You’ve just launched your freelance career and can’t wait to get started.
But at this stage, you don’t know what you don’t know – so could inadvertently make mistakes that will cost you down the line.
Here are 4 common freelance mistakes to avoid and what to do instead:
1) You take on all work
When first starting out, everything is new and exciting, and it can be tempting to take on all the freelance client work coming your way.
This is a rookie error for a number of reasons; the main one is that you have no idea yet of the time it will take for you to perform the work and generally have little solo experience in managing multiple clients.
Even if you performed a project or client management role in your former corporate job, you likely had a budget and a team around you.
When you’re a freelancer, you’re often working alone, juggling several tasks all at once, so don’t have the luxury of delegating duties to others. Naturally, there are more distractions and new stuff to learn, so things take longer.
If you take on too many clients at once, it’s likely the quality of work will suffer too, which benefits no one – apart from the competition – and can harm your reputation.
What to do instead
It’s perfectly okay to tell a client that you are fully booked and schedule time in the future to work with them. Once you are more experienced (and quicker at things), you’ll be able to schedule your time more accurately. Even then – always block out time in your schedule to act as a buffer zone for any potential project creep (but see point #2 below).
For the first few projects, track your hours so you have a better idea of how long tasks take (and remember, not all hours are billable). Invoice Ninja has a neat time-tracking feature that allows you to accurately record time spent on individual tasks for a client and then convert those timed tasks to invoices in just one click.
2) You work without a contract in place
This is a big one! Following a successful client discovery call, you may be keen to do away with so-called formalities and get stuck into your exciting new project. After all, you got on like a house on fire with your new client bestie – and you’re pretty sure you nailed everything down on the call.
However, things can get misinterpreted, lack clarity, or at worse, payment terms not fully agreed on – which might end up with you not being paid at all!
What to do instead
Following the discovery call, summarize what you agreed on during the call in writing. This can also be a good opportunity to send your quote and initial deposit invoice too.
But before you commence the project, it’s important to have written terms of reference that you both agree to – i.e. a contract in place. It doesn’t need to be overly bloated and full of legalese, but it does need to cover all the relevant points, such as the scope of the project, payment terms, cancellation, confidentiality and copyright, to name just a few.
Having a contract in place can save a lot of potential problems down the line.
3) You don’t get a deposit upfront
While not all freelance work lends itself to getting a deposit upfront, much of it does.
New freelancers can often be afraid to ask for a deposit upfront, but it is accepted practice.
A general rule of thumb is not to start work until the money’s in the bank. This reduces the risk of doing some of (or all) the work and then being ghosted by the client. This is especially pertinent to new clients who you don’t have an established relationship with yet.
What to do instead
Stipulate during your client onboarding process that you require a deposit upfront before commencing work.
Clients are used to paying a deposit that can range from anywhere between 10% to 100%. In some larger projects, payment can be phased in over the duration of the project.
With Invoice Ninja, your client can easily convert your quote into a payable invoice at the click of a button. What’s more, you can set partial payments/deposits with unique due dates. After your client pays the partial payment, the invoice will automatically update itself with the balance due and set the new final invoice due date.
4) You don’t use invoice software
You probably don’t have a massive budget and think that sophisticated invoice software is only for the big players. You can create your own invoice on a Word document and simply add your logo, and off you go.
But the problem with this is that unless you are a design genius, it’s unlikely to come across as a professional invoice template to clients. And you could even accidentally miss important information.
Creating invoices and not having these processes automated is also time-consuming and could result in avoidable payment delays. Cash flow is really important to any business but can be especially crucial when you are just starting out freelancing.
What to do instead
Sign up for free or affordable invoice software.
Invoice Ninja is a leading free invoicing software for small business invoicing, online payments, tracking expenses and billable tasks. It also includes attractive, professional invoice template designs you can customize with your logo and brand colors.
We help make the complex simple so you can focus on doing what you love.
