How to Make Freelancing Easier

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here JS Scott Tolinski

and Wes Bos. Welcome to Syntax. This is the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Today, we've got a freelancing show for you. We haven't done a a show on freelancing in, I don't know, maybe 6 months or so. So we're gonna talk about how to make freelancing easier because, like, honestly, I've seen a lot of developers go into freelancing, and then 6 months later, they're they throw their hands up and say say, ask for it. I'd it's too much for me. There's too much going on, and and that's fine. But I see a lot of people quit for the reasons of it's too hard to, like, run the business. And so we're gonna we're gonna talk today about some tips and tricks that you can do to make actually freelancing easier, both in terms of, like, coding as well as the business part of it. With me JS always is mister Scott Tolinski. How are you doing today, Scott?

Hey. I'm doing good.

Just hanging out here. Just got back from a trip. We went into Grand Lake, Colorado, which is, like, the biggest natural lake in Colorado. So it's big, big lake with mountains all around it and hikes. And we were able to take the doggies, which was a lot of fun because there's not a ton of vacations where you get to take the dogs and go on hikes and stuff. So Yeah.

It was a it was a nice Node little getaway, although there were wildfires and we were sort of hucking in some smoky air sometimes, it was a whole lot of fun. And I'm feeling refreshed, ready to get back to, back to work here. It's awesome. It looked beautiful. Can't believe Colorado's got some views, man.

Yeah. It has some views just about everywhere you get. And the cool thing is is that there's, like, maybe about a 100 more of these little little nooks and crannies in Colorado that we've never been to, obviously, not being natives from here. So there's just so much to do, and there's so many more places to see. There's some great sand dunes in the middle of the mountains we're trying to get to too that just look like you're in the middle of the desert in the middle of the mountains. It looks pretty sick. Awesome. Wow. That's interesting.

Yeah. Scott, today, we are sponsored by 2 awesome companies. First Node is Sentry, one is Netlify. We'll talk about both of those companies partway through the show.

Alright. So let's let's kick it off. We're gonna start with code because, like, if you're being a a freelance developer or a freelance designer, that's actually the thing that you need to do at the end of the day. So we'll start off with tips on that. You wanna kick it off, Scott? Yeah. Let's let's tip it off here. The first Node is going to be to assemble,

basically, a set of reusable starters, resets, component libraries, things that you're used to using, and things that you know and like using because there's nothing better than dropping in your your custom grid component or your grid class that you created that you know exactly how it works, and you use it a 100 times, and you're very familiar with it. So, really, as you're working as a freelancer, compile code snippets, starters, resets, anything that you might have to make your code time a little bit easier so you're not having to have the cognitive load of, alright, now which grid framework should I use for this one? Which one? What do I Scott? What should I use for this Node? What browsers do I have to support? Node. Assemble your tools, have them ready, and know exactly what they do.

Next one we have here is I often see a lot of stress around getting things done in time for what you've quoted the client. So a lot of times people will bill. We'll talk about billing hourly versus project. But, essentially, sometimes you have in your head, this thing should take me 5 hours, and you're 3 and a half hours into it, and you're almost ready to scrap all of it. And there's a lot of stress that comes from that.

And I think it's fine to go completely over your budgeted time. You obviously can't bill the client for that extra time, but it's fine to go over that time knowing that, you know what? I'm just learning as I go. I'm getting really I'm getting much faster at it. So if you go into a shop for your car with a mechanic, mechanic always oh, I I would say almost every mechanic, does what's called book time. So I had what did I have? The airbag struts replaced on our Yarn. And they they look it up in the manual and say, this is a 2 hour job to replace it. So what they do is they charge you for 2 hours worth of your time, and it could take the guy, like, 26 minutes. Why? Because he's done a 100 of them in the past, and he's super good. He knows exactly what to do. He's got all the right tools and, just bing, bong, boom. He's not gonna charge you less for that.

By the same means, if if it's his first time doing a a specific project, replacing a head gasket or something like that, it it might take them an extra 5 hours over what the book time is on something like that. And and that's okay because you're you're learning. You don't charge the client more. And I think that that also applies to Wes development as well, because there's gonna be times where you're super efficient, and there's gonna be times where you just need to take a bit longer to learn something like that. And don't stress either way.

Yeah. That's definitely a big thing because, I mean, in addition to, like, you mentioned being so proficient at some things that you can get them done really quickly.

This is this is sort of on the topic of, auto automobile repair rather than on web development, but there's a really good, Reddit which JS just rolled into the show. I love it. I was hoping you're gonna say that. Yeah. Which totally reminds me of this because you might you might also think that you you can, you know, just slam dunk this Node. You you you got it all lined up, and you might not know that when you open the car door that there's just gonna be, you know, 10 fish in the in the front seat. How those 10 fish get there? I don't know. But now you gotta deal with it. That's just how things work sometimes. Right? So even if you can slam dunk something, you never know exactly if if that time is going to be there. So giving yourself that bumper time is is a big thing. I'd never heard it called book time, kind of an interesting concept. So definitely an important thing. Another one is going to be unless you're planning on having extra time. Right. If your if your schedule is tight, tight, tight, don't pick something that you've never built in before. Yeah. Because if you've never built something in something before, it's really difficult to gauge time. And I am I've been described as Quixotic.

I believe that's the pronunciation of that word. Do you know Quixotic? No.

Quixotic means exceedingly idealistic, unrealistic, and impractical.

So it's like it's basically idealistic to a fault. And I definitely am the type to be like, well, yeah. I knocked that out in 5 minutes. Let me just use this brand new Wes thing that I've never touched before. That's not a great recipe for success when you're running a business. Keep in mind, as a freelancer, you are running a business, and part of running a successful business is knowing when to be practical and when to be adventurous.

So don't build on something that you don't know if you don't have the time to do it. For the most part, WordPress is good enough for just about most projects that you're going to encounter that are are basic websites. Right? No need to get fancy fancy.

Totally. And it's probably super tempting to always go for whatever is the latest and greatest. But, honestly, being like a year behind hot tech or 2 years behind tech when you're doing client facing projects is super key because all the bugs have been ironed out. There's thousands of Stack Overflow questions and blog posts and YouTube videos and and things like that, and you're not the person running into the issue. It's like, all the time when I'm making courses, I'll always take the beta version of whatever it is they're working. Like, example, Apollo 3. I was working in it in beta, and I hit all kinds of roadblocks JS I was one of the 1st dozen people to actually use that feature, and, like, that's why it's in beta, so people could test it out and report bugs. And that's frustrating because, like, if you need to get something done at a certain amount of time, it's hard to go back to the client and be like, hey. Like, I'm waiting for this open source pull request to be merged in order to support this feature that you want. That's such a good point, and that's not necessarily even something that I thought about. But, like, if you if you do think about it, again, this project is for your client at the end of the day, and it's bad enough that when you might overestimate

your abilities to get things done faster. But like you mentioned, you have no ability or capacity to understand if there is, like, a bug in something new and fresh and open source or whatever that I wonder, like, how many aggressive GitHub issues or whatever could be avoided if people people just use what was appropriate for their project? Because I'm sure that people are under stress for times and deadlines, and then they go to the issue. Just send the fuck in. And they're like, well, it's pretty an open source. Yeah. I

I had that with my my personal website. So my personal website has been for 6 months, and I went to go fix something the other day.

And the darn thing, I could not get it running. And I reinstall Xcode, reboot the computer a couple times, and npm install and switch my node Vercel, and I'm just like, like, this was a WordPress website running for 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. Never never had a problem.

And now I'm, like, 6 months into this, like, new Node React Gatsby stack, and the stuff changes so quickly. It's such hot new technology that, like, it's it's frustrating that it just obviously got working again. But I was just, like, sitting there thinking about, man, there's something to be said for tech that you know just works. Yeah.

Absolutely. And and tech that you're gonna be able to predict is going to work under a deadline when you need it to work. Tight. Tight. Tight. Yeah. Totally.

Another tip we have here for Node is just reusing code. So this, obviously has to go into a contract, meaning that, like, if you write code I've talked about this on the podcast before, but, like, what I would do previously is things like a store locator. I would, write the code once, and then, like, 5 or 6 different clients would want that implemented on their website. And you can reuse, like, at least 80% of that base code from project to project.

That's key because you can go really, really fast if you're billing them 20 hours for that thing, and it only takes you 5 to implement it. That's totally okay. As long as you're doing value based billing, I would feel a little bit weird about that if you just like, Yeah, it took me 20 hours and then the next person took me 20 hours. But if you that's why we really like like value based billing on this thing because you're like, All right, this is worth

$2,000 to you. And then the next guy, it's still worth $2,000 even if it takes you a quarter of the time to implement it. Right. Because in those 2 scenarios, right, that you laid out where, you know, you're billing 20 hours for something that took you 5 hours or you're building based on the one of those is ethical, and one of those is not ethical.

So that's where project based billing can save your butt and help you out a little bit.

The lastly we have here is target similar types of clients.

If you become the the dude who's building everybody's interactive restaurant menus or something like that or the the dude or or do that. Sorry. If you are implementing specific types of websites over and over again, you're gonna get really good at those websites. You're gonna understand what the pitfalls are. You're going to be able to speak from a place of authority on those websites or those those types of things where you're saying, hey. I have encountered so many different aspects of these things that you may not have thought about. In fact, one of your competitors revealed to us that they had these issues. Not not not sure in trade secrets here, but one of our one of our competitors had these issues. Perhaps, you might have these issues too. Let's go ahead and build this in ahead of time so that way you don't run into these issues down the line. It makes your work that much more bulletproof.

Yeah. That's so key. If you can just, like, target a specific little niche of clients, like like, one aspect that I heard a lot about, since the pandemic hit JS greenhouses needed the ability to sell direct to consumer.

My dad makes websites, and he got hammered by all these people that own greenhouses in the area because, like, literally Node one was set up with a website. And then he figured out all of the sort of nuances of how to use specific software for their specific use case because, like, you can take some like yoga booking software and try to apply that to a greenhouse, but it's not exactly the same, right? So I always think that's really interesting when people are like, Yeah, I did a website for, like, this Node type of client, and now I'm down a rabbit hole and I just work in this Node single industry.

Yeah. I think that's really important. We when I used to work in an agency, we we did a lot of conference websites, and that was the same thing. It's like we know what kind of things you're going to hit when you're building a site for a conference. We know all of the tools and plug ins to use. We know the ins and outs, and we can get you set up for that in absolutely no Node. And it's gonna be custom. Right? So, again, lots to say there. Next stuff is a big, big, big piece of this pie, which it it's it's one of the harder things for developers. Typically, us developers, we're good at code. Right? We're good at the logical stuff, but we're not necessarily as good with the communication based things. And I personally had been on teams that struggled with communication, and I myself have struggled with communication on numerous times. I know if you've emailed me, you probably know that I am not super great at getting back to you that fast. But in more addition to communication might have been the most difficult aspect of freelancing for me personally.

And what I needed to do for myself to make it easier would be to really make sure that I'm communicating often, clearly, and frequently, often and frequent being the exact same thing here. I don't know why I wrote it twice. People aren't going to be mad at being too informed. They just know when to leave all of the technical crap out that they don't care about. Right? They don't care about whether or not you built it on wide angle lens dot JS or cloudlifter dot j. I'm just looking at stuff around my office. But, whether or not you build it on various tech, they don't care about that. They just care about the blazing speeds. Talk to your clients often, maybe set up like a schedule to talk to them. I've heard that, like, you know, maybe saying, like, okay, Friday morning is update day, and I'm just gonna send you a little update, put it in your calendar, put it in your time block planning, whatever, make it happen and update them every week, even if it's just, hey. No progress this week. Just wanted to give you a shout out. Hope everything's alright. A key component is making sure everyone's on the same page, right, about things.

Another tip I have here is is kind of the flip side is, like, also don't overwhelm them. Like, that's kinda what Scott was saying. Like, don't tell them about every little technical change that you're making. They just care about, like, their website coming to fruition and and building it. And, like, I was just thinking about an example with the guy who handles our retirement investments and whatnot. And, I was getting, like, I don't know, 4 or 5 different emails from him and these PIN codes to log in and all the stuff. And I basically just shut down and stopped emailing him back because I was just Scott that I was like, oh, screw this guy. But I was just like, okay, This seems like a lot. I'm gonna I'm gonna do it do this later because I Scott sit down and get a coffee and figure it all out. And this is now a big thing, whereas it use just used to be an email. And I can tell that he noticed that because I just I just stopped emailing back. And now when he emails me, it's very clearly bullet points, things that are black, are action items that I actually need to get back to him. Other things are just information that I can reference, and I was like, oh, good. Like, what a good skill set on his end because I'm sure he has clients who love the constant communication. But for me, it was too much. He was able to to adjust how he communicates with me so that he can get replies from me as well. Because that's that's the other thing JS sometimes you're a you're a freelancer, and you've got deadlines. And you you tell them you're gonna launch by a specific time, and you email them and say, hey. Can I get approval? And you don't hear from them for for a week. And and that's frustrating for you as a developer because you got lots of stuff to to work on. Right?

I think their goal should be to reduce the cognitive overhead. Yes. That's key. The one thing that I really hate in emails is when, like, there's a huge long paragraph and then, like, 1 tiny little simple question at the end when the email could have just been the question. So, like, for me, it would be really hard to parse and find that there's even a question in that email.

So, like, keep your emails to the point. Like, if you don't need to ask a question and don't ask a question, like, if you can figure it out, like, oh, do you think this blue JS better than this slightly other blue? No. You make the call. You're the expert, and don't increase your your clients' amount of decisions they have to make. I don't know if how much decision fatigue you get, Wes, but I have to make so many decisions a day. Like, Courtney will ask me, like, hey. Should I leave this door open or close it? Like, I don't care. Just do do whatever you want. I I do not care here. I have so many other things to worry about in this regard. Totally. If you wanna go back to episode 117

of syntax, Sanity treat, how to email busy people. We talked a lot about how to write a good email. And it's funny because I often get emails from people, and it's very clear that they listen to that podcast. And Oh, yeah. I I love it. And I'm just like, oh, thank you. I I feel kinda bad because I'm like, don't email me unless you listen to this podcast. But,

they get replies because they they do a good job. What am I and and along the lines of that same thing JS one of my favorite email types that I get is when somebody emails me and they just say, hey. I know you're busy, so just respond with a number 1, 2, or 3. 1, I'm interested and would like to talk more. 2, I'm not interested. 3, like, you know, go to hell or something. So, I no. I I I really appreciate that as long as that makes it so easy. And you know what else makes your life easy? What? Netlify.

Hoo. It makes shipping and deploying your code extremely easy.

And Netlify was one of our 1st sponsors. And before they were a sponsor, they were a company that I admired very much for the ease of use. In fact, you probably heard me talking just about how easy Netlify is to use before on the show. So what is Netlify? Well, Netlify is a host for your front end at Jamstack code. They say it's the fastest way to build the fastest sites, and that's such a great tagline. Because if if your site's on Git, GitHub, whatever, oh my gosh, you just select the repo, you click go, and it usually just builds it or you type in build command, and then you get all sorts of awesome stuff like automatic deployment. And let me tell you, since we started working with Netlify, they have just grown and grown and grown.

They now have a ton of additional features, like the ability to log in via their identify platform, dealing with large media in ESLint easier ways, split testing. Have you used the split testing stuff? Because that's been one of the a and b testing than something that I've been interested in checking out Wes you can serve up 2 different versions of your site to different people, new DNS based analytics, serverless functions, and more. So check it out at Netlify .comforward/syntax and sign up today. It's free to get started. Free, free, free, free, free to play your site and see it going. I know anytime I have a site like, you know, my personal site is hosted on Netlify. Anytime I don't need a server side, server database, whatever, I I'm just jumping right for Netlify immediately.

Yeah. They're they're really working on all of the, like, sort of gotchas with the static site where you don't have a server side.

They have it. I think they have an answer to almost everything.

The analytics, split testing, media, contact forms, serverless functions, plug ins, all kinds of stuff. It's pretty good. I got my own website on Netlify, so definitely recommend it. Alright.

One more thing about just, like, communication is training your clients that you aren't available 247.

So sometimes if you're trying to please your client, you email them back immediately or send them back an email 4 or 5 times a day because some clients are like that Wes they just are they're super involved in the project and then doesn't really leave you with much time to actually do the development.

So just, like, sort of training them that I'm not replying to emails outside of working hours, or I'll send you 1 email a day, so don't email me. Like, I used to I I've told this story before, but I had a client who had, like, a BlackBerry, and every single thought they had, they would just type into the subject line of an email and fired off. So I'd have, like, 20 emails of just, like, don't forget about this and what about this? And I was like, you need to put this or like when it came to site review warp I'm just like, okay, like, here's the website, give me your feedback. It all needs to come out once and you need to like Wes need to go over it together before we go and fix these things. Not every single time something flies into your head or you're significant now that doesn't like the color and you send an email about it at 4 AM.

That's no way to live your life. So you have to train them that they can't do that. Yeah. That is it is a big thing. And I have I have a client one time who was like, he did this similar thing. It wasn't as bad as what you're describing, but it was definitely similar. And then I would just send them an email, like, once every 2 or 3 days. Like, I didn't ever come out and say, like, hi. I am doing x, y, and z. Like, I'm blocked, like, whatever. And then he sent me 1 email. I just remember, oh, I see why you're not emailing me constantly back.

You're doing time blocking or something. Like, he had this realization. He sent me the emails. Like, I see you're doing batching.

Yeah. Yes.

Beautiful.

I stay productive? What do you do all day? Do you just email all day? Is that all you do? There's some people that do that. Like project managers,

realtors, and people like that, their job is to be in contact with people and to always be sending stuff off. And our job JS developers is to spend as little time possible not doing banging on a a thing and writing code.

Yeah. Right. Alright. Let's get into the next one, which is time management.

This is is super key.

Similarly related to to communication because, like, honestly, this pretty much goes for anything in life. But if you are a good communicator, you can get what you say you're going to do done on time. You will be incredibly wealthy because, like, honestly, like you think about like a web developer or designer or even just like somebody working on your house, it's so hard to find reputable people that give you good communication and get it done when they say are close, at least close to when they're going to get it done or if they're not gonna get it done on time, then there's the communication about something like that happening. It's so frustrating in life because people are just flaky and don't do what they say they're gonna do. So, honestly, those are the 2 the 2 keys to to freelancing.

Yes. The 2 keys besides, actually getting a website that works is communicating time management.

Tip that we had for time management would be to set up alerts for yourself and your own calendar.

Like, if you have specific dates, specific times that were discussed, if if you establish some sort of calendar, add it to your actual calendar. Put alerts on there. Put put day alerts the day before, week before, whatever. Give yourself that time and those internal tools, fire alarms, whatever, to make sure that you know exactly what the deadlines are 247. Because if you say you're gonna deliver it on Friday and you deliver it next Monday, it's a small change, but it's still a hit to your reputation, your ability to get things done on time, and, overall, their likeliness to

refer to you to someone else, which is really what this is all about. Right? You do the good work so that you can get more good work. Right? Yeah. Sometimes I have my accountant. He says, hey. I'm gonna I'm gonna send you the numbers by 5 Npm, and then, like, they don't come and I have to email me like, Hey, where's the numbers? I'm like, Don't make me manage you.

That's so frustrating to me because, like, I want to do my thing, which is coding.

I'm hiring you to do it. If you're going to be off, Node. At least just tell me, like, what's going on and when to expect it and things like that. So, yeah, don't make the person your client have to, like, micromanage you. I remember just this is totally unrelated, but I once had a meeting with a client and it was at a brewery, like up the street from me, maybe like a 15 minute walk or something like that. And I was just sitting at my computer, and I get a text like, hey. We still good? And I was like, oh, man. I totally, totally spaced on it. So I just, like, gunned it. Like, I ran to the brewery, and it was I ran there in, like, 7 minutes, and I just, like, came in huffing and puffing. And just I just owned up to it because, like, what else are you going to say coming in, like, panting? Like, I totally forgot, but here I am. I'm ready to go. I was only, like, 15 minutes late, but like, checking your calendar often is key because so often, I've done that with calls where I'm was totally unprepared because I forgot the 10 minute beforehand is never enough time.

Yeah. It is this is something that I have, like, really, really learned in it's, like, taking me 30 years to learn this. My calendar is the best tool in the world for me. I have a bad memory. I have clinically a bad memory. In fact, my memory is so bad, it invalidates my IQ Wes, that is real.

And, so my memory is so bad that I like, if I don't put it in the calendar, I I'm not gonna I'm not gonna be on it. I'm not going to remember it despite my best intentions. Again, remember, Quixotic. I'm always thinking, like, oh, yeah. It's gonna be totally cool. I'll remember, and then I never ever do.

In fact, one time, Courtney and I had dinner at the same place 2 nights in a row because the 1st night we showed up and we're like, hey, are our guests ever going to get here? And then I looked at my phone, and it was supposed to be the next night, and I didn't put it in my calendar. So, yeah, that stuff just happens. Right? It just happens. Next 1 we have here is just block off large amounts of time for dev. You're not gonna get any meaningful work done in 1 hour Scott. And I see this all the time where

devs will screenshot their day, and they've got, like, 16 different meetings that they need to come in. Even if you're not a freelancer, that this happens all the time, which just sucks. So literally just go into your calendar, block off 5 hours of your afternoon, and don't allow anyone to book you in that time.

I always schedule my meetings for like 9 a. M, And that is awesome because if I do like 9:30 or 9:45 or 10 a. M, I find that like hour beforehand, I'm kind of like, I'm not gonna get too deep into anything because I know I've got something else coming up.

That that's a good one. I I've been recently, I made my calendar public, Scott, like, public public, but for the people, like, on my team. Like so it's not just Courtney who can look at my calendar, but it's everybody who I'm working with. So that way, it forces me to keep my calendar up to date, and people will be able to see what time is available, what time is not available. If they message me, they can see that I'm doing something specifically, and they'll they'll know to wait an hour or 2 or whatever until I'm actually going to reply just to make it as transparent as possible. So, I mean, you can always have a specific calendar that your ESLint can see that's, like, blocked off time or whatever, like, open available communication time or whatever. Just so just to to free it up a little bit so they know exactly what the expectations are. Half of every all of this is just managing expectations. Okay. So next is going to be contracts and quoting. This is a big one because a lot of times Wes hit a new project, and we're like, oh, Scott go fire a contract and a quoting template.

What you should have is you should really have boiler plates for all of this stuff. Just have these things ready that you can do an easy find and replace to replace all of the things that you know and love. One time, you know what I actually did for myself, Wes, is, as a fun project for myself, just as a side project, I built a contract generator using Rust because I wanted to learn Rust more. And it's like, oh, okay. I can read a file. I can write a file. I can replace some values. It's all basic techniques. Right? But it's it's neat because you just load the command line, and I say, oh, give me a contract. And it says, who contract for? I say, contract for Wes. And it says, how much Wes get paid? Okay. Wes get paid. Enter. And then this Sanity out a PDF of the contract. It's perfect. And then you have to think about it. Right? So this is a big thing. Do you have any tools or anything you recommend for writing contracts or having those boilerplates?

Yeah. I had a, a website that had a bunch of, like, free ones. But what most of my freelancing friends recommend is just go and get, like, a lawyer. Like, get, like, a boilerplate one they find online, bring it to a lawyer, and have them look over it. And then that's a good that's a good, like, sort of place to start from.

And then, like, I just had 1 in a Google Doc. Every time I wanted a new both for quoting as well as for, like, a contract, it's just, like, just type what you're gonna deliver, when you hope to deliver it, what it includes, what it doesn't include, and have them sign off on it. I didn't have this huge 40 page legalese type of thing. It was pretty much just a, this is what I'm giving you, for how much, and this is also what it does not include.

And the things that does not include usually is, like, inputting content or designing images that go into it or things like that. It's pretty simple, but definitely helps me speed up that process because, again, you don't wanna be spending a whole lot of time on that.

I'm also going to double your call to have a lawyer look at it. I'm lucky that my neighbor is a lawyer, so I could just, like, shoot him an email saying, hey, can I, you know, take you out for beer and whatever, and you'll look over something? So I I have a little bit of a Node nice connection there. But, again, if you know anybody that's a lawyer, pay them for their time. Just get them to look at it. It's a one time expense. Bingo. Bango. You Scott the contract. Good to go.

Next thing we'll touch upon is just, like, value based billing. So what this is, if you're if you're new to it, is that instead of charging somebody 10 hours for a website, you you look at the website and say, alright. Like, what's this worth to them? Or I also, like, would look at that, but I also would, like, look at, like, approximately how how much work is this going to take me at the end of the day. And then you give your client a quote for $3 for a website and they approve it and then you just go off and build the website. And that's really great for projects that are very cut and dry, meaning that this is what you get. This is when it's going to be delivered and all that. I did do hourly billing when it was more another technical team would bring me on as just like another hired gun. But the value based billing was was really great because, a, you can make a lot of money that way because you can get very fast. You can use all of the stuff we talked up until right now in making your skills as as fast as possible, and you still get the same amount of of money at the end of the day. Also, the clients loved it because they knew what they were getting and that they don't like like, if you tell them, like, yeah. It's gonna take me 20 hours to build this thing, they're they'll be like, is that is that good? I have no concept for it. They don't know. Yeah. Right? Like, that shouldn't be something that they have to to really think about. So there's a book from FreshBooks called Breaking the Time Barrier.

And it's it's all about this tiny little quick read. You can download it as a PDF online.

It just puts you in that mindset of how you should be approaching selling your skills and not just trading.

I always call it ass in seat time. Right? Like, you ideally don't want to just be trading your time for money because then you'll never be able to stop that.

Yes. Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Yeah. And then this episode is not sponsored by FreshBooks, but we will Node mention them again at another point. However, if we wanna talk value, let's talk value. And I'm talking about Node of our sponsors that gives you so much value for your money, and that is Sentry. This is a tool that I have used for a very long time myself, and I get constantly getting value out of it. For instance, one of the newer things they added was performance metrics that gives you a user misery score that tells you which of your routes are the slowest and giving you the the average times so that you can investigate if there's Node particular route that looks like it's making your user upset, because it's taking too long to load, and then you can discover what the performance issues are. Now there's a lot of really neat stuff here in Sentry. Sentry is the error and exception handling tool that allows you to keep track of all of the bugs, errors, and exceptions on your site, tag them to releases, commits users. Specifically, you get all the information about their browser information, what they did, the breadcrumbs when it happened, and you can attach it directly to issues in your Git project management. For instance, I have a issue. I wanna track it. I click the issue. I click add to GitHub. I fill in the information. I click go, and all of a sudden, the issue is not only tracked in GitHub, but GitHub the GitHub issue contains a backlink into Sanity so we can investigate for more issues. So if you wanna check out Sentry, check it out at Sentry Scott I o. Use the coupon code tasty treat, all lowercase and all one word, and you will get 2 months for free. Talking about value. Those are 2 good months you're gonna get out of that.

Let's get into billing. And I have something to say about billing. 1st and foremost JS that too oftentimes, especially new freelancers, a real good sign of a new freelancer is somebody who's afraid to talk about money. They'll get into the meeting. They'll be like, so what's it gonna cost me? They'll say, well, and it's maybe not just them thinking. They just don't wanna say. Yeah.

The best book I ever read on this topic was Mike Monterio's Design JS a Job. That's the book.

That was such a good book. Yeah. If you're if you're interested more in this billing billing stuff, redesign is a job. It's so very, very good. And so one of his big things was just that, like, this this may even be too aggressive, but if you're not getting a no on your 1st quote like, if you say I'm gonna I'm gonna bill you $10 for this, and they're like, not a chance. If you're not getting a no on that first one, then you went too low because that means that they that they were getting too much value out of what you were giving them.

Not to say you wanna be screwing your clients out of money because that's absolutely not the point here. The point is is that you should value your services. You do good services. The value in which your services bring costs Sanity, and your clients know and understand that. They're running a business. Right? They see the numbers. You JS a freelancer need to see those numbers as well and understand

it's all just a business, and these are business conversations. And people talk about money all the time. So talk about money. Don't be shy about it. Get it out in the the open. Clear the air. Make sure everybody's on the same page. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because a lot of times I see, like, freelancers who maybe aren't like, they weren't raised talking about money, things like that, and they see their skill as a bit of an art. Wes. But you also have to charge money for it because you need to be able to to live. And I see a lot of people undervaluing themselves or just saying like, I don't know. Like, how much would you like to pay? And Wes. Right. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Unfortunately, you have to be a little bit aggressive, and and the only way to get better at that is just doing it. And you probably will have some some awkward conversations, at some point where people go, woah. I was totally not expecting that. But in my experience, in most cases, it was just, okay, I can see that. Or could you explain, like, why it's going to cost that much? Like, not that I'm saying it's too much. I just, like, would like to understand as to to where that comes from and and whatnot. So, yeah, it like Scott said, don't be shy. It's your job to tell them why it's costing so much, and it's your job to bring home the bait to deliver. Right? It's your job to to get that little parcel, take the ribbon now, wrap the tie to ribbon, and and deliver it. Right?

Make the work happen.

Exactly. Also, once you do get paid, you obviously have to hold on to the tower. Maybe this is not obvious.

It's actually something I've seen in the past is that when you get paid, the government does not come and take the taxes out of that money. So you need to hold withhold a certain amount. And this depends on which country you live in and what type of if you're a corporation or if you're just a sole proprietor.

But generally, you'll have some sort of tax rate that you need to withhold a certain amount, let's say Wes. You need to withhold 20% of of that bill and put it away for taxes. And on top of that, if you're charging local taxes. So in Ontario here, we have HST.

And if I'm billing somebody else from Ontario, I have to tack an extra 13% on there. And I got to hold on to that. And then at the end of the year, I have to give it back to the government or give it to the government, say, hey, I collected this for you. And also, here's your chunk of my own hard earned money that you use to build roads and things like that. And I see a lot of people just, like, eat all the money that comes in and then eat it. Yeah. Yeah. And then when it comes time for taxes, they are in the hole, which is always funny because at tax time, all my friends are going out for beers and buying buying clothes because they get a rebate. Right? They get the tax rebate back. And then it's just I'm here I am sitting,

writing in the biggest chunk of the year. $50,000.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That's not some a position you ever wanna be in. I think I got some good advice early on that was, like, when you're taking money as a freelancer or without tax being withheld, what you should do is besides 1 have well, to to make it easy on yourself and taxes in general, you should have a business bank account. The bank account specifically for the freelance business, all the funds come into there, and then you can filter it into your own personal accounts. But 2, have a business savings account. And every single time money comes in automatically put that 15, 20% into the savings account when the money comes in. And it just never take anything out of the savings account until tax time because that money is there for Texas. It's not yours. It's it's just there to live there.

Totally. That that's that's so key because I saw a bunch of my freelancer friends. When coronavirus hit, our government rolled out this plan for small businesses, and it was a pretty good deal. Like, they would give small businesses 40 grand, and 25% of that was forgivable. So you could get $10 for free, but you had to have your own business account. And a lot of these sole proprietors were like, well, I was just putting the checks into my personal bank account and like, that was my money. And then if that was the case, you weren't able you wouldn't you didn't qualify it. There was other programs, but this is a pretty sweet program and it's too bad because, like, the another thing, you're mixing your finances. And if you're married to somebody, then, like, there's, like, money coming in, and, like, you wanna buy a piece of equipment. You wanna buy a new monitor for your business, but, like, that's coming out of personal funds. Like, that's it. It gets kind of weird being like, should I spend $1,000 on this? Like, our car needs new tires on it. And then now you're like, okay. Like, you're you're not really running a business there because you're you're weighing business purchases with personal purchases and having a separate banking. How makes things so much easier. It's so nice and cut and dry. You pay yourself from the business even if you're a sole proprietor where none of that matters, you still do it, like Scott said.

Yeah. And also, it makes accounting really easy at the end of the year because a lot of these tools that we're gonna mention in a second here, whether any of your accounting software, in modern times, you can link your checking account, your whatever account, your credit card account. You can link all of those directly to these accounting services. And if you do all business transactions through these these individual accounts and credit cards, then your books in accounting simply just become essentially the statements on your credit card or bank account. It makes it all very, very easy. There's also this whole concept of piercing the corporate veil, which I, you know, involves if you're getting sued, they can't go after your personal stuff. But if you're using your personal accounts, they can go after your personal stuff. I don't know too much about that. I am not a lawyer. Do not hold me to that. Yeah. That's that's question I I get a lot is, like, do I need if you if you register a corporation, then

money that's in the corporation like, if somebody sues your company, they can't come and take your house because you personally own your house and, you the corporation would would own the business. So that's something to think about as well. Like, I've never really necessarily heard of that happening. Like, no one's no one's slipping and falling on a website.

Yes. It probably can happen. Didn't, Domino's get sued for accessibility? So, like Yeah. Yeah. You're right. Maybe that's something that we'll see happen more and more. Totally. I mentioned some of these tools I should go into a little bit more in-depth. We you Node, our one of our sponsors is FreshBooks. This is great cloud accounting software that will make your life easier. Again, not an ad transition. That's just generally what they are. But if you're looking for a couple of free options, I've used in the past both wave apps and Xero.

Wave apps is much prettier.

Xero is what my current accountant uses. I that's why I'm not using FreshBooks currently JS because I have an accountant, and my accountant uses Xero. So I have to spend quite a bit of time just pond through Xero if I want to with or not generating invoices or something. But so wave apps since you actually don't know if Xero JS free. I think it is, but I know wave apps is definitively free for their free use, which is pretty darn good. Alright. Let's move on to the final topic. Yeah. I hear it's just like marketing, like getting known. That's another downside I hear of a lot of people who can't kick it. Freelancing is they just don't have enough clients coming in

for what they want. And, generally, the way that I see it happen is if somebody is good at what they do, like we talked about, if you're if you have good communication and you get things done after a couple of years, those people are booked up rock solid and they've got lots of lots of work. It's that initial 5, 10 clients that you need to get. And because of that, you need to to be good at marketing. Like, you don't have to be amazing running Facebook ads and and things like this, but you just need to let people know what you do. And and when I I used to teach freelancing at HackerU, and I would always just tell people, like, if you were to go out to, like, literally anyone on your Facebook list or go up to an uncle at a Christmas party and say, like, what do I do? And if he's not able to say, like, you're making websites. Right? Like, you're doing something on a computer.

If they're not able to say that, then you're probably not doing a good enough job letting people know what you need to do because almost all of this good stuff comes from just word-of-mouth, people going from recommending 1 person to another. I know you have some more points on that.

Yeah. It it's very fun. I have a a realtor.

Let me tell you this. If anyone is in Colorado looking for a house, get at me because this guy is so good that I want to be on a podcast and tell everybody how good he is. And, every single time I get any friends asking me in fact, this JS actual story. A friend of mine let me know that he's actually moving to Colorado, and he didn't even say anything about a realtor. And I was just like, that's amazing. If you're looking to buy a house, get at me first. I have the best realtor. He didn't have to say anything, and the first thing that popped into my head Wes, I knew a guy who can help you. Because this realtor was so good for us, and he did so many awesome things for us. And at the end of the day, he asks for referrals. He says, by the way, he I I think he, like, sent us a card, like, right after we move in, and it was just, like, the best thing you can possibly do for me JS a friend is send referrals my way because that's how my business stays afloat. And then, sure enough, we send him a referral, and he sent us a $100 gift card to the fanciest steak restaurant in Colorado.

And then, so we said, oh, that was pretty pretty sweet. Let's, let's send him another referral. We did. Got another gift card. And every single time, we get to go to the nicest restaurant in in, in Denver here and get some fancy steaks. Right? So it's like, okay. I think I like this relationship, but not only that, his work was really good. We've never had anybody disappointed with him, and I suggest him all the time, not because he's giving me the steak gift cards, but because he does such amazing things. And every once in a while, we get this weird letter in the mail from him that just be, like, just thinking about you guys, and here's, like, a Starbucks gift card for $15. We're just like, do you sleep, man? What do you like, like, he must have all of these things, like, set up on timers, to check-in with all of his his friends and whatever. But he's also the type of guy who's who's like, hey. How's your family doing? Let's just go out for drinks. And we just got drinks for to chitchat, you know, whatever. It's not like a it's not like a always a reciprocal relationship there, but, like, be that person. Like, that to me, it was such an eye opening experience because, like, you know, that's the type of freelancer you could be.

Yeah. That's so behind the scenes, he's he's running some sort of software called a CRM software. So Salesforce is probably the biggest one. There's tons of them out there, and they'll just let you know when to follow-up. Or if you haven't had an email from somebody in so long, then send them send them a gift card or whatever it is. And systems like that can can really pan out because, like, especially for selling a house. Like, what does a realtor get? Like, $40,000,000 for selling a house? Currently, Endeavor, you get that much. Yeah. Take a couple photos, throw it online. Yeah.

So, like, it's worth it for them to to send that. With a CRM in any of these things, it has to be personal. It can't be a robot. So cheesy.

He he writes the cards by hand when they're sent. It's like it's it's not just like some some generated email that I know he he just set up on a timer or something. You know? When I got life insurance, like, a couple Yarn ago or 10 years ago, the guy who sold it to me had this, like, the hardest follow-up after he sold it to me. And he says, Who are 3 people you can recommend to me right now? And I was like, first of all, yikes.

And second of all, I also read that book, and, like, that's straight out of the book. So transparent.

Yeah. Like, I also listen to that audiobook or, like, I see this all the time with in emails as well where, like, sometimes you can tell people are using a technique, but they're genuinely good. And then other times you can tell people are using a technique and you're just like, oh. Like, you literally copy pasted that out of the book. Like, come on. Have a little finesse.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Finesse is the right word there.

For those who don't know, I'm a b boy at breakdance for a long time. When we judge competitions I've been a judge for, maybe, you know, 30, 40 competitions.

When you judge for a competition, I remember I used to lose, and I Wes to wonder why why lose that, man. I did the coolest stuff. And then when I became a judge, I understand that it's all about finesse. It's not that this person did something harder. It's that they Node it look yeah. Finesse. Right? That finesse is such a a difficult thing to tack down exactly what it means. But at the end of the day, finesse is really what makes it smooth, what makes it look good, what makes it work, essentially. And that's what my realtor, Chris, has JS finesse. Right? He finesses the way he does all of that.

One of the last points I have here is just show people that you're excited about what it is that you're working on.

That's really how I got a lot of my early dev work JS well is that I was going to conferences and, doing YouTube videos and writing blog posts. And I Wes, like, legitimately excited about the tech that I was working with. And and that just shows very clearly to to other people. And they say, wow. Like, we need to hire you to do that for us because you clearly know what you're talking about. And, also, you love this stuff so much that you spend your free time writing a blog post about it.

Cool. So that is tips on how to make freelancing easier.

My final thoughts here warp don't be upset if freelancing isn't for you. There's 2 aspects to this. pnpm, everybody is not great at everything the 1st time they do it. Chances are your 1st time working with a client may not be the most amazing thing ever. That doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna be bad at it forever.

You can learn all of these skills. You can practice them. You can hone them. You can be the sharpest knife in the drawer. You can be Wes Bos of freelancing if you want. You just have to work at it. On the other hand, if you don't like it and you've done it several times and it's not working out for you, there is no shame in that game in saying, hey. This just isn't for me. I can say this is very specifically, I worked my butt off as a freelancer, and I was probably way happier.

1, working in an office or, 2, owning my own business, which I am now that's not doing client work. So despite the fact that I was capable of of freelancing, it was not my favorite thing in the whole world. And just because, I was making more money doing it, didn't mean I had to do it. I I found ways

to make myself much happier doing different types of work. So, again, you don't have to be good at freelancing. You don't have to love freelancing, and you don't have to do it. You can always work for a company, and there is no shame in that game. Yeah. I would go as far to say most people probably aren't gonna be good freelancers. Most people Mhmm. Rather be on a team. They can learn from more senior devs. They don't have to worry about billing. They can just sit down and and do their work. And, like, honestly, when we we saw people coming out of the boot camp early on, we thought, like, oh, a lot of people are gonna be freelancers. And it turned out that almost none of them were gonna be freelancers, and everybody much preferred to to go and get just a a regular job.

So my last thoughts, I guess, just like a, like, a little tip is that, like, freelancing can also be a filler or a stepping stone.

So if you are in between jobs or if you've sometimes if you Scott a little bit of a chaotic time going on in your life or you you can't hold down a regular 9 to 5 because of whatever's going on in your life, then freelancing is good for that. Or if you're just saying, like, look, I'm trying to launch a business. For me, it was I'm trying to move over to entirely selling web development courses and freelancing was it was great because then I could spend more and more time on making my courses as they made more money and less and less time on client work. And then eventually, I was able to hop off that boat onto the dock, as we like to say on those podcasts. So it's it's just sometimes it's a great a great stopgap. And, hopefully, some of the tips we had for you today will, make that go a bit smoother.

Sick. Do you have any sick picks? I have one that is for those of you who are programming fans and oh, it's a YouTube channel. Wes, you're gonna like this if you haven't heard of this because this is right up your alley. It's it's it's almost like the technology connections in a less produced way for I don't wanna say video game development, but it is things video game development. So for instance, there's a 10 minute video on the aspect ratio changes of Super Nintendo talking about the various ways that it outputs, the graphics, and why why these things existed. But with some of my favorite, it's called the Displaced Gamers.

I don't know under I don't necessarily understand the title, but they're all men. They are also fantastic. So for instance, they he does this series called behind the code, and I just watched the video last night that came out 2 days ago. It's a Zelda 2 behind the code, and they talk about, like, the differences between the CD version and the Nintendo version of Zelda 2 and why they couldn't do tiling this and how the background repeater actually works. Wes, okay. Well, we only have in the the very coolest thing that this guy does was JS he steps into the RAM.

So since these games are just you know, there's so little data involved in whatever compared to modern games and whatever. Everything is done on, like, a, like, hex value in RAM situation.

And so he'll be like, this is where this is stored in this particular bank of RAM. You see that if I set this value to 0, then watch as the screen updates. Like so he has, like, a RAM editor with the game thing open, and he's like, watch how Zelda tries to exit the screen here. And this is why this very particular glitch works because the code does this, and these values are stored in RAM.

And, oh my gosh, is some of the stuff he does with manipulating RAM is just so interesting. I've never seen anything, like it to that degree, and I absolutely love it. There's a whole video on dithering of PlayStation and stuff that is just fantastic.

I I really, really have been into this channel specifically just because of this, like, the Ram stuff that he talks about is just so very, very good. I I know you didn't play a ton of games. Do you have any of the systems growing up? Yeah. I had

a Nintendo.

Oh, did you have a Game Genie for your Nintendo?

My neighbor did. That was the thing, like, you put the game into before it went through?

Yeah. And then you put in a a code, and then it, like, gave Mario super jumping ability or something. Yeah. Get this. Because he goes into Game Genie in this series, and it's so good. All that Game Genie is doing is overriding RAM values, or it's overriding RAM values. So, like, Mario's Mario's jump velocity is stored in this bank of RAM. Let me just overwrite to that RAM value. And when you have the Game Genie JS you would enter codes like f a 4 whatever. You were actually just adding hexadecimal overrides to the RAM, which caused these things to happen. It's so cool. Yeah. My my neighbor had the game shark

where Oh, yeah. We would play Goldeneye on n 64, and he had the game shark that he'd pop on top of it.

And, man, that was like, I love, like, actually being technical, like older now because I understand, like, what is actually happening. And it's fun to go back to these these types of channels and actually understand how it all works.

Yeah. So check this channel out. It is very, like the explanations are fantastic, and I really, really enjoy it.

I'm going to sick pick some tool battery hacks. So Oh, wow. I've got DEWALT tools Wes you've got the these 20 volt batteries.

They're great because I've got all these these batteries, and, I've I've used many times before. I've used the batteries in little projects, whether it's, firing up my kids' power wheels and juicing it to go a little bit higher or things like that.

And those kinds of projects are really, really fun. But sort of a downside to it is that you have to have you still have to have something to click the battery into. You got to be able to slot it in and press the button.

And on eBay, they sell these things. They're just these ones aren't 3 d printed, but you can make your own if you have a 3 d printer. But they're pretty cheap on eBay. It's called the D E Wes v.

That's for Dewalt. They sell them for all the different types of batteries. So I just ordered a couple of them, and, basically, your battery just clicks into this thing, and then it gives you a positive and a negative lead. Oh. And you can just attach them to whatever. I'm thinking about building my own little floodlight where you the battery can go into. And with the with the DEWALT batteries, at least, the the circuitry for what's about why you're laughing? This is so Wes. This is so West. I love it. True. I love love hacking my own stuff. The great thing about the dual batteries is the there's, like, over and undercharge protection on the battery itself, so So you don't have to worry about running the battery too low and actually damaging the lithium cells aside because with Milwaukee tools, the the chips to do that are in the tool itself.

So it's kinda harder to use those batteries in anything. You can still do it, but with the DeWalt ones, it's a little easier. So check it out. It's called just go on eBay. Search for d e twenty v. Buy a couple of them because you never know when you'll need them.

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Take them all, folks. Support us both. Take them all. Yeah. Take them all. There actually, it's funny. There is a lot of people that listen to this podcast that will take anything either of us or both of us put out, which is really cool to see that support from everybody.

It's amazing. Thank you so much.

Alright. That's it. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you on Monday.

Peace.

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