Handling work overload

In the process of progressing a freelancing career, there may be a fortunate position of you being inundated with more work than you can handle. If this is happening to you, what are the possible ways that you can handle such a situation. Though it is a fortunate situation, it requires careful handling in order to not to damage the client relationships.

Ok, to the possible ways that you can handle it:

Turn them Down

You can politely turn them down. Almost all clients will understand that you are not able to take on their projects due to your current commitments. This is something that you can do maybe a couple of times to a client and then the chances are that they may not come back to you in the future, because they may develop the presumption that you are fully booked.

Refer

You can refer them to a friend or a fellow freelancer. The clients will in most cases appreciate this option as you are recommending the another person and they will be a bit comfortable.

Again there are two downsides to this. If the person that you referred the business to does a good job the clients may give him/her preference over you for future projects. Almost all freelancers would not let go of a good client very easily. So if your client happens to be one of those gem of a client, the chances are your fellow freelancer will go out of his/her way to retain them.

The other end of this is if the person does a shoddy job, it will damage your reputation as well as your relations with the client as well. Since their decision to go with the person you recommended depended also on the trust your client has placed on you, this will result in clients’ trust in due getting diminished or even completely destroyed. So this is something that you should do with care.

Of course depending on your relationship with your colleague, you may earn a referral fee for the project that you referred as well as for any future work the client may give him. Or even better if you can get into a formal agreement with them both to say that this is a one time arrangement and that they cannot work together in future without your consent in future.

Subcontract

You can take on the job and subcontract it to another. This way, you are eliminating any risk of you losing your client in the long term. The client may feel comfortable as they are dealing with the same old you. But this option might end up adding an additional workload on you as now you will have to manage the subcontractor as well as ensure the output meets the quality level that the client is expecting from you. Also, be prepared to spend a significant amount of time in communications as now the communications flow through you.

Expand/Evolve

You can expand single you to a entity. This is the natural evolution of a freelancer unless you have a strong preference to stay as an independent freelancer. This is the birth of a company and there are quite a few successful companies that have started off in this manner, specially in the IT domain.

Personally this is my preferred option as well. I would like to build my freelancing career into something that is not solely dependant on my time. As a freelancer, my most precious commodity is my time. The amount of work I do is directly proportional to the time I can put into doing it. So my income becomes a direct function of my available time.

As with most of us, I came into freelancing seeking financial, creative and of course time independence. So the natural step I would take is to expand or evolve. I would like someday to be not working but still earning an income. The way to do this is to have others do the work for you. Of course, the chances are, even if I can afford to not to work, I’d still be working or developing something as I love what I do! But it is good to be working because you like what you do rather than because you have to!

Free tools for a freelancer/start-up business

One of the first things that I did when I started off as a full time freelancer and entrepreneur was to look for those applications that would help me do a variety of things. And one of the criteria that I had was that all these tools had to be online tools, allowing me to use them where ever I am, if there was an Internet connection and also which would allow me to share them with my future accountant or other admin staff members, where ever they also may be. What ever I did, I was keen on building a business that operated on through the Internet as opposed to through a traditional office building.

The other reason for looking for web based applications was because of my keenness to build a virtual business operation where the employees were telecommuting. This would allow me to tap into the best people immaterial of their location, allowing the business to scale up and down with the demand for its services, and allow the employees the freedom to work from the comforts of their homes.

Here are the applications that I looked at and eventually settled on.

Email / Calendar / Web Presence / Document Sharing

Google Apps for your domain without a wink of an eye. I had used this before for my personal domain and it was a no brainer. You get so much of services for free if you have less than 50 users. And the limits on these accounts are more than enough for my use!

The older version of Google Apps had Google pages which were pretty good to design and host a basic web site. But with the phasing out of Google Pages and introduction of Google Sites, the new wiki style web site structure may not be ideal for a company wanting to project a professional image.

Invoicing / Accounting

Since I am not an accountant and my exposure to accounts are really minimal, I am not sure what an accounting application needs. But for the purpose of sending estimates, tracking time spent on clients and projects and invoicing, which were the things that I needed to do, FreshBooks.com met my needs perfectly.

So far I can live with the limitations of the free Freshbooks account. The one that I am going to exhaust the soonest is the limit on clients. It allows three and I already have three on my account. But it allows unlimited projects and that is a relief.

But I am not entirely happy in the way in which it manages projects, which seems like a bit of an unorganized approach. I think it works fine for Freshbooks as its intention is just to record time spent on each task on each project.

I have already hit the ceilings of the free account in Freshbooks. But I am still not in a hurry to upgrade as my main client is through oDesk and oDesk tools are what I am using for him. So I can scan stick to the free plan on Freshbooks, at least for sometime, with creative using of clients.

Actually there were a couple of other tools that I evaluated, LessAccounting, CurdBee, Blinksale being some of them. One of the main issues I had with those were the lack of an integrated time tracking module. Though they had integrations with other Time Tracking apps, none of those apps were easy enough to use or were free!

CRM

This is not an application that I am using much now due to the fact that most of my project chasing happens on oDesk and others are happening through word of mouth. But Tactile CRM is my choice. There are a few limitations on the free version, but I think it is a decent start.

But if you are creative enough you can use Google Contacts also for this purpose.

As my business continues to grow I may outgrow some of these applications. But that will be a long way to go, until I reach that point and at such times I will stick to these choices. At some point you have to stop evaluating and start using them!

With these kind of free services available on the net, it is pretty easy for companies to start operations. There is a whole lot of infrastructure available, at our disposal at no cost. So all you need to do is to concentrate on the business.

Gmail and Tasks comes out of Beta

This might be a little bit of stale news, but I could not resist making a note of it when I noticed it. Two of my favorite apps have graduated out of Beta: Gmail and Tasks.

I have been hooked on Gmail ever since I got an invite, back then when it was an invitation only system. What hooked me to it initially was the enhanced storage, but eventually I got hooked to it unconventional user interface and the powerful search features. I was never an email organizing person anyways. And Gmail suited me just fine. Just let the messages be and search and retrieve when you want them.

Since my dabbling with GTD started I have been looking for that perfect task management system and was glad to find something right inside my Gmail inbox. I know there are plenty of other darn good web based GTD systems, but the fact that this lived right inside Gmail sealed the deal for me. The only thing that I would really like to see with Tasks is the ability to sync it with third party apps. Particularly I would love it if there was an iPhone app that synced with Tasks. That would have made my day as I am not a great fan of web apps on the iPhone.

But since I sync the iPhone calendar with my google caledar, at least those tasks with due dates appear on my iPhone as well. But I would like to see:

1. Google publishing an API for Tasks as part of their GData API.
2. A native iPhone app that would sync with Tasks.

When Google publishes an API for Tasks I should maybe write the iPhone app and make a few millions!