Diversify Your Client Portfolio
This will be my 100th article here on LinkedIn, and it's the second one I've penned today.
I don't often write more than one article on the same day, but I'm off to a friend's wedding party this evening, so I figured it'd be cool to give myself a little reason to celebrate as well.
I'm selfish like that!
As I'm sure you all know, I love audiobooks, and right now I'm listening to the The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy by Thomas J. Stanley.
It's pretty dry, and the focus on frugality doesn't exactly make for a riveting read, but this morning something grabbed my attention.
The author had surveyed people on their perception of risk.
Specifically, what they consider to be risky behavior.
Those employed full time in regular jobs regarded "entrepreneurship" as risky.
Yet, when the entrepreneurs were asked the same question, they cited "having only one source of income" as risky behavior.
In other words, they viewed the employees as being in the more precarious position - on the grounds that if they lost their job for one reason or another, they would have zero income.
It made me think about freelance translation, and about the importance of working for a large number of customers - be they agencies or direct clients.
I realized that theoretically, the more customers you work for, the safer you are.
You can lose a customer for a thousand different reasons, and it can happen to anyone. The customer could go bust, they could quit the translation business, someone better qualified than you could start working for them, they could decide your rate is too high, the project manager could take a dislike to you ... anything is possible.
If you only have two customers, losing one wipes out half your income, but if you have a hundred, it's only one percent.
Many freelancers allow their client pool to shrink as they perceive maintaining a large one as time consuming and troublesome.
There's certainly some truth to this, as let's face it, a lot of agencies don't exactly make it easy for us to work for them.
There's the registration process, and once you're working for them, they often have all these in-house rules and procedures that you're supposed to follow, and keeping track of all these can be a strain.
But there is a solution.
And that's to be assertive.
By offering the same service to every agent.
You might be surprised, but the vast majority of agents are actually very flexible in this regard, particularly if you have standout skills in your field yet are still willing to work at market-competitive rates.
Here are some things that the service I offer does not extend to:
- Submitting a checklist with my translation
- Putting comments into a separate file
- Adhering to the client's own style guide
- Flagging errors in the source text
- Searching for translations of terms in reference materials (short glossaries are OK)
- Formatting
- Extensive checking and proofreading
By providing everyone with the same service, I can handle work from multiple agents without spending time on tasks that are specific to the customer and without even having to remember what these tasks are.
The time saved means I don't need to charge as much per word as I would otherwise and am able to handle more work and get it done faster.
And my customers love that.
For more insights on freelance translation and how to make a real go of it, check out my ebooks on Amazon/Kindle:
88 WAYS TO BE SUCCESSFUL AS A FREELANCE TRANSLATOR
NEW (May 2019): SUCCESSFUL TRANSLATOR VS. UNSUCCESSFUL FREELANCE TRANSLATOR (SIDE-BY-SIDE COMPARISON)
(Links are for amazon.com, but you will need to purchase from your country's Amazon/Kindle site.)
Best of luck on your journey.
Matt