Freelancer

Lately, I’ve been explor­ing var­i­ous “com­mod­ity” free­lance job boards where one bids for projects. In perus­ing a num­ber of sites where only expe­ri­enced web devel­op­ers and graphic design­ers are com­pet­ing against each other, one thing stands out vividly: every buyer/job source has set their price not only low, but out­ra­geously out in left field low.

Another stark fact is that the rela­tion­ship between client and designer is flipped: the client dic­tates a cost and the designer does the work for that price (or lower).

Yet, there are always bid­ders. Lots of bid­ders with low-ball ($90 for a Joomla! site done in one week) impos­si­ble bids. And I sit scratch­ing my head try­ing to fig­ure out how this com­modi­ti­za­tion of a skill set and art form has happened.

There seems to be a basic dis­con­nect between what is needed to earn a liv­ing as a free­lancer and what clients seem to want (at least on these out­sourc­ing sites) to pay. The dis­con­nect goes even deeper. Sud­denly a client can define all aspects of a job from price to design, caus­ing the designer’s role to change from that of a pro­fes­sional to that of a tech­ni­cian. It is unnerving.

Pay Sur­veys & Freelancing

Accord­ing to FreelanceSwitch’s excel­lent sur­vey, The Free­lance Sta­tis­tics Report sold by Rock­able Press, the aver­age hourly rate for a free­lance web designer is $46 (and if you are a pro­gram­mer, that hourly aver­age rate can jump to $49). Sev­eral arti­cles in the blog con­firm that the best way to price a job is to con­sider the hours it takes to do it, plus a per­cent­age added for over­head as well as the com­plex­ity of the job and whether it is intrigu­ing; and then fig­ure out if you want to do it fixed fee (my pre­ferred pric­ing struc­ture) or by the hour.

• Read “Fig­ur­ing Out How Much To Charge” for a quick overview.
• Use the Free­lance Hourly Rate Cal­cu­la­tor to fig­ure out how much you should be charging.
• Read “How Low Should You Go?” to find solu­tions to sin­gle clients who ask you to lower your fee.

But each of these arti­cles and the sur­vey assume that we are using word of mouth and our own net­works to find our next gig and nobody is dic­tat­ing the para­me­ters of a proposal’s price (although as we ques­tion poten­tial clients we do get a strong sense of what they are will­ing to pay).

Here’s a site that clearly describes the dif­fer­ent lev­els of skill sets and how the “real world” prices a web site based on who is per­form­ing the work. You can read the arti­cle at How Much Does A Web­site Cost? (and do real­ize that this was posted in 2006 and the econ­omy is a dif­fer­ent place now). Again, these hourly rates are totally in line with every­thing else I’ve read and do not answer the ques­tion about where buy­ers are get­ting their pric­ing infor­ma­tion when adver­tis­ing a job on job list­ing boards as well as how any­body bid­ding on these bud­geted projects can set their fees so low and survive.

A basic guide for about 10 hours of work is:

• Stu­dent: $100 – $200 ($10-$20/hour)
• Free­lancer: $200 – $1000 ($20-$100/hour)
• Expert Con­sul­tant: $500 – $2000 ($50-$200/hour)
• Com­pany: $700 – $2500 ($70-$250/hour)

Rec­om­mended project budget:

Com­mon hourly rates:

Com­mod­ity Bud­gets Abound

And for the most part, each one of these arti­cles, cal­cu­la­tors, sur­veys, and lists are com­pletely on tar­get with my own expe­ri­ence. And because there is a logic and seem­ing stan­dard to how jobs are priced and bud­geted, I’ve found that it is best to work through your infor­ma­tion net­work to gain new projects.

But when the net­works dry up should you con­sider jump­ing into the fray and join­ing the global com­pe­ti­tion for web design jobs? Should you sign on to any one of the large num­ber of job list­ing sites where bid­ding is the norm and low bids often get the gig?

What holds me back is a huge ques­tion I can’t find a good answer to: why are the bud­geted amounts for work so out of sync with what all our care­ful cal­cu­la­tions of pric­ing say should be the going rate for a web site or graphic design?

Here are some facts I’ve come up with:

1. Our typ­i­cal clients are those we are able to “talk” to via phone, in per­son, or over the Inter­net. This com­mu­ni­ca­tion is cru­cial to build trust between free­lancer and client.
2. Unlike job boards where the buyer posts their require­ments in some­times vague and database-driven terms and our bids are not cus­tomized but must fit in 160 char­ac­ters or less, we are able to col­lect many more facts about a client’s needs, bud­get, and cor­po­rate cul­ture (what makes them com­fort­able) when we deal with a network-based client
3. If the client’s bud­get is not at a level where we can afford to take the work, but who’s project is intrigu­ing, we can edu­cate poten­tial clients about why we are charg­ing the rates we pro­pose and espe­cially about the value of what we offer (be it years of expe­ri­ence, the impor­tance of adher­ence to web stan­dards, the flex­i­bil­ity of using vector-based design tools to cre­ate a unique and ele­gant cor­po­rate brand­ing solu­tion; and on and on) and for the most part this nego­ti­a­tion phase of the pro­posal process is very rewarding.

The end result is that we either are awarded a con­tract with a win-win sce­nario, or we can walk away from those clients where we fail in our approach or with whom we can’t com­mu­ni­cate. This is a pro­fes­sional relationship.

Is there a pro­fes­sional rela­tion­ship with its give and take avail­able on job list­ing boards? I don’t believe so for these reasons:

1. The only access you have to the buyer is via inter­nal PM which the buyer may or may not answer.
2. The job require­ments are one-sided since there is no way to add your design and/or devel­op­ment exper­tise to pos­si­bly assist the buyer in mak­ing an even bet­ter result since what you are typ­i­cally given to work with to cre­ate a bid is the bud­get, a web­site to look at or a doc­u­ment stat­ing the require­ments. One devel­oper is like another in this scenario.
3. Bud­gets for jobs seem to be based on the client com­plet­ing a form and set­ting the price by check­ing off a range that has very lit­tle to do with the amount of work involved or any nego­ti­a­tions. Web design becomes a com­mod­ity and site projects are no longer unique.

On a deeper level, the entire cul­ture of buy­ers who use job sites ver­sus those who iden­tify can­di­dates for free­lance work via word of mouth and ref­er­ences is com­pletely dif­fer­ent. Job list­ing boards con­tain hun­dreds of small busi­nesses and entre­pre­neurs who are used to low-balling their sub-contractors and sup­pli­ers and see a web site as a mar­ket­ing tool and over­head (which it is), and set the price accordingly.

But there is no nego­ti­at­ing when some­one is will­ing to bid the low price and promises to deliver. In addi­tion, sadly, from the way a lot of the job descrip­tions are worded on sites like JoomLancer.com, Get A Free­lancer, Out­Lancer, and so forth, prior design­ers, devel­op­ers, and pro­gram­mers have not ful­filled their promises and these guys feel burned and wary.

State­ments like: “Have been through numer­ous unor­ga­nized pro­gram­mers who dis­ap­pear way too often, pri­vate and social life takes pri­or­ity over their work. We are search­ing for mature, ded­i­cated peo­ple like our­selves, who take their jobs seri­ously and are mar­ried to their work and value their clients. We are not inter­ested in work­ing with any­one out­side of the U.S” tell me that buy­ers are try­ing to pro­tect them­selves from decep­tive bidding.

More Ques­tions Than Answers

So, my ques­tion remains: Where do all these guys who list jobs on free­lance job boards get their bud­gets from and do these projects ever actu­ally get off the ground and pro­duce high-quality results? Is this the wave of the future? If so, how can we learn to live in such a world?

Fonte:freelanceswitch.com