Barbara Kerbel, who runs a corporate communications business based in Great Neck, N,Y., has been a solopreneur for more than a decade. She started her business after a successful career as a vice president of corporate communications for a publicly-held company, a columnist for Newsday, and a weekly newspaper journalist. In this installment of our interview with Barbara, she address pricing, how to define business terms and how to get projects started properly.
How do you come up with fees as a freelancer?
It is pretty much up to you to determine whether you want to charge by the project or prefer an hourly fee. Project fees can be dangerous because sometimes a piece of work is touched by so many hands and changed over multiple drafts before it even gets to the decision maker, who then start additional rounds of changes that often lead back to copy that is closer to what you originally handed in.
Resentment rears its mood-altering head, and you feel taken advantage of. On the other hand, if you work quickly and have an easy-to-please client, you can benefit from a project fee. Regardless of how you are going to charge, the closer to reality you are able to estimate, the happier both you and your client will be. If settling on a single fee for the project, be sure to specify what that covers.
How do you know what terms to negotiate in the contract?
As a freelancer, your currency is the hour, and your income is bound by the number of hours you can work until such time as you have enough work to hire others to work for you. In this tough economy, companies are taking longer to pay, and it is not unusual to be asked to agree to a payment plan weeks after you should already have been paid. This is not a happy situation. I submit an invoice for a third to a half of total estimated cost the day the client gives me a go and then invoice again on completion. For a very large months-long project, I indicate milestones in my estimate indicating when I will bill. For jumbo jobs like repositioning or branding a company, I ask for a third of the cost up front. It is not a matter of trusting a client. It is about protecting your wallet from loss stemming from unexpected hiccups in a company's revenue.
Once you land a job, what do you need to do to get ready for your first client meeting?
On phone or in person, your output can only be as good as the input you receive. Learn all you can about what a company does before you ever meet. If you are working for a specific division or product manager or market segment the prospect serves, do as much homework as you can. This demonstrates that even if you are not a master of the industry, you know something. More importantly, the more you know going in, the better your questions will be. An input meeting is an amazing opportunity to gain the confidence of the team with which you will be working, to show that you are a strategic thinker, not a drone. The words, "You've hit the nail on the head," or "You know, we haven't really thought of that," spoken by a new client, are a symphony. If you can elicit that kind of response, you have already taken a leap toward earning a client's trust.
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