 Ah, hello. Welcome to my talk. In terms of about freelaniting, I've been doing it for seven years. Let's talk very, this is on. Okay. Ah, there we go. Okay. About me, I'm a software developer. I've travelled around all freelaniting. I've always been into computers. I've always been a nerd. I first wrote my first program in basic in 1998. Sure, let's do that one. Okay. Okay. I built my first website in 2002. University from 2004 started getting paid for work in 2006. And 2011 I left my traditional job when overseas and started freelancing. I kept that going, turned into a company in 2015 and I'm still enjoying it. Why are the buttons never working? That would probably be it. I'm just going to press the space bar. This was my first office. It was a 1980 camper van that I bought in Germany. We drove around and found any old campground which had Wi-Fi. We plugged the van in. I worked on a laptop. And that's how I started freelancing, proper digital nomad. This is my current office. It's a little bit upgraded. I would have fit more screens on there if I had the desk space. But this is how I like to work. I really dislike laptops and I can keep everything going. And yeah, I run my business to a level that can support this many screens. So let's talk about freelancing. Who here has freelanced? Who here is looking to freelance soon? And who here has hired freelancers, either subcontractors? Okay. So hopefully everyone will get a little bit out of this talk. Truth number one, freelancers are cheaper than employees. Employees cost two to three times their salary. Most people don't realize this. A lot of business owners don't realize this. But there are overhead costs to employees. There are desks. There's computers. There's software subscriptions. There's extra accounting costs. As Ben was just saying, there are more costs to an employee than just their base salary. They'll keep costing you money when they're not working. If work dries up and you've got three developers sitting around doing nothing, they're still costing you money, even if they're not earning you any money. And they also aren't feasible if you only need a 5, 10, 20 minute job or even a three or four week job. It's not reasonable to hire an employee just to cover that small amount of work. Freelancers, we have a cost. You can see what our cost is. It's on our rate sheet. It's on our quotes that we hand you. That's what we cost. When you're done with this, we stop costing you money. We're available for small jobs. We're available on demand. Even if you have employees, maybe you're going through a busy time and you need someone else who can add a bit more capacity to you. Maybe you've got a skill that you need which you can't cover internally. That's what freelancers are here for. Businesses use freelancers to add capacity to your business. Consider the costs of hiring. Freelancers will almost always be cheaper unless you are hiring them for, say, a year at a time. And even then for larger companies, a contractor may be cheaper than a full-time employee. Remember they're adding value to your business. Don't look at the high rates and go, ah, I don't think that's worth it. If you're paying $90 an hour for a freelancer, but they're bringing in $3, $4, $500 worth of profit to you that's ongoing once they've stopped, that's definitely worth it. For freelancers, your starting weight, look at your current employed rate, current employed rate, figure out what you're getting paid hourly, times it by two to three times, and that's a good starting point for figuring out your freelance rate. Remember you can't bill all of the time you work, so the time that you do bill has to cover the time that you can't, and you've got to pay yourself enough to pay for your salary, superannuation, a whole bunch of other costs. It sounds like a lot of money. When I started, I thought, ah, I get to pay 25 an hour on salary, or I'll charge $30 an hour, and that was a horrible idea. And so now I'm up to over 100 an hour, and that's fine, and people are happy to pay that because I'm still providing that level of value. Truth number two, a six-hour task will cost you the whole day. If you've got a couple of tasks for a couple of different clients lined up, one of them happens to be six hours, you are not getting any of the tasks for the other clients done. Either from context switching, your brain won't be able to switch to another project and pick it up, or just for a length of time. If you've got, I find six hours about it, some people say five, but if you've got a task which takes more than six hours, charge a day rate. Day rates are good for you. Day rates are good for clients. It's sometimes hard to get this across to them, but if a task blows out for longer than the six hours, it doesn't cost them any more. If the task turns out to take five hours instead of six, great for you. It also means you're not losing focus and thinking about other projects during the day. You are booked for the entire day for their work. If they want other bits and pieces done in that day, maybe, they've got a few 15-minute tasks which they've been putting off because why would they put it on? You can get them done. Tip number three, you are a business. You are not an employee. This is really hard to get across when you've been an employee and you switched to freelancing. It is really hard for small businesses to understand, especially if they are used to hiring casuals. Basically, if you wouldn't go to your plumber and say, I know you said this will cost me 100 bucks, but what if I give you 20? Why would you do that with a freelancer? If you wouldn't go around and say, ah, you've got to work overtime and you're going to be unpaid, why would you do it to a freelancer? Negotiation is fine, but you can't dictate a freelancer's terms and freelancers don't let a big business dictate your terms. You can negotiate terms, but ultimately you are a separate business as a freelancer. You set your terms, you set your rates, you set the hours you work. While other businesses may have preferences, you can't just count out to them as if you were an employee. Which leads into this. Unreasonable requests deserve unreasonable rates. If you have a client which insists that you start work at three in the morning every morning because they want their site up and ready and running for business in the morning, charge them extra. If you have a client which says, ah, it's an emergency, you have to drop all your business right now and fix my mistakes on my website, charge them extra. I add about another 20% for any of my rates. If they have an emergency that happens at 3 a.m., it's an extra 40% because I've got to get up and do that. Then it's unreasonable for them to expect me to do it at my regular rate and it's unreasonable for me to do it at my regular rate. It's costing me time. It's costing me sleep. It's costing other projects time for other clients. So for freelancers, set your business hours. I work 9 to 5 Brisbane time, Tuesday to Friday. I like to take the weekends off. I like to take Mondays off. Implement an emergency and priority rate that will compensate you for extra time that you have to spend catching up on other projects. So if you have to put aside someone's project to fix a website, then it's going to take you extra time, especially time outside of your working hours to catch up to where you were. I also put a two-hour minimum on emergency work. It kind of helps clients to understand what is and isn't an emergency if suddenly it's going to cost them $300 instead of 15 minutes of work. It really puts things into perspective for them and helps keep me sane. For businesses, try to plan ahead. If you know that there is a Halloween sale that you're doing, don't tell a developer two days before the Halloween sale. Get it ready in a month beforehand. Get all of your stuff ready. You can test it, you can make sure, and then when it's time to go live, you can press a button. It's all good. Yeah, one to two weeks minimum lead time for changes you know are coming. Even more if they're going to be a big change. Talk to your freelancers as early as you know, just so you can get everything in. Sometimes they won't have schedule to help you out if you ask them last minute. Sometimes they might be on holidays, who knows. Just try to get as much time as you can in there and be happy that if you're planning properly and your freelancer is working properly and charging people extra for meaningless emergency work, they won't be dropping your tasks and if they are, they're going to be picking them up and you're not going to be the one compensating them for that. Truth number five, you have to make time for downtime. I can pretty much read this whole slide. If you hustle too much, your brain will fall out. Burnout is a real thing. I have experienced it many times myself through my career. I have spent weeks, days, months where I've done very little productive and none of that productive, none of that unproductive time is billable. And that adds more stress and it becomes a cycle and a cycle and a cycle. So you have to take care of yourself and that means mentally as well as anything else. There will be times when there's no work and times when there's too much work. If you don't accept that there are times when there's not enough work and use that time to relax, you won't handle when there's too much work. You'll be too stressed. So plan for two to four weeks off. I just took two weeks off and went up to Whaley Beach. Make a schedule, hourly schedule, stick to it, plan all your projects for the day, stick to it. I really suck at this but I'm working on it. Find a hobby that doesn't resemble work. I ride mountain bikes. I have no computers when I'm riding mountain bikes. It's great. Use slow periods to learn to do housekeeping. If you're worried that nothing's going on with your business, maybe you can use that time to learn new skills, something else that you can sell. You can research new projects. You can catch up on all your accounting and reports. You can do all of these things at which you've been putting off, just so you are caught up with them and you don't have a massive rush at the end of the year. Most importantly, relax. Now that's been a lot of talk so let's have an intermission. These are my pets. First up is my cat and office companion who knocks shit off the shelves. His name is Shrodinger because I am a massive nerd. In the middle we have my pet hedgehog which I had when I lived in the US. Her name was Spiny Norman because I am a massive nerd with obscure Monty Python references. And on the left we have my insane border collie named Scotty because my wife wouldn't let me name any more animals. All righty, back to it. Truth 6. You have to be upfront, honest and candid. The worst time for a client to find out that something is about to break or that you're not ready to deliver is the day after it's due. The second worst time is the day before it's due. As soon as you know a project's going sideways or needs more work or there's something you can't deliver or something's gone wrong, you have to be upfront with your clients. You have to tell them what's going on. If they're aware of it, maybe they'll go, well, you said this thing's going to take more time but it's not actually important to my business. I don't care. It was a nice thing. You don't have to spend six hours making the button wobble back and forth. I don't actually care about that. You don't know what's important to their business. They do so you have to defer to them and the best way to do that is to let them know when something's going wrong. A lot of people try to avoid it because they see it like, oh, I'm terrible at my work and if I tell them they'll know I'm terrible. They'll know you're terrible when you don't deliver and then stop answering calls. And that's when they stop booking you again. If you're upfront, honest, candid about it, then you can work with them, work through the problems. You might lose a couple of clients but they're probably not great clients. I've found the clients that I've worked with this, they've always appreciated it and most of them have come back and offered me much more work. Truth 7, hungry doesn't mean desperate. I see this a lot. People who are posting on Reddit are talking in Slack channels saying, oh, I've got this guy's offering me a lot of work but he seems a little bit dodgy. Should I just take it anyway? No. Red flags exist. You're wired to notice them. A bad client will cost you money. It will cost you opportunity cost. It will cost you stress. If I used to, when I was working for an agency, have a client who would ring up on a Friday afternoon and shout abuse at us for no reason but he must have had a calendar notification for it because he did it almost every week. We eventually dumped the client because his money wasn't worth the stress. And the other thing is, if you're working on a client who you're not sure if they're going to pay you or they're being a bit sketchy about it, you're going to spend a whole bunch of time and money building something for them which you should have been spending on working on yourself, finding different clients which aren't terrible, doing anything else. No client is always better than a bad client without exception. Number eight, if you can't do it, somebody else will and that's okay. This was one I struggled with for a long time when I started freelancing. I needed to be the professional who could do whatever they wanted. I am a developer. As you can probably tell from my slides, I can't design. As you could tell if you looked at my website, I have no idea about marketing but I can build something that works real well. This is what I've been starting to get into doing over the last couple of years. I know my limits. I'm not going to try to push myself to do things which I'm not comfortable doing when there are plenty of other freelancers and contractors and professionals who do know how to do those things. You don't have to do everything yourself and you and your clients will get a much better result if you stop trying to. Also, a project isn't the time to experiment on something new. Learning your free time, I don't know how to do but if you're wanting to try out and you plug in on WordPress and you're being really excited about trying it out but haven't actually played with it, don't wait until a client's paying you and then just try to throw it on and see if it does what you want. Learn about things when you've got the time to learn about things. Do it on your own time. Then you can build that time out and be efficient and be able to deliver something good to the client. And don't be afraid of the word outsource. You are outsourcing. People are outsourcing by hiring you and you can hire other people to fill the gaps in your skills and knowledge. Truth 9. Every project is more important to you than to your client. This is another one which took a long time to understand. My business is development. I build websites. I create things. I put them up on the internet. I hand them out. My clients do not build websites. They do not care about websites. All the websites are, is and expense. As soon as it starts making money, great they'll care but until it does all they're seeing is money getting thrown into a freelancer hole. They care about selling widgets or brushing ponies or whatever their business is. That's what they're focused on and you have to remember that. So if you're sitting there going why isn't the client getting back to me? I sent them this urgent email and they haven't responded in two days because they're busy brushing a horse. They're not thinking about the website. That's your job. You have to be proactive about keeping projects moving. Once again, this is your job as a freelancer. You are there to manage the project and manage the client. The clients will get distracted with their own stuff. You have to keep them on track or accept that the projects will just keep dragging on and on and on and on and maybe you won't be able to send your final invoice for three months because you haven't managed to get the client to give you one photo. The only time that a client cares more about the project than you is when it's costing them money and I don't mean throwing money down the money hole of freelancing. I mean when their site goes down. Suddenly it's the most urgent thing in the world and you have to drop everything to fix their problem. Until that happens, your job is keeping their site up and their job is doing whatever they do. And the final point, freelancing isn't free. So watch out for the following things. It'll be great exposure. The day I can pay my rent or buy food with exposure maybe we'll talk. Until then people die of exposure. The great one I get is I've heard so many times I'll give you equity. I've never had an offer where they've offered more than 5% equity and expected me to do less than 95% of the work. Doesn't sound a good deal to me. Ideas aren't worth anything unless you've got someone to deliver. Maybe if it's an idea that I really believe in I might consider doing some work for 50% equity if they are also producing that amount of work exactly unless I've won the lotto. There's where a charity. I've heard this one a few times and a lot of freelancers get picked up on this. Where a charity so you still have a budget. You still have money to do this. If we are doing this so you can gain more money that's still you making profit and I'm not in a position to donate my time for you to make profit. You're my son. Don't work for family members. You're my neighbor's friend's grandson. Don't work for friends or friends of family members. If you do treat them like any other client they will hate this but you make them sign contracts and you talk in business mode if you can't do that don't work for them. My nephew could have done it. This is a great one. There's a cool story about a factory which shuts down because one of the machines breaks down and no one there knows how to fix it so they bring in a specialist from Germany and he comes in walks up to the machine, looks at it for five minutes presses a button and it springs to life then he sends them a $10,000 bill. When they question it they go look you just pressed one button anyone could have done that so he sends them an itemized bill pressing a button, $1 knowing which button to press, all the rest. And the other one I get in WordPress is WordPress is free. Why are you charging me for it? Yes, the core software is free. Configuring it is not. Themes are not always free. Building a custom theme is definitely not free. Plugins often cost money. All of this is free. If it was free and that was all there was to it great, you can do it yourself. That's free. If you're getting me to do it for you that means it's obviously worth more to you than your own time and my time is worth more to me than helping you out for free. Tips, be upfront about your prices and other costs. Whenever I meet a new client one of the first things I do is I send them out my terms of trade that outlines my costs, how I work everything about them. If they get scared off by that, great. I didn't want that client. If they don't and most of them don't, they'll go through it and might ask me a couple of questions. That's awesome. That means they know what they're getting into. They're seeing me as a business, not just some guy they can exploit. So by the value of the results they get there. So if you're doing some work for someone and it's going to make them hundreds of thousands of dollars in a year even if it only takes you a small amount of time to get it done you have to bill according to the value they're getting rather than the path that you take. If you're using a bit of free software to get there it's still worthwhile billing a reasonable amount because they're still getting a huge amount of value out of it. Free products exist to reduce costs but they still take time. If I didn't use WordPress I would be building things from scratch and that's going to take another if I had to build something like WordPress from scratch every time that's a many, many, many year project with a much worse result. But that doesn't mean me using WordPress is free. Don't be afraid to walk away from a bad deal I mentioned this before I will try to scare off bad clients or if I can't scare them off and I still think they're a bad client I'll just say no. This all ties into not being desperate and it all ties into knowing that you are a business you can refuse service to anyone please do the more freelancers that keep working with bad clients and don't refuse service the more emboldened they are to continue being horrible to freelancers and if you're really desperate to give away free work, contribute to WordPress or open source projects make a theme sell a theme, make a plugin do all sorts of things that you choose to do don't work for other people because they ask you to free work should only be done in fact all work should only be done because you've decided it's worth your time to do it Thank you very much are there any questions?