I tell a fair number of enquiries not to hire me. It reads as sabotage from outside. What happened: Revenue flat for about five months, then higher and much steadier. The flat stretch is long enough to feel like a…
One client I have had for about a year. The work is fine and the relationship is not: constant weekend messages, decisions reversed after I have built things, and a general sense that my time is theirs. I want out. What…
We run a multi tenant platform. One of our customers, without telling us, had a security assessment run against it. The first phase was an enormous volume of requests from an unauthenticated source, which we initially…
Quoted a flat 3,000 for a five page site based on a brief. Three weeks in we're at fourteen pages, two of which need a filterable listing, plus a newsletter integration nobody mentioned. Client is pleasant and seems to…
Eight months in with a single client who now sets my hours, asks me to clear holiday with their delivery manager, and has posted me a company laptop with their device management on it. I invoice monthly and handle my…
Every discovery call ends with send us a proposal and we will see. I quote, they go quiet, and I never find out whether I was double their number or half of it. Asking directly gets me we do not really have a fixed…
Invoice for 4,200 went out on net 30, we're now at day 45. My contact replies within a day, is always friendly, and says accounts has it and it's in the system. I've asked twice for a payment date and got no date either…
Solo design work, currently five active clients plus two on retainer who go silent for a fortnight and then need everything on a Tuesday. Delivery is still fine but my mornings are pure context switching and I have…
New client, six week engagement, and in the two scoping calls so far they've changed the core requirement twice. They're not difficult, they're just early and figuring it out as they go. My instinct says hourly because…
I do 45 minute calls with prospects and they mostly turn into me diagnosing their problem out loud. About one in six turns into work. The other five say they'll think about it and I sometimes later see they've done…
Eight months freelancing full time. I track everything and I'm averaging about 19 billable hours out of a 40 hour week. The rest is proposals, invoicing, email, calls that go nowhere, and fixing my own website. I keep…