Professional and non-professional clients

When going freelance, it is logical to use the experience gained at your previous job, rather than master a profession from scratch. After working in a website creation studio, I decided not to change the direction of my activity and continued to develop in interface design. In addition, during my work, I learned to get along with my boss and colleagues, cope with emergency and difficult situations and solve problems on my own, without bothering others with unnecessary questions.

The first thing I did was send emails to St. Petersburg and Moscow studios with a proposal for cooperation. I promised to literally single-handedly replace an entire design department, explaining along the way: it would be cheaper than hiring staff. Since I already wrote letters quite well and knew how to work with text as an interface that called for action and covered the objections of a potential client, several studios responded, and partnerships began between us.

So I went toprofessional clients- literally on employers in my niche. Those who can assess my professional level, know the market value of my services and take on many risks in project management, so my missed deadlines or poor-quality interim results would also be treated professionally. I came up with the definitions of “professional” and “non-professional” clients myself and have never seen them anywhere.

The professional clients are very similar to our previous employers, so when I started working with them as a freelancer, I felt like a fish out of water. But after working with them for three years, I grew out of this format and faced a number of restrictions that did not allow me to earn more.

• Sometimes there was no direct access to the final customer. Communication took place through a “damaged phone” in the form of a project manager. This made it difficult to do quality work.
• Even when demand exceeded supply, it was difficult to raise prices. At some point, professional clients found another contractor with average market prices instead of me. And I was hitting a financial ceiling.
• While continuing to work with professional clients, I did not develop the skills necessary to attract clients, improve communication, and improve the level of service.
• I was making happy not the final client who wanted a solution to their problem, but the project manager on the part of the professional client who wanted to get the maximum possible profit from my work, often sacrificing quality for this.
• Payment depended on the final customer and on the processes within the company with which I collaborated. In such conditions, it was quite difficult to count on 100% advance payment. There were delays in payments.

Of course, there were exceptions. Some studios allowed me to visit their clients and let me handle all the communication myself. There were also those who agreed to high price tags and also made 100% prepayment. I still work with them to this day.

During the period of cooperation with studios, I created videos that taught how to use design programs, and also periodically wrote articles about my profession. These materials eventually led the firstnon-professional clients. Those who needed to design something for themselves. These were novice startups and teams with a finished product, but without a designer on the team.

And at first I couldn’t make them happy, although I tried my best. This is because not all the skills to perform this task can be obtained through hiring or working with professional clients. And here are the things I was not prepared for:

• If I missed deadlines, the manager didn’t come to me and ask, “How are you?” No one “reprimanded” me for being late or asked me to name the next date. I found myself alone with my failure and had to tell the client what happened and how it would affect the project. And at first, this caused situations when I was afraid to contact the customer, I disappeared for several days, trying to finish everything so that “the client would not notice.” This, in turn, reduced the quality of work.
• To carry out expensive transactions, I had to create an individual entrepreneur, independently prepare contracts, issue invoices, and close the completed work with acts.
• Such clients could not appreciate my professional skills. The only thing they immediately paid attention to was the level of service provided.
• The result of the work must, first of all, be clear to the client and please him, and secondly, be objectively effective (many may be outraged by this approach, but later in the book I will try to explain how to do my work as efficiently as possible and at the same time in such a way that the client likes it).
• Between me and the client there was no manager who could take the blow and smooth out rough edges in case of conflict situations. All responsibility for the process and result lay with me.

But now I could raise prices when demand was high (“there are many of you, but I am one”), take 100% advance payment, work on a personal brand and make clients happy so that they come back again and again, and also recommend me to others (by the way, professional clients never recommended me to anyone, so as not to accidentally lose a good performer when he is busy in other projects).

A particularly big breakthrough in this direction occurred on the day when I myself first found myself in the shoes of a client for design services. I would even recommend that a beginning freelancer order work from one of the competitors and see what’s what. Pay attention to those places in the process of providing the service that brought pleasure, and those that caused irritation. Then use the experience gained in your work. Without such experience, you can provide services all the way based only on your assumptions about what the client wants and what makes him satisfied.

Total. Professional clients are like our former employers, and they are easy to start interacting with when going freelance. This may be an intermediate step on the way to non-professional clients. The latter are more demanding of service and less focused on the average cost. There are many more of them than professional clients, and by learning to find them and keep them happy, you can feel as confident in freelancing as you did in hiring (and maybe even more confident).