Freelancing

Let’s talk about freelancing and mental health; a topic that I think is not discussed nearly often enough.
I don’t have ongoing mental health issues, but I consider myself a mental health ally because a lot of people I love struggle with depression and anxiety. Additionally, I went through a period of several months at the height of COVID back in the fall of 2020, when I was under a tremendous amount of stress and, for the first time in my life, I had trouble coping. I felt physically exhausted pretty much all the time, and in general I just felt like I was having trouble functioning.

As freelancers, many of us have a bunch of risk factors for mental health struggles:

• We’re perfectionists
• We spend a lot of time alone
• We don’t have the financial security of a guaranteed salary, and if we’re single or the primary earner in our families, we may have no employer-provided benefits either
• We’re afraid to admit when things aren’t going well in our businesses
• We feel, sometimes correctly, that we could be at risk of significant financial problems if we stop working or even slow down for a short period of time

All of these factors are real, but what can we do about them?

• Most importantly, if you are having suicidal thoughts, call a mental health crisis line or go to an emergency room. There’s evidence that business founders are up to twice as likely as the general population to have suicidal thoughts. If you have thoughts of not wanting to be alive, you need and deserve professional mental health help immediately.
• Second most importantly, try to accept that if you’re at the point of having trouble coping (chronically or periodically), you have two choices: give your brain and your body the break they need, in a way that you control, or risk being forced to take a break in a way that you can’t control. Sadly, I’ve spoken with multiple people in my circle who told themselves, I can’t slow down or take any time for myself because…(who will run my business, who will watch my kids, what will my spouse think, how will I survive financially, etc. etc.), only to find themselves unable to do those things because they ended up needing emergency mental health treatment. The most important step is to not let yourself get to that point.
• All of this sounds like, “Yeah, right, nice idea, but…” or it even seems condescending, as if the key is just to work less and take more time for yourself, which not all of us can do. The reality is that your health is your health: mental, physical, it’s all your health, and we all know that as a freelancer, you are the business. If you crumble, the business crumbles.

In my own life, here’s what that looked like:

• I started meditating for 5-10 minutes a day with the Calm app. That’s not an affiliate deal. I like the Calm app because it has a bunch of different narrators, and you can literally do a meditation that’s one minute or 20 minutes long. Meditating got me off the ledge; after a few weeks, I started feeling that my thoughts were slower, I no longer had a sense of panic when I thought about the hard things going on in my life, and I could identify thoughts and feelings as thoughts and feelings rather than facts or things that were certain to happen.
• I slowed down a bit in general. I’m a fairly energetic person, but I need a lot of sleep, and to be honest this is something that I always feel vaguely embarrassed about. I need at least eight hours of sleep a night in order to function, and honestly I feel better with eight and a half to nine hours, and I sometimes sleep 10 hours on the weekends. I started allowing myself to do this without guilt.
• I prioritized things that I love, like spending time with my husband and my close friends, hanging out with my foster animals, and riding my mountain bike and going skiing. I made a point to take “screen-free Saturdays” where I tried to do an outdoor, non-screen activity all day.
• I eliminated some non-paying work from my work day. I decided to focus on my highest-paying clients, and to offer fewer online courses and more courses that I teach myself, so that I’m as close as possible to my target hourly rate whenever I’m working.
• Eventually, I started going to four yoga classes a week, and for me, this was the major mental health turning point, where I actually started to feel calm and happy again. I realize that this is not attractive or possible for everyone, so I mean it as inspiration for whatever keeps you calm and happy.
• Even if you can’t make big changes, do something, even something small, to support your happiness and mental health; even a small sliver of your day that helps you feel sane and grounded.

I hope these tips are helpful to you in your own freelance journey!

When I need a professional service provider, I prefer to go through a referral or hire someone local. But sometimes that’s not possible, because the task is very specialized, or because I simply can’t find anyone who fits what I’m looking for. I recently had a great experience hiring two services providers on Upwork, and I thought this might be helpful to other freelancers!

In the past Upwork (not an affiliate deal) had the reputation of being one step above Fiverr; a place where cut-rate professional service providers hawked their offerings. I do feel like things on Upwork have changed. I recently needed to hire someone to do a small but very specialized IT job for me (untangling two legacy GSuite accounts and transferring them to Google Workspace), and I also needed to hire an on-demand bookkeeper. After looking locally and not finding anyone who fit what I was looking for, I decided to try Upwork.

I was surprised by a) the quality and b) the non-cheap prices on Upwork. For example, the IT provider I hired charged $125 an hour (and was totally worth it). When I say “non-cheap prices,” I mean it in a positive way; I would be afraid to work with a cut-rate service provider, because I think that indicates either that they have very little business sense, very little confidence in their own skills, or both.

One annoying feature (in my opinion) of Upwork is that you can’t contact service providers and just hire them. You have to create a job posting for people to respond to, which tends to generate a ton of responses in very little time. Update: Thanks to my newsletter reader Paolo Slajmer for letting me know that there is a workaround for this. You can create a job on Upwork and then invite only the person/people who you want to apply for it. I plan to try this in the future! As a filter, I specified that I wanted someone based in the US, and who was willing to talk to me on the phone or over Zoom (no e-mail-only candidates). I was really impressed with the people I found. The IT provider resolved my Google Workspace issue in an hour and a half (which had been driving me crazy for a few months), and the bookkeeper helped me make a smooth transition from Excel sheets to QuickBooks Online for accounting. I would actually recommend Upwork for these types of services if you need them!

No matter where you are on the beginner-to-advanced freelancer spectrum, you’re likely to get requests for work that you can’t fulfill. You may get requests that you could theoretically accept, but you’re too busy, or you’re on vacation, or you may get requests that are for services you don’t provide: a different language pair, specialization, or type of language service. An important part of running a freelance business is never turning down a client without giving them a referral. Even if I get a request for a client for something completely out of my wheelhouse, I never just say, “I don’t do that,” or “I’m not available,” unless I really have no idea who else might be able to help that client. Following are a few tips for referring work to other translators or interpreters:

• Most importantly, unless you never want to take vacation, or you plan on never getting sick or having a family emergency, you need at least one very trusted colleague to whom you can refer your current clients when you can’t take on their work. Better yet, put this person’s contact information on your e-mail autoresponder when you are out of the office (with their permission, of course). It always surprises me when I get other freelancers’ autoresponders that simply say, “I’m out of the office until X date, I’ll respond to you when I return.” And in the meantime, that person’s regular clients are supposed to…????…perhaps find another freelancer and never come back?
• Second most importantly, it’s good to have a couple of go-to referrals for a) freelancers who do what you do, but in the opposite direction (for example, I get a lot of requests for English into French official document translation, so I have a couple of people who I typically refer to), and b) freelancers who do your specializations, but in another language pair (for example, my international development clients will often ask for referrals to someone who does English into Spanish, or Spanish into English).

I follow a few guidelines when I refer work to other people:

• I never ask for any sort of commission or referral fee from other freelancers. I think this is a “what goes around, comes around” situation, so I never ask for money.
• I always specify to the client whether I know this translator personally, whether I know the quality of their work, or whether I’m just looking them up in a directory to save the client that step. I think it’s a good idea to spell this out, so that the client knows your level of trust in the person you’re referring them to.
• In some, but not all cases, I’ll then e-mail the freelancers I referred the client to, and let them know that the client might be contacting them. I typically do this in two situations: if I want the freelancers to know that this client is trustworthy and good to work for, or if I want to let them know that I have no knowledge of this client. I think this is a good step, because many freelancers who receive an e-mail saying, “I was referred to you by X,” will assume that the client already works with X, when that may not be the case.
• If I refer another freelancer for a job for one of my clients, and that freelancer then contacts me and asks how much I charge the client, I always tell them, with the caveat that I am not recommending that they charge the client the same rate as I do.

I think the most important element here is to never send a client off into the ether without pointing them in the direction of someone who can help them. Even giving them a link to a reputable professional association directory is a step up from a simple Google search. I hope these tips are helpful for the next time you need to give a referral!

Here’s a quick tip: That big chunk of time that you’re planning on using to totally revamp your freelance business is never coming. Literally, never. Instead, start with 15-minute increments:
✔️Ping one dormant client (THE most boring, and most successful marketing technique out there; trust me on this one!)
✔️Apply to one agency
✔️Send one LinkedIn connection request to a potential direct client
✔️Comment on one potential client’s LinkedIn post, blog post, etc.

It adds up. Let’s say you did this even once a week. You set the lofty goal of spending *15 minutes a week* on marketing. And let’s say you take four weeks of vacation a year. That’s 48 chunks of marketing work a year. How many freelancers do you know, who applied to 48 new agencies last year (almost no one does that). How many freelancers do you know, who connected with 48 potential direct clients on LinkedIn last year (again: basically zero). Don’t discount the incremental effect of these small efforts!

My accountant’s early deadlines are a really good thing, because they force me to get my year-end finances in order in January. My 2021 income (gross, minus subcontracting) was right on target at a bit over US $100K. I’d like to aim for $140-$150K, but I’m happy with what I earned in 2021, given that I was still in conference interpreting graduate school for half the year, and I then took most of July off to celebrate passing my MCI exit exams.

I always find it interesting to break down my business expenses during the tax preparation process. I hate…no, I actually loathe accounting, but I find the accounting data interesting. My 2021 business expenses were $24,581; approximately the total that I earned from freelancing in 2005. Here’s the breakdown of the top five:

• Office rent: $5,715
• Bank fees and credit card commissions: $4,743
• Online subscriptions (web hosting, Zoom, online course platform, Microsoft Office, antivirus and backup software, etc.): $3,693
• Professional services (accounting, website manager, etc.): $3,092
• Continuing education (conferences, webinars, one on one coaching, etc.): $2,736

A quick analysis of these, and how they fit into my business model:

• I pay $545 a month for my co-working office desk (this expense varied during 2021 because I worked in a small, private office for part of the year). Obviously I could reduce this rather large expense to zero, simply by working from home, but I’m the oddball who hates working from home. That’s a topic for another day, but the six initial months of COVID that I spent working from home were among the least satisfying and least profitable of the past several years. In part, this is because we live in a very small house by U.S. standards (1,150 square feet), and I’ve worked at a co-working office since 2013, so I no longer have an office, or even a comfortable place to work, in my house. Honestly, I like it that way. I like going home and not thinking about work. So, although my co-working office costs almost 6K a year, I’m not looking to reduce or eliminate that expense.
• Bank fees and credit card commissions: Annoying, but I don’t see a way around this expense. Nearly everyone who signs up for a Training for Translators class pays by credit card, and there’s simply no way to take credit cards without a commission. Likewise with my individual translation clients; I offer them options where I don’t incur a fee (Zelle, Wise, etc.), but most still pay by credit card.
• Online subscriptions and professional services: I’m pretty liberal about spending money on things that make my business run better, or that free me up from tasks that I hate. And it seems like most software is moving toward the subscription model instead of the one-time license model. So I don’t see this line item going down anytime soon, and in fact it will probably increase, because I just switched from Excel for accounting to QuickBooks online.
• Continuing education: What can I say, I enjoy learning! I also did a lot of interpreting workshops this year, attended the ATA conference in person (yay), and at about 3% of my gross income, I think what I spend on continuing education is pretty reasonable.

So there you have it! Readers, any thought on your business expenses from last year?