Anchor clients: What are they, and do you need them?

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In my experience, translators and interpreters don’t tend to talk that much about anchor clients. We’re more likely to say “dominant client,” or just “my biggest client(s).” And that’s not the worst way to think about it. In my mind, an anchor client is one that represents:

• At least 10% of your income
• Or, five figures of income: a client from whom you earn $10,000 or more in a year

By this, I mean that even if you’re earning 200K as a freelancer, $10,000 is still a big client. So let’s use those definitions: 10% or 10K. Most people also think of anchor clients in terms of regular workflow. If a client sends you a 12K project and then disappears, I’d be more likely to call that a windfall. To me, anchor clients are the ones who are sending you $1,000+ of work every single month, or a 3K project four times a year.

Why would you want anchor clients?

In my experience, anchor clients are one of the best routes to a stable freelance income. Anchor clients free you from the need to constantly hustle for work, and they greatly decrease your administrative overhead.

For example, I really enjoy translating official documents for individuals. It’s fulfilling, and it’s some of my highest-paying work per hour. For one page, I generally charge $100, and for more than one page, $75 per page, with each page rarely taking more than 45 minutes. The significant downside is that most projects are small (one to three pages), and clients often refer me to other people or come back with more work, but it’s rare that they have truly ongoing needs. Thus, the client acquisition process starts all over again, from zero, after every project.

Anchor clients are the opposite of that. They’re clients who come to you over and over again, you get to know them and their needs, and your administrative overhead drops a lot. You also tend to get better at their work because you do a lot of it. You have glossaries, you have style sheets, you know what they mean when they describe a project to you.

Anchor clients have a lot of advantages!

What are the downsides?

On the flip side, anchor clients have some risks and disadvantages. Specifically, I’d say:

• Anchor clients, by definition, really like you (or they wouldn’t use you that much), which can lead to a huge percentage of your income coming from one or two clients.
• Anchor clients can keep you from branching out; instead, you’re doing the same types of work over and over

Here’s one of my favorite examples of the pluses and minuses of anchor clients. When the Broadway musical Phantom of the Opera closed in 2022 after 13,781 performances, 11 of the show’s 27 orchestra musicians had been playing in the orchestra since the show opened. No kidding. Even with vacation, illness, etc., many of them had played close to 10,000 performances of the exact same music. The pluses: financial stability (how often does that happen for musicians in New York?), a great community, predictability. The minuses: that’s all they do! Instead of alternating between teaching gigs, weddings, music festivals, let’s spend the summer at a cello academy in Rome, they went and played Phantom 10,000 times.

That’s anchor clients in a nutshell. Overall, they’re great. But/and, when you get an anchor client creeping toward 50% or more of your income, that’s a risk, and stagnation in and of itself is a risk.

Still, those risks are survivable. When I translated mostly for agencies, I had several years in a row where my main agency client represented about half of my income. And in a sense, having an anchor client (even if their work gets a little monotonous) frees you up to do other work that might not pay as well.

Can you market specifically to anchor clients?

Not really, but you can smooth the path for anchor clients, in my experience. Most often, anchor clients grow over time; you start small(ish), and then they like you and you like them, and things grow from there. I do think it’s worth letting clients know that you enjoy large/ongoing projects, if you do! In my experience, it’s surprising how many translators and interpreters would rather have 20 clients, each making up five percent of their income. And, I mean, you do you. Personally, I like to have about 70% of my income coming from three to five anchor clients, and the other 30% coming from once-in-a-while or one-off clients.

For example, in 2023 I had four anchor clients, and I actually earned almost 75% of my income from them, with only 25% coming from clients from whom I made less than $10,000. Personally, I like this, and in order to create these kinds of relationships, I specifically tell clients that I’m interested in ongoing work. Particularly with interpreting, there’s a “groove” with each client: the platforms they use, who their interpreters are, what backchannels you use to communicate with your partner, etc. etc. It’s a lot of work to manage this with a client that I only work for a couple of times a year. I let clients know this: if the relationship is a good fit, I would love to work for them several times a month, or more. I currently have an anchor interpreting client for whom I interpret multi-session online courses that last for an entire semester, and I actually love it. Not everyone enjoys this type of work, so make sure to inform clients if you do enjoy it.


I hope these tips are helpful! If you want to add anything to the discussion, just add a comment.