Top 5 mistakes beginner freelancers make
Have you been considering doing some freelancing work? I have been working as a bioinformatics freelancer since early 2019, and during this time I have built a community of over 30 bioinformatics freelancers who are actively engaged in freelance projects of their own, but also often team up for larger projects, help each other out and even hang-out for a weekly Zoom chat which we call “Chat by the coffee maker”. I often teamed up with a fellow freelancer myself, and have learned a thing or two about working remotely, building trust with people you never met in real life, and delivering successful result on freelancing project. Over the years I have seen number of aspired freelancers that joined our community, but failed to find themselves in freelancing world. Here are the top 5 reasons that it never worked out for them — I hope it will help you to prevent making those mistakes yourself.
Some of the points here might specifically apply to bioinformatics freelancing, where the size of the projects is often small, and the clients want high engagement.
1. Thinking that freelancing is just a side gig
Why it fails:
1) freelancing (and client’s satisfaction) is not a priority
2) any interaction needs to happen outside business hours
One of the top signs that the beginner freelancer will fail is if s(he) has a full-time job. Nearly all of not all full-employed people estimate that they can contribute on average 10h per week in addition to their main job. And nearly all of them fail to keep up with that estimate. Work emergencies from their main job (or literally any other errand they need to run) always will take precedent over the freelancing project. Their main income doesn’t depend on successful implementation of the freelance project, but mine — does. I cannot count number of times I had to do the work myself because a fellow freelancer had emergency at their work, or they suddenly got very busy with something else, or they had to move the apartment this weekend, or they simply stopped replying to any messages. Another aspect of working full-time and freelancing on the side is that you would do that outside typical office hours, which means that I (or the client) need to be available to answer any questions or have a call to align on results during our time-off.
2. Freelancing while job-hunting
Why it fails:
1) waiting for the tasks to be “assigned” or a direction to be given
2) freelancing (and client’s satisfaction) is not a priority
The job market right now is tough, so it is unsurprising that many look at freelancing as a source of income in-between the jobs. I had number of job-seekers who wanted to “do freelancing”. But in practice, they just waited for someone to tell them: “Here is a project — do it”. And even if they got a project, they would ditch it immediately once they get an offer for employment (or a job interview, or sometimes just because the uncertainty of what happens afterwards is too much to handle).
3. Treating freelancing as employment
Why it fails:
1) passively waiting for the projects that never arrive
2) setting hourly rate as if it was an employment
3) might be illegal in some countries (like Germany)
There are situation in life when freelancing might be the only choice to stay in our preferred professional field (like having to or wanting to stay home with kids more or moving with family to a small town where there isn’t any fitting jobs). There is one scenario which is actually a legal grey area and should be considered carefully — working for a single client as a freelancer for a prolonged period of time. In some countries (like Germany) this is considered a “false employment” and may result in quite heavy fines for your client and for you (especially if your client is a German company as well). But lets assume that is not your case.
There are some key differences in how freelancers operate and how employee operates. As an employee, we are often told what to do, and we get money regardless of project’s success or even if there is one. There is also an infrastructure within the company that helps us avoiding tasks like writing invoices or doing accounting, or handling your IT infrastructure or taxes. But as freelancers, we need to hunt for projects! The projects rarely just fall into one’s hands — freelancing means doing a lot of “cold” messaging/emailing, and being ready to do that consistently for many many companies/academic groups — the rejection rate will be astronomical, and some rejections are also pretty rude. And we need to handle our own finances and administrative tasks. At IDL we estimated that it takes up on average 30% of our time on “un-billable” tasks — something we cannot charge the client directly. Add to that health insurance, which now needs to be paid out-of-pocket in-full, vacation time that will not be paid, any potential sick days, any purchases of laptops and keyboards and printer paper… All that contributes to the reason why freelancers who setup their rate comparable to their industry salary eventually will become too stressed and too underpaid, and leave for employment anyway.
4. Thinking that freelancing = freedom
Why it fails:
1) client’s satisfaction is not a priority
Sure, it says in our contracts “The Contractor shall be free to choose the place and time of its activities.” But that really(!!) doesn’t mean that the Client will be happy when you join a call from the beach in Mallorca or a hotel room in Dubrovnik or even a café from across the street. Most of the time we need to be considerate of the client’s business hours, and make ourselves available at least during some of those hours. Most of the time, vacation in the middle of freelancing project is not a great idea. And most of the time, especially at the beginning, we don’t really get to choose the projects we are working on — we take what we can get.
5. Thinking freelancing is only about hard skills
Why it fails:
1) usually because of lack of communication
A survey conducted by one of the bioinformatics service companies as part of their market research showed that clients who needed bioinformatics services valued most a personal communication in exploring the results. Most of the responders pointed out that standardized pipelines did not produce satisfactory results, and that they wanted to have a deeper look at the data. It’s not about YOU looking at the data, it’s about THEM looking at the data. Many freelancers (and actually service providers are guilty of that too) take the client’s data and disappear for 3 weeks and then send the client the result: thousands lines of code, an xls with 60 000 rows and 57 columns and 20 slides PowerPoint presentation (or worse, 75 pages worth html report of pdf document). Often these clients end up hiring me for the “second opinion” or just to be able to sort through all of the data that they received. Always remember, you are not there to show off your coding or stats skills, you are there to make the data useful to the client, and that means communicating with your client every step of the way.
None of the reasons above are a certain indication that the freelancer will fail — I successfully collaborated with number of freelancers operating in the above circumstances, and many of them are part of IDL community. But being a freelancer is a very different type of occupation that doesn’t really compare to any other type of career, and the key to becoming a successful freelancer is a commitment — to client, to your colleagues and to your own choice.
