Holiday proofing your freelance copywriting business

I learnt a very valuable lesson during the Christmas hiatus – don’t try to work when everyone else is having fun.

With deadlines approaching and projects piling up, I chose to forgo a break over the holiday period, naively imaging I could get work done around two over-excited (and over-sugared) kids and one husband under foot.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s not their fault. It was just all so … distracting. And I am afraid I am easily distracted.

I did get some work done – but it was the bare minimum, and I have been paying for it with late nights and early mornings since (hence the delay in reviving the blog for 2014).

Those of you with a J.O.B. probably think freelancing is one big holiday, but guess what? – there ain’t no such thing as holiday pay, so you tend to take the jobs when they land, no matter what time of year it is.

And with Christmas being a time when most of us bleed money, it seemed silly to knock back projects. So I said “yes” – to too many things, with too many conflicting deadlines. And, of course, they all started to cascade on each other, leaving me sleep deprived and crazy frustrated.

So next year, I intend to take time off during the summer school break but first, I need to put in place some strategies to “holiday proof” the copywriting business – and the income that goes with it.

1. Budget ahead: This seems obvious, but I am really not good with budgets and numbers and finance stuff. In fact, about three years ago work sent me off to one of those psychological personality tests where they tell you what kind of job you are suited to. Apparently, I would make an awesome barrister or advertising account executive, and while it showed I had an entrepreneurial spirit, the psychologist who administered the test said “just don’t forget to invoice people”.

I have in my mind how much income I need in a year in order to keep my family in the manner to which they are accustomed. And know I have to account for tax and superannuation and all that stuff you people with a J.O.B. take for granted. But I also need to take into account sick days and leave days, and days when I just can’t be arsed.  So that means working harder in the weeks I can – and storing my figurative nuts for the weeks I can’t.

2. Subcontract: I do a little bit of this now, but I am a bit of a control freak, and for subcontracting to work, I need to let go of this attitude. Using a subcontractor, rather than a straight referral, keeps the client as mine (all mine!). But I have found with some subcontracting that being the middleman can be more time consuming than the meagre commission I charge. That said, contracting is not about the commission, it’s about keeping my business front of clients’ minds by allowing me to take on projects I don’t have time to do myself.

3. Be fussier: I took on a couple of projects over the Christmas period (or, actually, well before, but they dragged on) that I really should have passed on. Not only because they added to my workload, but they were also projects that, in hindsight, I may not have been ideally suited to (trust me, not every copywriter suits every project or every client). But I accepted them for a couple of reasons. The first was, obviously, financial, but the second reason was frankly, the clients sounded desperate and I didn’t want to disappoint them. But, you know what, they would have survived and thought nothing of it. And I would have has less stress.

4. Give myself permission: This is a biggee for me. I always feel I will be letting someone down if I say no to a project, and it’s related to the above point. Plus, as a freelancer, I live in constant fear of the jobs drying up, the income falling and unemployment. But I need to give myself permission to relax, to enjoy my family without thinking about work (I’m sure they think the laptop is part of my anatomy some weeks).

So next Christmas, I will be shutting my copywriting business – if only for a week or two, and enjoying real downtime. Not “downtime but checking emails”, or “downtime except for a couple of urgent jobs”, but a real honest-to-goodness break.

And it’s up to you to hold me to this.

‘Til next time

Nicole