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6 Critical Lessons I Learned After 6 Years of Freelancing

My new company logo, from my dad
My new company logo, from my dad

This summer, I’m celebrating the six-year anniversary of my company, Maple World Translation. I’m still a full-time freelancer and despite the ups and downs, I love my status.

I enjoy the flexibility, I love the core of my business (who wouldn’t want to play with words all day??) but above all, I feel like I’m learning life lessons and acquiring new skills along the way.

So here are 6 critical skills I learned after six years of freelancing!

It’s okay to say no

For freelancers, each new assignment is like a birthday gift. Work! Money! Life is beautiful, I’m needed again! At first, it’s very tempting to accept every single request, but I found out that it’s also okay to say “no”.

There are different options depending on the scenario:

  • When I’m offered a genuine opportunity for which I don’t think I have the skills set, I refer the client to a colleague if I know a better-suited person. For instance, I turned down an English-to-Mandarin assignment because the document was extremely technical and it just wasn’t worth the time and effort for what I feel would have been a mediocre result. I can speak Mandarin but I don’t know anything about Mandarin legalese.
  • If the request is unrealistic and problematic parameters can’t be negotiated, I’m out. Last year a staffing agency contacted me to work as an English-to-French interpreter for a congress. It sounded like a good opportunity at first, but the client expected one person to be on-site 12 hours a day for three days with zero backup and just translate all discussions and materials “on the fly”. Oh, and did I mention it paid minimum wage and that I’m not an interpreter in the first place? Yes, I bailed out, even if the client couldn’t understand why I would “pass on such an amazing opportunity”.

Bottom line is, if I don’t think I can do a good job, I turn down the request. My reputation and my sanity matter most on the long run.

Invoice chasing is a new sport

I’m pretty lucky: in six years of freelancing, I only had to chase my money twice. Once was with Adecco, the middleman a client used. Adecco somehow thought the “total” line on my invoices was merely a suggestion and I fought for months to have them paid in full. This was a case of incompetence—like I said at one point, exasperated, “you only had one job: deal with my invoices!”

More recently, I worked with a smaller company with terrible communication practices. This became clear during the assignment—they were constantly losing documents, not returning phone calls or emails, etc. Nonetheless, I completed the job and, unsurprisingly, getting my invoices paid proved difficult. I don’t think it was done on purpose, I assume nobody cared enough to follow up. Well, I did care. It took a few weeks of regular phone calls to get my money but I was paid in full… including the late-payment fee I added on top of the bill because, you know, fuck it.

It’s okay to fire clients

The company I just mentioned above? They contacted me again after the invoice debacle for another assignment. I stared at the email for five minutes, torn between laughing out loud and crying. I typed a very satisfying yet respectful reply in which I explained that chasing payment wasn’t my favourite sport and that accepting another assignment was too risky considering I had spent a month getting my previous invoices paid. Come on, guys, seriously…

Bottom line is, if a client is rude, difficult and doesn’t pay, it’s not a client but a liability.

Time management is the key

I never wait by the computer for new assignments. Time is a finite resource and I’d rather put my awake hours to good use. When I’m not busy, I use my free time to tackle other parts of the business (marketing, invoicing, etc.), run errands (it’s much more pleasant to shop at 11 a.m. on weekdays than at 4 p.m. on Saturdays) or just relax. I don’t mind working on weekends because I had my days off sometime during the week.

I always carry my smartphone with me, so I can check my emails and reply to clients if needed. I accept new assignments and complete them when I’m back—as simple as that! It requires some flexibility but it works for us since Feng also has his own flexible schedule.

Leverage all the professional help you can get

There are hundreds of tasks I can do by myself, but they are a hundred more I’m not skilled for. I can’t do it all alone, so I leverage all the professional help I need to keep my sanity. For instance, I do my monthly invoicing and bookkeeping alone but a certified accountant prepares my corporation taxes and HST returns. Whenever I’m assigned a large project I can’t complete alone, I hire some of my translator friends to help out. Last month, I even hired my father to create a fancy logo for my company, something I never got around doing!

Keep all your skills up to date… and never stop learning new ones!

Even if I occasionally hire professionals, I still do a lot more than “just” translating or editing documents, the core of my business. I learned to draft proposals, to negotiate deadlines, to set my rates, to collect HST, to deal with all kinds of personalities, to manage multiple assignments, to market my services and much more. Just last month, I had to update my Excel skills to design a better invoice template that calculates HST automatically and yes, I’m very proud of it!

I have yet to become rich, famous and super successful… but I can say proudly that I love my job. That counts for something, right?

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Zhu

French woman in English Canada.

Exploring the world with my camera since 1999, translating sentences for a living, writing stories that may or may not get attention.

Firm believer that nobody is normal... and it’s better this way.

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