One of my blog readers (a designer who wants to move into freelancing at home) had some questions for me, their questions and my answers are below. I think would be freelancers will find my responses interesting and perhaps even useful.

How many hours, on average, do you work per week?
Unfortunately, as much as I’d love to (because I really enjoy my work/business) I don’t work crazy hours because I have a family to look after and spend time with also, so I’d say I work about 45hours a week.

A word of caution however, when a freelancer first starts out, there is a chance they may find themselves working far more hours than this to get the business up and running and things flowing. Also the learning curve involved in running your own business causes you to work more hours than an established freelancer.

So I would say that in the first 1-2yrs of being a freelancer, there is a chance that you are looking at something more like working 50-60hours a week to get off to a good start because in the beginning you aren’t as efficient as you can be, this is something you learn over time.

Also you don’t have repeat business from clients coming through the door yet, you have to get it all fresh for every single project, and that’s a lot more work compared to an established freelancer who gets a percentage of their work from existing clients returning for more. That’s why it’s vital to be good to your clients if you want them coming back.

Do you tend to work in bits throughout the day, or in one long stretch?
My work is very fragmented because I have two children, not as crazy fragmented as it was before they both went to school, but still fragmented, so my day goes typically like this in the week day;

9.30/10am: Start work after dropping kids off to school and cleaning the bombsite that is the kitchen after breakfast. Work my socks off all day and eat any food over my desk, lol. That gets me about 5hours work.

2:45pm: Make moves to fetch kids, fetch both from school (on two different sites can you believe!). Spend a bit of time getting snacks, chatting to them etc, spending time with them.

4:30pm: Usually go back to my desk, kids playing in their bedroom on the floor below me (my office is in the loft), this working time be a bit fragmented now as they come nagging me about things, sitting on my lap for cuddles, or arguing with each other and I have to intervene. Plus I need to set up dinner for them. I probably get about 1hrs work done at this point. At best….at best… lol.

6pm: Their dad comes through the door from work and I spend a bit of time telling him about their day/my day before escaping to the office in peace, their needs are now his problem ….evil laugh …. ha ha Get about an hours work, without interruption.

7:30pm: Come downstairs to say good night to kids and tuck them in and stories and what not.

8pm: Go back to work, usually for about an hour and finish by 9pm most nights.

So if you count that up, you see it comes to about 8 hours work done each weekday, fragmented over the day a bit, but fairly consistent times. That’s 40hours, but it’s typical for me to spend a few hours on a Saturday/Sunday (which is how I end up doing more like 45hours work a week) catching myself up and making sure I’m really ahead of all my work, so that Monday isn’t a nightmare for me. Mondays can be busy, so you don’t need work hanging over your neck on a Monday.

If I’m really busy (or had to deal with more family things than usual in the week), and need to work more than 45hrs or am not fitting my hours in very well in the week, I simply put in more time at the weekend, or I work later at night to make up for it, that doesn’t happen a lot as my workflow is quite consistent, but it does sometimes get busy enough that I just have to put in a bit more time.

Do you find it hard to call it quits for the day due to your business being at home? (I will also be home-based)
I used to find it hard and was constantly over-working, but as time goes on and novelty wears off (I’ve been at it for 7yrs now) I find it quite easy to leave the office at 9pm at night!

How about holidays? Do you feel you have opportunities to take two or three week holidays? How many times per year?
In the early first year or two it’s hard to take a holiday because you are having to work like a demon, but after the first 18mth or so you really should be able to fit in regular holidays without your business suffering.

You simply give you clients some notice, tie up as many loose ends as possible before you go and then off you go. Warn clients that you won’t be working on projects whilst you are away.

No client will have an issue with that I promise. I tend not to be away for any more than a week however, mainly because I get bored after a week anyway and want to come home (I prefer lots of smaller more regular holidays than one big massive holiday a year), but also if I’m in the middle of a project (which you often cannot avoid really even if you give clients notice) I don’t think it’s ideal to be away for an entire two weeks mid project.

I take at least 4 weeks holiday a year. I took about 5 days over Christmas, and in spring I’m going Gozo, near Malta for a nice sunny break. I’ll be away again in the summer, and also October most likely

Is it hard to leave clients unattended while you’re away?
No, they have notice of my up and coming break, if they have anything urgent they need me to do before I go away, and there isn’t anything that can’t wait a week.

Is your work cyclical or seasonal at all? That is, are there typical times of year when work slows or is hectic?
Not at all, my work is very very regular and my income is very regular. That’s because I am very regular with my marketing activity. If you do crazy marketing for three months, and then do nothing for three months, you can expect your income to be as irregular. If you do your consistent marketing month in month out no matter how busy you get, you can expect your work flow to be equally regular.

Some freelancers have a habit of neglecting their marketing when they are busy …then when they aren’t busy, that’s because they didn’t do their marketing when they were busy. So they start their marketing again and this is how they get in to a cycle of busy, not busy, busy, not busy… … this is a mistake and leads to peaks and troughs in workload. One must work on one’s marketing no matter what, week in - week out.

I agree with you about how to avoid starving artist syndrome - I also have freelancer friends who are “ar-teests” who just don’t have any business sense. But as a savvy business person, do you still go through feast or famine cycles?
Nope, as explained above, do your marketing, no matter how busy you are, and there will be no cycles to suffer from. Work will be regular.

Everyone tells me it takes two or three years to really get the ball rolling and make decent money. Is that so?
I don’t think it has to be quite as long as that personally. If you work really hard I think you can probably manage it in 18mths to get a really good flow of projects going. To be honest I was earning fairly decent money within the first few months, but I did work like a demon! So you will get out of it, what you put in. Work harder and the decent money will come earlier.

Also, again, not all designers are business savvy, so that may be effecting their ability to get off the blocks. Learn about how to run a business, not just how to design well.

Because you’re in the UK, I won’t ask you how much you earn b/c it wouldn’t apply anyway! But would you mind telling me if you feel you earn below, above, or average compared to other occupations?
My income is substantially above the national average (median wage) for UK workers And as you are aware from my earlier responses, I’m not working crazy hours to achieve that and take at least 4 weeks holidays as well. Which I don’t get paid for, blah!!

What happens if you totally goof (e.g. used the wrong measurement and now the brochures are cut to the wrong size!)? As an in-house designer, I felt horrible about such mistakes, but I never had to pay for them. As a freelancer, does that come out of your pocket?

Errrm, I don’t goof is the answer! I’ve not had a goof like that ever. Basically you really cannot afford to be dealing with goofs like that as a freelancer. Can you imagine it if you were responsible for £1,000 or more worth of bad printing? You don’t even want to go there … check your layout over and over and over, do not make mistakes in print layouts.

Personally if I did goof, my inclination would be that yes I have to pay for it, but that would probably depend on how much that amount was….basically, just don’t even get yourself in that situation. I’d cry if I had to pay for a reprint.

It’s your choice of course as to whether it comes out your pocket, they can’t make you pay and your insurance (make sure you have Professional Indemnity) can cover any legal proceedings against you for the money…but you’d have to ask yourself whether it’s worth paying anyway to avoid the potential damage to your business reputation when that client goes round telling everyone how awful you are, and of course there is the ethical side of it.

Again, just don’t go there!

I see that you allow unlimited revisions for logos - does that ever bite you in the bum? Do some clients ask for so many that you end up making, like $5 an hour?
No, the only reason I offer that is because from experience I’ve found that clients barely ever ask for any revisions. If you compile a good brief, really listen to what they are looking for in a design, and get it right, the chances are they shouldn’t want to change barely anything and will just be very happy with what you’ve offered them.

If I do get the odd client that wants a ton of revisions, it’s like one project a year and very much worth it to offer all customers the assurance that they don’t have to pay for revisions …it make the design offering more appealing to prospective clients and as described, very little danger to me.

How much time do you allocate to the administrative side of things? 50%? 25%? My friend was always shocked by how long quotes, invoices, accounting, etc. took her to do.
Administration, customer communications, and marketing take up a good 50% of my day. Don’t forget to think about that when setting your design prices. You’ll only be designing half of your day at best.

Do you set a time limit for how long you spend conceptualizing or producing a concept?
No, I just work on it until it’s right, no matter how long it takes. Some projects are done very fast, some take longer… but it all evens out to a good hourly rate overall and a decent yearly wage, so that’s the main thing.

Also if you don’t get designs right, you don’t have a good portfolio (and your customer might not want to hire you again … so no repeat business, which is valuable), and your portfolio is what helps to win you the next project.

It’s more important to get designs right than worry about how much time you spend on them, I would say that setting a time limit would be a flawed method of running a design business and will hurt it in the long run.

Do you sometimes get “artist’s block” and go on for days, thereby making the job not worthwhile?
Yes, all designers get blocked and it’s very stressful when you have a deadline looming, but this is infrequent enough not to effect my overall income

How the heck do you find time to maintain a blog? You must not sleep!!
Aha, well a blog is part of my marketing activity, so totally essential and included in my 50% of admin/marketing/communications time!

I quite enjoy my blog as well, it’s one of the best business decisions I made.

By the way, I can touch type at very high speeds, this helps me to be more efficient compared to someone who cannot. Not just with the blog, but when quoting, communicating and so on. I wouldn’t understimate how much one can improve one’s efficiency each day by simply being able to type at a high speed.