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- Down but Not Out: Surviving The Hard Knocks of the Writing Biz
Down but Not Out: Surviving The Hard Knocks of the Writing Biz
Tough lessons are part of business — and they can be even tougher when it’s for first business. The truth is that the first time you start a business, you have no idea what you’re getting into. Even if you have a great plan, unless you are psychic, you don’t know exactly what situations you will face and how best to deal with them. That’s what you find out as you go along — and it’s why so many businesses fail in the first year when things are toughest. If you want to build a writing business — or any business — that survives, the best thing you can do is take your knocks, learn the lessons, get up and keep on showing up. And maybe you can also share your experiences with others so they won’t have to repeat them. Here are three lessons from my personal school of hard knocks and what I learned from them.
Lesson 1: The Plagiarist
It may seem silly to say it but one of the first things to learn when you start working with other freelancers is that they are not you.
You know what standards you have and how you do your work and since that is your only frame of reference you often expect that the people you work will feel the same. Huh!
I have worked with some great freelancers over the years, some of whom have my work ethic and have become my friends. But then there are the others. I discovered that some of the people I worked with didn’t have the same respect for deadlines that I did and had a somewhat lower ethical threshold. Here’s an example:
One person I worked with crossed the line between research and plagiarism. Now, this person had already stretched the deadline to the limit so I only discovered that the articles had been partly plagiarised the night before I was due to deliver. That meant blowing off what I was supposed to be doing so I could stay up all night to fix them myself. The client never knew a thing and my reputation stayed intact.
From that experience I learned:
1.Always test out new outsourcers with a single non-time critical piece of work so you can assess their approach.
2. Set deadlines a couple of days earlier than you need the work so there’s no need for last minute panic.
3. Be clear about the standards of work you expect from the people you are working with (though between you and me, I would have thought that ‘I can’t stand plagiarism’ was pretty clear).
(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, a long talk with the writer involved made it clear what plagiarism was and I never had that issue with her again.)
Lesson 2: The Disappeared
Working with clients can be another minefield — and in this case it doesn’t matter whether you’re new or experienced as we all eventually meet that situation we just didn’t see coming. Take a client I worked with back in 2008. I blogged for him, he paid me on time and everything looked good. Then one month he was a couple days late paying. No biggie. But the next month he didn’t pay at all. And he didn’t respond to emails. Or phone calls. It later turned out that he had an addiction problem which had resurfaced, so he was broke and I was out of pocket. There’s no way I could have seen that one coming. A couple years later, I had a problem with a client hit by recession who thought it was OK not to pay me. I’m still seething about that one but since I’m a professional I won’t name names. (And in case you’re wondering, the sum involved was too little to be worth chasing because of the cost of doing so but more than enough to make me mad.) This client has quietly removed herself from my Skype contact list and has stopped responding to emails.
The lessons from this:
1. Collect a deposit up front where you can and payment in stages as you go along — that way you won’t get stuck with a huge unpaid invoice.
2. If that’s not possible, collect payment for each piece of work as you go along and don’t deliver anything new while the last one isn’t paid for.
3. Make sure you have a payment agreement/contract, even if it’s just by email and make sure clients know your payment procedures up front.
Lesson 3: No Backup
Backup, backup, backup! You can’t repeat this too many times. If you are dealing with clients’ work then you need to have a backup, preferably more than one. This was something else I learned the hard way. It’s not that I didn’t backup — because I did — it’s just that I did a weekly manual backup and when my laptop died suddenly midweek I lost all the client work I had worked on between Monday and Wednesday. That meant that instead of being on track with the project I was suddenly behind and I had to scramble for a couple of days to catch up (in addition to the inconvenience of having to replace my computer). There’s just one lesson from this experience — and I have learned it well:
1. Use an online backup system that backs up as you go (and check periodically that it’s actually working).
So those are my three lessons. What have you learned that has changed the way you run your business?