10% and 60%: Important numbers in your freelance business

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First: Spend 10% of your time on marketing

People are always asking…How much time do I need to spend marketing my freelance business? It depends on what situation your business is in:

• If you are just starting out, don’t have enough work, or are branching out into a new niche, market during every second that you don’t have paying work. This sounds extreme, but I really mean it. I did a lot of things wrong during my first couple of years as a freelancer, but this is one thing I did right: if I planned to work 20 hours per week and I had one hour of paying work (the reality of being a beginner), I marketed for 19 hours.
• If your business is at cruising speed, spend 10% of your time on marketing and business development. I’ve always struggled to answer this “How much time…” question, and now I have an objective answer, after reading lots of other people’s thoughts on the subject. Spend 10% of your time working on your business, even if you have enough work most of the time, because that’s how you stay busy.

It’s up to you how to divide this up: 45 minutes per day, four hours per week, it doesn’t really matter. The point is most of us are spending nowhere near 10% of our time on business development.

And then, what do I mean by “marketing”?? I mean, various activities that fall under the umbrella of Always Be Marketing. I wrote a whole blog post about this, because a lot of people asked me, “Are you seriously always applying to new clients??? Don’t you have enough work???” Yes, I have enough work, basically all the time. I’m not in “panicking about how much work I have” mode, because my tolerance for chaos/lack of sleep/work-related stress and drama is (literally) about a negative two out of ten. But I’ve seen too many experienced freelancers whose businesses withered due to complacency and neglect (as one of them put it!). I am not always applying to new clients, but I am Always Marketing.

Next: 60% billable hours

What’s up with 60%? That’s the percentage of billable hours you should be aiming for. Billable hours are hours during which you generate income, generally by typing words or speaking words, in our job! As freelancers, we have, or we should have, a lot of non-billable tasks; things that we have to do, that clients do not directly pay us to do. Here’s an old but still-relevant blog post about the concept of non-billable time.

To keep your business healthy, you need to be spending around 40% of your time doing non-billable tasks: marketing (see above), and also:

• Reading and answering e-mail
• Participating in professional development
• Networking (in person or online)
• Billing
• Following up with clients who don’t pay
• Keeping your tech stuff updated (running software updates, trying out new tools)

Of course, your mileage may vary. If you work mostly for agencies, and your agency clients pay well, you may not need 40% of your time to keep up with non-translation, non-interpreting tasks. But for most of us, spending little to no time on those tasks has one result: your business withers. If you work eight hours a day, I would aim to spend around five hours on billable work, and the rest of the time on non-billables.

I hope these tips are helpful; have a great week!

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. She holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College, is an ATA-certified French to English translator, and is Colorado court-certified for French interpreting. If you enjoy her posts, consider joining the Training for Translators mailing list!