Having all your eggs in one basket

One of the most common fears for a freelancer is now knowing from where your next job is coming from. What do I do once this current project ends is a question that hovers on most of our minds, if we don't have a list of projects on the pipe line.

A balanced business development program (I prefer the term business development opposed to marketing for freelancers), should have a couple of projects that are waiting on you to start, and a few more in various early stages of discussion/negotiations. Such a order pipeline would also mean that you have accurately planned your current projects and they are going to end on schedule with minor variations at most. You need to be able to move on to the projects on the pipeline is a reasonable time frame, otherwise those clients are not going to wait on you forever.

In my case, I never could work on a pipeline mainly due to this reason. The first client that I started to work with, started to treat me as an extension of his team and his company and he got me involved with most of the projects that he was working on. And at that time, HE has a lot of projects on the pipe line. So by extension I also had a lot of projects on the pipeline.

After 6 months down the line we have cleared most of the backlog. Now we are at the tail end of his last major project. In about a month or so, this project is going to move out of development to maintenance. It is already live with a few more features to be added. I am starting to feel the pressure of continuity. For the past 6 months, I did not have to worry about business development. I had work, more work than I could actually do. Now my work load is showing signs of diminishing.

While my client, being the nice guy he is assuring me that he will find enough work to keep me busy. But I do not wish to become a burden on a client. After all, there is no obligation for him to keep giving me work. There are a few small projects and maintenance projects that we had put on hold due to increased workload with new projects. He is planning to work on those while he markets his services and lands new projects.

For the first time in my freelance career I am feeling the pressure to market my self. I also had become lethargic and made the classic mistake most freelancers make in leaving marketing and business development for the last stages. As a technologist, my first love is technology and when there was a new project to be built from scratch, using the latest technologies, I jumped at it and deferred my least preferred task of business development.

There was another issue which prevented me from working on new project leads. That was I wasn't sure when I was going to become free. I was working full time and more for the single client I had. His projects had shrunk schedules and we crammed and met them. We delivered all right. And some projects just kept growing. His clients liked what we churned out and wanted more and more features. And we happily churned them out as well.

So essentially I have all my eggs in one basket. I like what I am doing and I kept doing it. My client demanded my full time commitment and I was happy to give it, as that meant I was meeting my financial targets. But as a result I had risked my whole business upon a single client and have been putting all my eggs in one basket. I think it is time for me to 'diversify' and look for at least one more client. Ideally I should start off by reducing time spent on my current client to 75% of what I do now and try to fill that 25% with work from another client.

Another one of the things that I wanted to do when I started freelancing was to build my own web applications and market them. I had a couple of ideas but I never really pursued them, mainly due to lack of time. I gladly welcomed any work sent my way as I wanted the money. But me being the bad financial planner that I am , though I earned more as a freelancer, I have already spent all that extra income as well. I need to plan and save up an emergency fund and maybe, if I can save enough, I would like to reduce my client work even more and start putting in my time to develop and build some of the application ideas that I had. Better still, I should brainstorm and come up with more novel ideas and work on the best ones!

I would love to hear from other free lancers on the strategies they adopted to diversity their client base and to maintain a healthy project pipe line.