 Hello everyone today. I am going to talk to you about some mistakes. I've made I This so this is in response to a question I received from Elias Jacob he wrote is there a chance he could make a video about the mistakes you made when you were when you just started working Like maybe not researching if a company has a good reputation or things like that Now I've mentioned stuff like this in passing in the past But I kind of wanted to do a video about some of the mistakes I've made so that you can avoid them and so actually I'm glad you asked this question because it gave me that push to make this This video so let's get right into it. I have made mistakes Obviously, it's kind of a rite of passage when you're starting off in freelance pretty much anything I imagine definitely freelance translation. You're going to make some mistakes and so the best thing I feel is to learn them early and Learn them quickly so that you don't make too many mistakes in the future I'll go through some of the issues. I've had First and then I'll talk about some of the ways I try to avoid these issues In my day-to-day transactions and from the lessons I've learned so first of all, yeah, I've had quite a few issues I can run through a couple of them quickly One of them was with freelancer.com. I there was a client content This was very much towards the beginning a client contacted me for a quick job on freelancer.com and And and I did it. It was a translation of an audio transcription thing Anyway, I performed the translation as for the payment never heard back as for the payment never heard back as for the payment Never back finally I asked freelancer.com which was hosting the whole thing about them and they're like well You know, we don't know anything about them except their email address I I had understood that in order to post a job there You had to actually give some pertinent information about you or your business, but apparently you don't So that's where that went and I it wasn't too much money so but still that feeling of being cheated really kind of bothered me because I this was the first time and so yeah, it really bothered me but at the end of the day It wasn't too much money So here's another one that happened later was I had another client so this is a client that I had in I got I think through pros comm and it was me and another translator working on the same document and we finished up the document and And in fact, we had to rush quite a bit to do it, but we did it we sent it and she sent it to the end client and Then we tried to get paid and we didn't get paid her excuse She had many different excuses some for some of them. She's like in fact for a couple She responded saying oh, this isn't her. This is her mom. She's in the hospital right now Of course, she's forgotten that she added me on Facebook and I saw then she posted later that same day On Facebook having a party this weekend at my place. Who's coming? I mean, it was ridiculous Anyway, all these excuses and basically she was saying the clients didn't pay me so I can't pay you By the way, you will probably hear something along these lines in the future Do not accept this as an excuse. Okay, you're your contract is with whoever hired you not with some end client or something They take on the risk. This is why they're the middle person and they're getting paid for that for taking on that risk anyway, so what happened here was you know, I tried to get paid and finally after a while I was like well I'm gonna contact this end client and try to get paid because in the meantime I found out that the translation we had made Was being used on their website the final Translation and I've talked about this in my book in my course more in detail, but yeah, it was completely ridiculous So now so what happened long story short what happened is I never got paid I still send out the emails periodically to the person who hired me who by the way I gave a bad review on pros comm and she's been banned from ever posting jobs on pros comm again So and the name of the company was inter trade-o inter trotto, whatever So yeah, I have no problem badmouthing them and but I also contact the end client which was his company entrematic or D tech which is part of entrematic and And I have it is set to email them once a week with all the details asking them about payment It's been about three four years now and that I that I'm sending that email out I'm sure they've blocked me and so like once a year I'll switch the email that I send it from just to keep it fresh But basically I don't think I'm seeing that money again It was around 600 euros and that really annoyed me and that's why I really wanted to be persistent about this I'm like if they're not paying me. I'm going to do everything I can to try to get paid and So yeah, that's what I've been doing and but unfortunately I haven't been paid yet And so and then another story that I have and this one I also put in a lot more detail in in my book I think in the course as well definitely in the book And I can what I can do is show you some of the screenshots because what happened was this was and translators base comm and translators base So I basically found the job they needed a translation done. I said, okay, I'll do it I did it and then and in fact I checked the guy so he had a name He had an email address and he had an address, you know that I could look up on Google Maps And it so it seemed you know totally legit. I mean legit enough at the time Let's say did the translation sent and I even told him I was like look I'm gonna password protect this this translation because I've been burned in the past And if you send me partial payment, he owed me like 250 bucks I think I was like look if you send me apart. I'll send this to you password protected You send me a partial payment of 50 or 100 bucks or something like that And then I'll give you the password to open it. That was the last I heard from him now Since then I've looked it up. It's actually very easy to Access password protected document on word. So that's probably what he did But in the meantime, I never got paid I contacted him through translators base and through the email address He gave me tried the phone number didn't work and obviously I contacted translators base itself and told them and they were back And they're like, oh, he's not replying to our emails. Well, he can't post here ever again He posted from a Yahoo email address. Once again, I saw translators base took a bit more information Before allowing people to post I guess they don't so And that's pretty much it I can show what I'll do actually is I'll take some of the screen shots from this last one and And post them up while I'm speaking about it just to show you kind of what was going on and some of the the back and forth that was there because it was It was something I've closed up since then. I thought oh, yeah, no, I have Yeah, because it can show you exactly that he had a phone number He had an address and I'll show you what it is because obviously it's all bogus in fact later I looked it up on Google Maps and it was I think just some house but And I can show you all the correspondence in fact that we sent back and forth so you can kind of get an idea of what happened and also my email to translators base and their response just so you get an idea and So anyway, these are some of the mistakes that I've made in the past I want to mention another one quickly briefly a mistake that I made was with a client in Italy who who I hired and Sorry who hired me. I did the translation. I wasn't hearing back wasn't getting paid But I did find a phone number. She hadn't supplied the phone number But I found a phone number and so what I did was I had someone I think it might have even been my mother. I Remember it might have been my mother. I know I want to say it was someone it was a friend of mine who lived close by anyway, I had someone call this lady and Basically I emailed and said, oh, I'm gonna have someone pass by in person to pick it up if you don't, you know, send me my payment and She obviously thought I was bluffing So I had someone call this lady and say oh, I'm passing by so-and-so Because I knew where the address was it was somewhere in Italy I wasn't in Italy at the time, but I had someone call from an Italian number say I'm gonna pass by so-and-so Can you have Rob Roberts money ready and Because I'm gonna go pick it up and that put the lady I guess in kind of panic mode And so she did pay me and at the end of the day, so yeah, sometimes you need to do stuff like this and You know you live and you learn So but there are some things that I do now every time I get a new client just to be sure So actually I'm going to divide this video into two and so in the next video I'm gonna talk about the things that I do when I get a new client in order to Make sure that stuff like this doesn't happen or at least to really limit my downside but hopefully you found this video useful just seeing a bunch of the issues that I've had to deal with in the past and Hopefully it'll stop you from having the same problems and but yeah Stay tuned for part two of this video where I talk about what I do to avoid them when I Find new clients or apply for new jobs, etc. Etc. But yeah, that's about it for now I will see in the next video. Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't click like if you find this video useful because that always helps Otherwise, see you next time. Thanks. Bye