Do you have a percentage, say no client should take up more than X% of your business? What is the ideal client balance?
That’s a very interesting question, and always a good thing to ask no matter whether you’re in your first or your tenth year of freelancing.
While most of us have income goals, productivity goals, and even publication goals, few of us stop to think how much each publication should feature into our scheme of things. If an editor gives us a low-paying assignment, we rarely try to figure out how a regular relationship with the publication might work into our productivity and income goals.
I’ve only recently started thinking about client percentages. Like with everything else, there’s an ideal in my mind and a reality. For me, I look at the ideal from a yearly perspective. I’d like to have ten regular clients and each of them would have no more than 10% share in my income, so that if one of them went under (as has happened) or decreased rates (also happened) or tried to take advantage (of course it’s happened), 90% of my business would be still hum along smoothly and even if I didn’t replace the client immediately, I’d be okay.
The reality, of course, is that I have about four or five regular clients and each time I’ve finished a piece for them, I almost immediately start work on another one. In addition to these, I have about six or seven more clients who I’ll work occasionally for (say once or twice a year) and only pitch them when I have a story specifically for them. Then of course, there are the one-offs, people who write to me for a story for a particular issue, editors who needed someone at the last minute and came across my website, or publications that don’t typically run India-based stories but might be making an exception for something that needs covering.
I always try to have regular clients. If there’s a publication that pays poorly, for instance, I think hard about whether or not it’s worth the effort of working for them, because do I really want them to govern 10% of my time or income?
Right now, though, each client represents approximately 20% of my annual income, and of course, that is a little problematic, because if one of them were to go under, it would be a big financial hit. If two or more did I’d be in big trouble. I’ve been in this situation before, which is why I really believe in diversifying my client base, and taking full advantage of being a freelancer in terms of number of clients.
You can have too many clients, though, and that’s one of the pitfalls you should look out for as well. I hesitate to add more clients to my mix at this point because it becomes a juggling game and overwhelm and overwork start to seep in. There will come a point in your career, however, when you’ve found your ideal number of clients and adding on new ones means that you have to replace someone already on your list. It should also be said that if you have too many clients (and ten is a very large number of clients), you can’t possibly please everyone if you’re writing for them all each month or if they’re all in the news business and come to you for breaking news each time.
Perasonally I have two news-based clients, two that need analysis when major news events are over, and the rest are all feature-based. I don’t think I could handle any more news people at this point, because if a natural disaster or terrorist attack happens, I really can’t write for more than two publications at a time. Or even be available to them. So I think about that and plan it out accordingly.
No two freelancers have the same client mix though, and how many clients you have does depend on how long you’ve been working, what kind of writing you do, how often you write for them, and how efficient you are with your marketing.
That said, what the ideal situation would be for you is definitely worth thinking about.