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Stop Freelancing

robertnealan.com

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Re: Stop Freelancing

#81

Post by gridspy »

lsc wrote: post #76
joshyeager wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, let me say that I don't mean this to be offensive, and I'm trying to be helpful to you. As someone who occasionally hires consultants to solve urgent problems for me, I would be nervous about hiring a company whose point of contact had a communication style like yours. When I need a problem solved, I want someone who understands exactly what I need and who makes me confident that they will follow through and m…

>I have no idea if that is accurate. But if one of your competitors was easier to understand, I would probably pick them because I don't have the extra time required to understand you and make sure you understand me over the course of our whole relationship. That makes sense. The thing is, I always thought that my writing was an advantage, not a disadvantage. I mean, it's not perfect, or even very good by English-maj…

Just to push you further in the right direction - you need to decide what you want the email to accomplish. It should do that and no more.

Often you want them to arrange a consultation with you. So they just need a taster of your solution that will leave them curious for more in person where you can still adapt it to their requirements.

Once they are sold, stop selling and go for the close. Otherwise you might talk them out of it.

Respect their time and keep communications short. That way they'll read every word.

Re: Stop Freelancing

#82

Post by gridspy »

thomaslangston wrote: post #71
lsc wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Faking the full-time bit is completely true, does not make sense ... but then seems to be a necessity. It's weird, 'cause I do think I'm unusually good as a temporary worker; I'm willing to tailor the time when I leave to something comfortable for the employer (whereas someone wanting a full-time job is going to jump at the request of a company that is willing to hire them full-time) And because I'm looking at it as…

Offer a Contract-to-Recruit service?

Have a lower rate "partners" who can maintain the code once it's clean?

Re: Stop Freelancing

#83

Post by johnkpush »

We prefer hiring consultants who bill us as a business rather than as an individual. It's risky and more costly hiring and paying an individual consultant:

* If an individual consultant gets injured, we'd have to pay the individual's worker's comp/unemployment benefits.

* When it's B2B, we don't have to worry about 'tax nexus'. If we're based in NY and hire an individual in California, we now have to register and pay some tax in state of California. Hiring a business erases that responsibility.

* The consultants who have a business are usually more serious and mature. Invoices are cleaner and the experience is more professional all around. Sounds cliche but it's true.

Edit: formatting

Re: Stop Freelancing

#84

Post by mikeho1999 »

mmagin wrote: post #67
jtbigwoo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> When the business is actually just you, it's basically invisible in regards to your tax situation. Not true. In the U.S. if you create an LLC or S-corp you can pay yourself a salary and also pay yourself dividends (sometimes called distributions). Both salary and dividends are subject to regular income taxes, but only the salary is subject to payroll taxes. The justification goes like this: if you were paying an e…

(I am not a lawyer.) As I understand it, the real benefit of an LLC for what would otherwise be a sole-proprietorship or partnership is if you do work where there's significant liabilities you need protection from. e.g. you make products which are sold to end consumers, end consumers are frequently dumbasses and hurt themselves, end consumer decides to try to sue you for ridiculous amounts of money. But to make this…

(Also not a lawyer... just someone who has run a single-person "cute freelancing" or "professional services" company for almost a decade now)

Not sure what you mean by "it's a big deal". It's critically important to keep the LLC's finances completely separate from... but the effort to do so is not that high.

My limited understanding is that this varies from state to state, but at least in California, all that's really required is for you to have a separate business checking or savings account, and that receipts should be deposited there, and expenses should be paid from there.

Having a separate Federal Tax ID isn't even required in California, although it is definitely highly recommended. And at least in terms of trying to get a business banking account, many banks will require it.

And @jtbigwoo, you can have a single-person LLC that is "disregarded" as a separate tax entity from the IRS's point of view, which means any revenue to the LLC would show up in your personal income tax (on a Schedule C), known as "flow thru" accounting. That means that no, you don't necessarily have to pay separate dividends and stuff just because you are an LLC.

Re: Stop Freelancing

#85

Post by joshyeager »

lsc wrote: post #76
joshyeager wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, let me say that I don't mean this to be offensive, and I'm trying to be helpful to you. As someone who occasionally hires consultants to solve urgent problems for me, I would be nervous about hiring a company whose point of contact had a communication style like yours. When I need a problem solved, I want someone who understands exactly what I need and who makes me confident that they will follow through and m…

>I have no idea if that is accurate. But if one of your competitors was easier to understand, I would probably pick them because I don't have the extra time required to understand you and make sure you understand me over the course of our whole relationship. That makes sense. The thing is, I always thought that my writing was an advantage, not a disadvantage. I mean, it's not perfect, or even very good by English-maj…

Glad to help. :-)

I agree that a lot of sales and management types are sloppy and overly terse. That's just as bad. A good balance makes communication much easier and more effective.

Best of all is if you can do all that and still show a unique personality. That's what I'm working on, because I feel like my writing is pretty bland.

Re: Stop Freelancing

#86

Post by phamilton »

lsc wrote: post #76
joshyeager wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, let me say that I don't mean this to be offensive, and I'm trying to be helpful to you. As someone who occasionally hires consultants to solve urgent problems for me, I would be nervous about hiring a company whose point of contact had a communication style like yours. When I need a problem solved, I want someone who understands exactly what I need and who makes me confident that they will follow through and m…

>I have no idea if that is accurate. But if one of your competitors was easier to understand, I would probably pick them because I don't have the extra time required to understand you and make sure you understand me over the course of our whole relationship. That makes sense. The thing is, I always thought that my writing was an advantage, not a disadvantage. I mean, it's not perfect, or even very good by English-maj…

A very simple change you could make to your writing would be to swap out commas for other punctuation. Parentheses, semicolons, and other less often used punctuation serve distinct purposes and add to readability.

I'm no expert. Here is a stab at fixing a sentence of yours. >I mean, it's not perfect (or even very good by English-major standards) but compared to your average salesperson, well, I think highly of myself

That drops the comma count from 5 to 3 and makes it a little more fluid.

Just my 2 cents.

Re: Stop Freelancing

#87

Post by w0rd-driven »

lsc wrote: post #36

huh. Interesting. The thing is? I have no trouble at all getting freelancing or "contract" work where I'm paid by the hour, and where I'm expected to pretend like I want to be a full time employee. I mean, other than the pretending, I have no objections; usually the work is easy and the pay is good. The thing is, I like mercenary work, and I'm good at it (Most of the gigs I've gotten, well, they seem to be looking fo…

I'm going to be roughly saying the same thing as josh but I noticed a few examples. Paragraph #1 is barely a sentence. "The thing is.." used more than once and paragraph 4 spurred this comment. That much in parenthesis likely shouldn't be.

I'm only commenting because I myself do this quite often. I'll be very verbose and break into parenthesis for almost no reason. I've noticed a trend lately in my writing that may help you: my verbose emails get largely ignored. I can ask for 5 things that are clear as day to me and get barely a response for one. I've often said the same thing in emails multiple times until the other party finally understands. This is as a full time employee talking to coworkers and partner companies. I would likely blow my brains out if this occurred with every customer.

It still happens now but I take the time to prune every email. I may take 3x as long writing multiple drafts until I can be concise and clear. One of my biggest pet peeves is repeating myself, second is getting a response confirming something I said 5 emails ago. The amount of wasted energy is soul crushing when I think about it and this is a daily struggle. I do write for myself but when that point comes when no one is really reading the response you give, you start to question responding in the first place. That's a terrible place to be.

Re: Stop Freelancing

#88

Post by wsinks »

gridspy wrote: post #81
lsc wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have no idea if that is accurate. But if one of your competitors was easier to understand, I would probably pick them because I don't have the extra time required to understand you and make sure you understand me over the course of our whole relationship. That makes sense. The thing is, I always thought that my writing was an advantage, not a disadvantage. I mean, it's not perfect, or even very good by English-maj…

Just to push you further in the right direction - you need to decide what you want the email to accomplish. It should do that and no more. Often you want them to arrange a consultation with you. So they just need a taster of your solution that will leave them curious for more in person where you can still adapt it to their requirements. Once they are sold, stop selling and go for the close. Otherwise you might talk t…

Yay!

Re: Stop Freelancing

#89

Post by lsc »

phamilton wrote: post #86
lsc wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have no idea if that is accurate. But if one of your competitors was easier to understand, I would probably pick them because I don't have the extra time required to understand you and make sure you understand me over the course of our whole relationship. That makes sense. The thing is, I always thought that my writing was an advantage, not a disadvantage. I mean, it's not perfect, or even very good by English-maj…

A very simple change you could make to your writing would be to swap out commas for other punctuation. Parentheses, semicolons, and other less often used punctuation serve distinct purposes and add to readability. I'm no expert. Here is a stab at fixing a sentence of yours. >I mean, it's not perfect (or even very good by English-major standards) but compared to your average salesperson, well, I think highly of myself…

From a business writing standpoint? that whole sentence is superfluous. The whole thing is an insertion of humility, something that is important when speaking about yourself to other nerds, but is essentially social fluff.

My takeaway is primarily not that I did verbosity wrong, though certainly that comment wasn't right, but that the verbosity itself is the problem.

Take, for example one of the bits of writing I'm most proud of:

http://www.nostarch.com/download/xen_ch7.pdf

We had a real editor, and my co-author had significant writing skill, but even so: Look at the Scheduling for providers section; that was mostly me.

This is about what I had been aiming for in my business communications, and while I still think it's a reasonable bit of writing for a semi-technical audience, it is far too verbose for a business email.

If I was sending that same passage to a business person, I suspect the optimal format would be something like:

"We will allocate CPU based on how much ram the user purchases."

The rest is technical details and fluff. When dealing with a businessperson, the technical details are my job, not something they care about.

I think that my primary self-destructive impulse here is that I want to throw out technical details, in part to prove that I actually know something. I need to restrain that bit of ego, as worrying about the technical details is what I'm (hopefully) getting paid to do.

Re: Stop Freelancing

#90

Post by mehmehshoe »

This reminds me of a PandoMonthly talk with Chris Sacca:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqUG2_cmZ6I

He talks about his "aha!" moment when he was broke and then realizes the people he meets would rather see him as a part/leader of a team, and not an individual.

The moments I refer to are between 32-36 minutes.

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