Is it tacky to ask for referrals?

Thanks to reader Laurie R. for suggesting a newsletter on the topic of referrals (if you have a topic you’d like me to write about, drop it in the comments!). Laurie wrote to me:

I’ve been listening to quite a few business podcasts lately on the topic of referrals. Some say you should never ask for a referral, but should instead simply offer exceptional service and make sure to touch base with your clients often, so you are always top of mind. Some say you should ask for referrals often and make it a part of your workflow with clients. Some say that offering clients a discount on their next invoice in return for a referral is a great idea and others say it devalues your services. What have you seen work well in the past? To ask or not to ask? Referral discount or no?

This is an interesting topic, and one that I haven’t written about before! There’s no “correct answer” to this issue, but here are my thoughts:

The key: The type of client

In my opinion, the whole referral issue, what’s a good business practice and what’s in poor taste, what devalues your work, depends on the type of client you’re working with. Specifically:

Agencies: unlikely to work

• Agencies: I don’t see referrals being particularly effective with agencies. Honestly, agencies want to keep their favorite freelancers to themselves, because they want you to be available when they need you. If you want to get more work from an agency client, I honestly think that nudging, as annoying as it feels, is probably the best strategy. Here’s everything I’ve ever written about nudging dormant clients. Even if an agency client isn’t dormant and you’re working for them regularly, you should still nudge them: “I have some availability this week,” “Just wondering if the annual report project I worked on last year will be going ahead for this year,” etc. With agencies, it’s not that I think that a referral system would be a bad idea, I just think it’s unlikely to work.

Individuals: go for it!

• Individuals: I do a fair bit of official document translation work for individuals, and I actually think that actively asking for referrals and offering referral discounts could be a good strategy with this client base. Personal document translation is straightforward: it’s the only translation service for which I nearly always charge the same price. And, most expats know other expats: I’ve had official document clients who have referred me to four or more other people from their country. So here, I’d say go for it. I don’t think you have to be too specific, because you don’t want to commit to a certain amount. Just say something like, “Thank you for contacting me for your official document translation; if you have the occasion to refer a friend or colleague to me for this type of service, please ask them to mention your name. I’d be happy to offer them a courtesy discount, and I would also offer you a courtesy discount on any future translations.” I’ve never done this, but I think it’s a good idea.

Direct clients: Frame it as them giving you access to their network

• Direct clients: Here’s where things get tricky, because your contact at a direct client could very well be in a position to refer you to other people. Maybe it’s a large company and they know people who work in other departments. Maybe they have friends who do similar jobs at other companies, like they’re the international communications director, and they know other international communications directors. And yet, Laurie perceptively points out that this approach might devalue your work. Here’s what I’d do:
  • I’d be very hesitant to offer an actual monetary discount to a good direct client. In my freelance business, these clients pay me well, and I don’t want them to think that the rate I charge them is something that I pulled out of the air because I thought they would say yes to it.
  • For example, I’ve had a couple of direct clients ask me to do translations for them as individuals (“My daughter is applying to graduate school in California and needs a few pages translated”). In those cases, and I’m not saying this is the right answer, just that it’s my answer, I chose to do the translation for free as a courtesy gesture to the client, rather than charge less than my regular rate.
  • Pre-COVID, I also used to send my best direct clients a nice gift at the end of the year as a thank-you gesture, but so many of them now work from home that I’ve stopped doing this.
  • Rather than outright ask for a referral, I’d position your client as someone who is in a position to help you (something that they’ll likely be flattered to do) and phrase it differently. Something like: “I’m always looking for more clients to whom my skills might be helpful; are there other people in [that client’s sector or role] who you think I should get to know?” Or, “I’m looking to connect with other people in the luxury travel sector; does anyone spring to mind?” Or, “I’m really glad you were happy with the annual report translation, and I’d be interested in helping more people who need that service. Do you know anyone else who’s trying to get a report translated for this year’s deadline?” The key here is the wording: you’re not pumping your client for work, you’re positioning them as having access to a valuable network.

Adjacent topic: referral fees

Laurie didn’t ask about paying referral fees to colleagues, but let’s talk about that briefly. Here, I mean that when a colleague refers you for a job, should you pay them a percentage of what you earn?

In general, I’m a “what goes around, comes around” kind of person. I typically refer colleagues without expecting anything in return: simply because I like helping clients, and I like helping colleagues. I do keep a list of colleagues who either repeatedly send me referrals, or who refer me for a large-ish project (maybe $1,000 or more), and I send them a gift at the end of the year.

However, in 20+ years of freelancing, I have on a couple of occasions paid a referral fee to a colleague. For the record, the colleagues who referred me didn’t ask for this, and insisted that I didn’t need to pay them. But in all of these cases, the referral was for a project that morphed into something so large (in one case, $30,000 of work in one year) that I felt like a box of chocolates was an insufficient way to thank them, so I insisted on paying them a monetary referral fee. It’s worth noting that if you live in the U.S., you should ask your accountant whether referral fees might be tax-deductible. My accountant felt that they were, and told me to keep documentation of them for my taxes.

Great question from Laurie, and I hope these tips are helpful! Don’t forget to sign up for March Marketing Madness!

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Last week, I taught a free webinar called “What now?” directed primarily at mid-career translators whose freelance businesses are struggling.

Why mid-career people? Because, in my experience, mid-career people are having the hardest time adapting to “the new world order” of freelancing.

• For early-career freelancers, “it is what it is,” as we say in U.S. English. There’s nothing to adapt to, because they never knew a world in which translation agencies paid by the word for you to translate 10,000-word PDFs into Word documents using whatever technology you felt like using, or none at all. In my experience, early-career freelancers accept the things that mid-career freelancers are struggling with: they’re more likely to have a diverse business from the get-go; they’re more likely to aim for direct clients; they’re more likely to accept that they need to always be marketing.
• For people who were already established in the direct client marketing when ChatGPT hit, not much has changed. In my case, my translation clients never cared about technology and still don’t, because they’re not paying me for French word = English word, they’re paying me to solve a problem (translation) that they don’t want to deal with. Additionally, when a client comes to someone with 20+ years experience, most of it in the direct client market, they know that it’s not going to be cheap, and they either need/want that level of experience, or price is not a huge concern.

It’s not the service, it’s the type of client

One point I tried to make the webinar: if your business is struggling, you really want to focus on what kinds of clients you’re working for, less than the services you’re offering. My concern here is that people are looking for a magic bullet, like “Translation is dead, but if I can only offer the right service that clients want, then I’ll be fine.” For example, I mentioned on the webinar that content strategy and content marketing writing are one of the fastest-growing areas of my business right now; and a couple of people on the webinar mentioned that when they see copywriting and content writing jobs posted on LinkedIn, they often have hundreds of applications within a couple of hours.

My reaction: That doesn’t surprise me at all, and I would definitely not depend on LinkedIn (or any other online job board) as a source of well-paying work. Personally, I think that nearly any “word work” job posted online these days is going to get hundreds of applications, simply because a lot of people are struggling to find work. The key is finding clients who want your unique expertise, and who want an ongoing relationship with a freelancer they trust and who understands their needs. If you can hit that sweet spot, then you’re going to have a lot more success with charging rates at or above $100/euros an hour rather than the $25/euros an hour that you’re probably seeing on LinkedIn. Editing for translation agencies may not pay much, but editing for C-level corporate executives who have to write in their non-native language could pay really well.

The six ideas

If your freelance business is struggling, there are way more than six things to try, but I identified six that I think are worth considering for mid-career translators. If you’d rather listen to these six ideas as a podcast, you can do that by finding Training for Translators on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or using this direct link.

A number of people have recently asked me, what would I do right now if my business were really struggling? I’m happy to tell you, but the problem is that I’m not you. If you’re the main wage earner in a family with small kids, a big mortgage, and a spouse who’s home full time, that’s a lot different than being single, unattached, and having the option to store your stuff in your parents’ basement while you go digital nomad-ing and decide what to do with your life. I hope that these six options will at least give you some food for thought, particularly if you had a difficult 2025 and are trying to move forward.

1. Keep doing what you’re doing, and hope that things improve. Could we see the AI-fueled pendulum swing back toward human translators? Possibly! A couple of people on the webinar mentioned that they’re seeing this happen in some sectors, specifically gaming. And I think that clients are realizing that good translations cost money either way: you need IT and QA people to maintain your large language model, or you need translators to do the translations. I’d put this in the category of stranger things have happened, but I wouldn’t count on it and I definitely wouldn’t make this your Plan A unless you have another job or enough savings to wait this situation out.
2. Offer the same services, but to different clients. This, in my opinion, is the best option for most people, but also the most challenging. “Just keep being a translator, but for clients who appreciate you more and pay better” is a great idea, but if it were that simple, you would have done it already. Working for direct clients involves a lot of selling, at least at the outset, and the truth is that most freelancers have a hard time making themselves do that, with enough consistency, to establish a solid base of direct clients. But if you’ve been “thinking about thinking about” marketing to direct clients, it’s never too late to go for it, and I’ll take the liberty of mentioning that March Marketing Madness could help you get started!
3. Branch out into work that agencies still pay well for. There’s a reason people enjoy working with agencies: they find the clients, and then you just do the language work, which is what most of us are here for. And agencies still pay well for certain types of work: two that spring to mind for me are conference interpreting and medical/scientific linguistic validation (where you’re checking the actual scientific content of the document, not just the translation). Here, the issue is how long it takes to develop these skills if you don’t have them already. For example, I decided to branch out into interpreting in 2018, passed the court interpreter exam in 2019, did a conference interpreting Master’s in 2020-2021, and 2022 was the first year that I had a significant amount of conference interpreting work, so three to four years between the idea stage and the income stage.
4. Branch out into other “word work.” Again, this is going to require selling to the right kinds of clients, but I’d personally look at a) fact-checking, and b) writing and editing for companies or corporate executives who don’t have the writing skills or the headspace to do it themselves. I recently attended a presentation by a journalist turned fact-checker who started an agency in 2024 and already has 40 (not a typo) fact-checkers working for her! Caveat: if one of your struggles is that you can’t make yourself market to direct clients, this could be more of the same.
5. Look at salaried jobs that you could do with your current skills. Three options I’d consider: language teaching (we may see people streaming from translation into teaching, the reverse of the usual pattern), working in-house for a translation company as a salesperson or project manager, or working in-house in the localization department of a non-translation company, for example a software company or medical device company. I honestly think these are good options. If your freelance business is struggling, the income volatility can get pretty terrifying, and this is something you could start doing right away.
6. Finally, you could change careers completely. In the spirit of putting all the options on the table, let’s include this one. My advice: just make sure that you’re moving toward something better. As someone on the webinar commented, don’t become an entry-level coder and have that be eaten by AI too. Here in the U.S., there’s a huge demand for people to do education and healthcare jobs where you cannot work remotely. The “Careers” page for my local school district (not even an enormous city), includes no fewer than 10 pages of job listings, many of which don’t require a teaching license. I think I’d also look at IT jobs where you could study for some type of credential on your own, then apply for a salaried job. This occurred to me after I talked to someone with no IT background, who studied on her own for the Salesforce Platform Administrator certification (using Salesforce’s free training site) and subsequently found a salaried job paying $88K a year.

If your freelance business is struggling, you’re 100% not alone, and I hope these ideas are helpful! Just leave a comment if there’s anything you want to add.

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Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! I hope you’re all doing well! Scaling back your work with a client, or discontinuing your work with them completely, is honestly a sign of a healthy freelance business. It means that you’re progressing beyond what some of your clients have to offer, and hopefully working with more interesting and better-paying clients.

And yet, it can be very stressful to decide how and when to do this: Do you outright break up with the client and tell them not to contact you again? Sometimes! Do you just passively become “too busy” to take their work? Sometimes! It depends on the context…let’s take a closer look.

When to break up with a client

If you feel like a client treats you poorly, just dump them. Freelancing, and life in general, are hard enough as it is. You don’t need:

• Clients who you repeatedly have to chase for payment
• Project managers who disrespect you
• Anyone who constantly haggles about rates when you’ve already discussed that; like you’ve agreed on a rate, and then they continue contacting you for work that pays less than what you agreed on
• Clients who repeatedly renegotiate working conditions that you’ve already objected to (i.e. you’ve already told them, “I don’t translate more than 2,500 words per day,” and then they keep asking if you can do 10,000 words in two days)

Here’s how I handle this, in an effort to be polite. I tell the client, “To save your time and mine, you don’t need to contact me…” (in X situation). Such as:

• “…you don’t need to contact me about additional work until my last invoice has been paid”
• “…you don’t need to contact me for interpreting assignments with less than a two-hour minimum”
• “…you don’t need to contact me for machine translation post-editing work”
• “…you don’t need to contact me for rush work if a rush charge is not applicable”

Here, I’m talking mostly about agencies. For direct clients, I think it’s always worth trying to accommodate them, and charging accordingly, unless you really hate the work (I hate MTPE and I won’t do it at any price). But for example, if the client insists that they can only pay for one hour, that may just be a company policy. Ask for double your hourly rate and see what happens. If they have a hair-on-fire rush job, charge what makes it worth your while. I’m surprised at how often this approach works with direct clients.

Always consider keeping them as a KTLO

client

There is zero shame in what Ed Gandia calls KTLO (keep the lights on) clients. Clients where, there’s nothing particularly great or horrible about them, they send you work that pays the bills. Unless you really dislike a particular client or their work, consider keeping them on your KTLO list, or only working with them when you have nothing else in the pipeline.

For this reason, I honestly don’t mind clients who use automated assignment systems (I have a number of interpreting clients who do this). Instead of having to explain that you’d really love to work with them, but you’re busy, you just click Accept or Decline.

Even if you have to respond to the client directly, consider something generic like, “Thank you for this request! Unfortunately I’m not available but I appreciate the offer.” Honestly, I like this approach. So often, we feel the urge to overexplain when we turn a client down. You don’t owe them that; you’re not available, that’s it.

I think this is a particularly good option if something about your business is in transition: you’re trying to work with more direct clients, or you’re starting out in subtitling or non-native editing, or whatever. Personally, I try never to give up my existing KTLO clients until I’m really, really sure that I no longer need them. In many cases, I never actually give them up, I just politely turn them down indefinitely or until they stop contacting me.

Option three: raise your rates

To do this, you have to be willing to lose the client, but it’s an option. Think about what bugs you about this client, then raise your rates until the work feels worthwhile. Lots of businesses impose unilateral rate raises: no negotiation, no apology. Each year, my accountant sends me what he calls an “engagement letter,” getting my approval of his terms of service for that year. One aspect of that is his hourly rate, which goes up by about 5% a year. He doesn’t say, “I hope this is OK with you!!” He simply says, if you want to work with me again this year, here’s the cost. This is a totally valid option if you don’t mind losing the client abruptly.

If you started the year with a marketing push (Marketing: Do something!!), hopefully you’re starting to see some results. I hope these tips are helpful if you’re looking at paring back some of your work with existing clients!

Have a great week! Don’t forget to sign up for March Marketing Madness by Sunday if you’d rather pay $95 versus $99! Here’s the free preview if you’d like to try before you buy.

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Year eight of March Marketing Madness, my month-long freelance marketing challenge group, kicks off on March 2! MMM is:

• Daily motivational videos to get the marketing juices flowing
• Daily marketing challenges, with at least three options so that there’s less of an excuse to not do anything!
• A library of marketing resources: e-mail templates, how to nudge a dormant client how to research direct clients, various money resources, and more!
• An optional but fun Slack group
• New this year: three live sessions with recordings provided

MMM is always a fun time, and I’ve honestly never talked to a participant who didn’t get some good inspiration from it! However, if you want to try before you buy, I’ve created a free preview that you can access here.

Registration is $95 through February 15, and $99 thereafter! I hope to see you there!

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Hello, and Happy Monday! Here’s an update on Training for Translators’ upcoming classes:

• This month’s free webinar, “What now?” is sold out. Join my mailing list in the sidebar of any blog post, to stay informed about future free webinars!
• There are six spots left in this month’s session of Direct client research lab, my personalized direct client recommendation class. Registration is $190.
• If you like free stuff, you should do the free preview of March Marketing Madness! Back for its eighth year, MMM is a month-long challenge group combining motivational videos, bite-sized marketing tasks that will take you 15-30 minutes, an optional but fun Slack group, and, new this year, three live sessions!
• If you just want to sign up for MMM, here’s the link! Registration is $95 until February 15, $99 thereafter

Thanks and have a great week!