stand for don't the you stand for up. I'll let you guess what the F stood for I'm not working with our client. If that's his attitude when we go in I'm not working with our client I walked away. It's not worth it to me Okay, and then finally if you follow automatic, you'll know that they have a saying internally in the company The communication is oxygen for distributed for distributed teams I believe communication is oxygen for freelance and remote work So communicate with your clients as much as you possibly can Now this slide goes back to you and I've got the three Drawn out one key to success I learned from codable that customer service takes time quality takes time time equals money So make sure you are estimating properly for all the time you're gonna spend And then everybody will be happy When you charge according to the project not according so when you charge according to the project not according to your skills Everybody wins. I have never had a client come back to me and say I love your work, but you charge too much I've never had that happen Okay, thank you very much. You can ask me questions later