Freelancing, year 5.

As this new year kicks off, I’m pitching myself into it with a mix of optimism and pessimism. If I had to weight that mix, I’d put it at roughly 40% optimism and 60% pessimism. Here’s why.

I think the tilt toward pessimism is mainly due to the fact that I’m not a young man anymore. And the business world is enamored with young talent. This is nothing new. Young people are cheap to hire and they possess a naive exuberance about work that I sometimes wish I still had. That’s ok. A few failures down the road they’ll be wiser too.

Also, the freelance talent universe is expanding (regardless of the average age). And, the pool of freelancers on the market who will work for less is in abundance.

Then of course, there’s the pandemic horror show that won’t let up. That’s not helping. At all.

Let’s not forget about the stigma of the white male. And in my case, the 50-something white male. I’m theorizing that we’re all being lumped into a demographic profile that hirers are looking past.

So that’s my uneducated, unscientific guess as to the “why.”

I think this means 2022 has a good chance of being another year of under-employment for this stigmatized white guy. I cringe at the term “under-employed.” But, it’s fitting. I am one of those people ... the guy who was laid off and whose income or employment opportunities never really recovered … the guy who had a good job at a growing digital agency but account losses triggered layoffs and he became a statistic … the guy who has submitted hundreds of job applications but can’t get an interview. Yeah, I’ve become him.

That doesn’t mean I’ve given up. But it puts a busload of stress on the ego.

Mind you, it hasn’t been all dire straits. I’ve had freelance work each year, but it hasn’t exactly gotten us a dee-luxe apartment in the sky. And all the business relationships seem so fragile these days. I’m sure my clients — past and present — have all endured some level of Covid-19 instability the past two years. I’ve seen all types of upheaval on the client side since the pandemic started. Staff layoffs. Career changes. Maternity leaves. Reorgs. Early retirements. People who resign. A company is sold off, merged, or acquired and people get laid off due to role redundancies. A promotion (which usually leaves me at the mercy of the next marketing person to figure out who I am). It is, without question, really tough being on the outside always looking in, constantly asking for work.

And it’s not like I sit around waiting for jobs to land in my lap either. I’m very proactive about the process. I browse Upwork nearly every day. I cold email new clients every week — week after week, without fail. I circle back and email older clients with whom I’ve not worked in X number of months or even years. I connect with new people regularly on LinkedIn. I direct-message people sometimes too (though I think that’s a loss leader).

The other thing that continues to frustrate me year-over-year is the disappearance of the courtesy reply email. When exactly did this become the norm? People who are in a position to hire me simply won’t take 15-30 seconds to write a reply email. Or even to paste a stock reply into an email and hit Send (which would take about 3-5 seconds). Even amongst former clients, I usually get no reply if I send them a follow-up inquiry about work. I don’t really understand this behavior. I’d estimate that about 1% of all prospecting work I do via email gets a reply. The no-reply is unprofessional, in my opinion. But I guess it also points to the fact that most full-time employees are over-scheduled, over-worked, and dread having to wade through a stack of emails all day long.

One factor that I thought might be hurting my curb appeal was my website. While comprehensive, it wasn’t sharp looking or super well organized. So, last year I spent the entire 4th quarter completely overhauling my site’s UI and the work shown on it. I sunk literally hundreds of hours into it. (See my December 2021 “Year-End Productivity” post).

If you’re here reading this blog, maybe you’ve browsed my site. I hope you like it and appreciate the effort I put into it, not to mention the quality of the work itself. I’ve had a long career so far, and I hope there’s more to come. Otherwise, I’m going to have to seriously look at a career change. Then again, who’s hiring white guys in their late 50s?

Well, thanks for reading. Until next time, stay safe, do good things, and if you have a job, take a moment to appreciate it.

Year-end productivity.

As 2021 comes to a close, I once again feel the annual pull of my undernourished little blog. I truly wish I had more time to sit down and write, but alas, it doesn’t seem to exist in my daily routine. It's usually during the holidays, like now, when client activity winds down and I’m able to set aside a couple hours to prattle on about my feelings.

So, what a year, eh? Holy shite.

Obviously, all you have to do is mention The Pandemic, and immediately everyone gets you. I'll say the year sucked, but on the other hand I’m thankful none of my closest family members have gotten any variant of Covid ever — knock on wood. But I did hear stories from neighbors and acquaintances whose friends or family had contracted the coronavirus, and in some cases people died. I guess it doesn’t seem real until it hits that close to home. It's really a tragic way for one's life to end.

If that weren’t enough, many more issues weighed heavily on my psyche during the year — health issues my wife had (in addition to chronic Lyme disease, she suffers from IBS, which landed her in the ER twice in one weekend, then a third time at a hospital ER, whereupon she was admitted and treated); one of our dogs had knee surgery and required 3 months of rehab and recovery care; my mother-in-law has been inhabiting a world of dementia for quite a while now and needed family to fill in while her home health aides disappeared; I began was working on a book project with my mother (which is still ongoing); I was caregiving for my wife while doing all the domestic duties at home; I'm on the Board of Directors of my condo complex and we faced some daunting infrastructure expenses and budgeting; and there's that nagging little voice that says "find more work, ok?" every day; and so on. And what else? There are probably more issues I can't even think of right now. That’s enough though, right?

Professionally, 2021 was similar to 2020 — try to get more freelance work while a pandemic rages.

And yet, if I was going to find new clients and get new design and writing projects, I felt my portfolio site might be hurting me more than helping. It did get me a few new client projects this year, so it seemed “good enough.” But it still bothered me. I had a ton of work over the past several years that hadn't made it’s way to my site. And the work I did have on my site was not presented well.

After 7 years of having basically the same UI theme on Squarespace I was beginning to think, well, maybe this is that year I do another overhaul. But the thought of doing a gut renovation of my site just made me want to lie down and sleep, and hope that when I woke up, by some miracle someone had done all the work.

It turned out to be a fairly decent year work-wise so being busier than I was in 2020 helped me put off the portfolio site revamp. New projects also meant new work samples that I could show. This meant at some point soon I was going to have to rip off the band aid and start into my site overhaul. So I set a goal: get it done by the end of the year.

The summer passed quickly and I picked up two new clients that kept me very busy in the 3rd quarter, and would stretch into the 4th quarter too. By October, the site redesign was still hanging over my head. I really didn't have extra time in the day to set aside for a monster effort of this size. It just made me groan. I was going to have to go back and rebuild a lot of work samples that I'd had on my site for several years. They were blurry and low-res and needed to be bigger and high-res. (More groans mixed with muttered profanity.) I could see the way forward clearly: it represented hours and hours of grunt work. Lots of image processing, importing, exporting, uploading, yada yada yada. Blech. But if I didn't do it nobody would.

I decided I'd have to use mornings as my site makeover time. Get up a little earlier, get some coffee in me, and "sac up" as they say.

So, it began in mid-October.

I did a deep dive into my Squarespace theme and found new settings and site preferences that actually got me excited, and I was beginning to find my enthusiasm for the process. I found fonts that I'd already been using as part of my professional branding, I selected some fresh new colors, and I found better ways to organize my content and streamline the UI. I took advantage of some free tech-y looking video clips from Adobe and added a short video to my home page to jazz it up and set a “digital landscape” tone that I ended up liking a lot.

I also had to start the curation process—of deleting old and irrelevant work samples, bringing in fresh new work, rethinking how the work would be displayed, and developing a workflow that would become my own "best practice" for converting native files into engaging layouts on my site. And, spend some time on content organization.

In addition to that, I had to extend my rebranding to social platforms, my email signature, on promotional pieces, and on my résumé. Like I said, it was a monster project. But I managed to build momentum and I stayed in the groove for over two months. That’s what you call a “long tail.”

I'm really happy to say I met my goal of getting it done by end-of-year and I even beat my own deadline by a couple weeks. I'm actually proud of my portfolio now and I feel it shows off my best client work. More importantly, I can build upon what I have going forward.

And just under the wire, I’ve added this blog section, which includes all my posts from Blogger, going back to 2009. There really aren’t that many, so don’t freak out if feel you really want to read all of them. If you do, well, have at it.

Anyway, share some comments and feedback if you'd like.

As always, thanks for reading.

Happy holidays and happy new year! Cheers.

Hopes and doubts during a pandemic.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 08/06/20)

Here I am with my first blog entry of 2020, in August. Sorry I'm late. Got sidetracked by everything but work. LOL. Well, not really LOL, more like COL.

I'll say this: if the rest of the year is anything like the year so far, the desperation caused by COVID-19 will probably be just as ugly. I've endured some bad years as a creative professional, but this one tops them all, hands down, without question. A total shitshow of epic proportions.

It's a shame really, because in the 4th quarter of 2019, I thought I'd made big strides toward developing new clients and getting a decent amount of repeat business from existing ones. With Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year ahead, I was feeling optimistic about 2020.

Then the news media began to focus more attention on the flu outbreak that began in Wuhan, China. But in all honesty, I didn't think it was something to be too concerned about at the time.

Like millions of people in the US and abroad, the virus proved us so wrong.

Christmas and New Year's came and went, and in January 2020, some of my freelance assignments carried over into January. By the end of January, no new projects were coming my way. I chalked it up to companies getting their budget ducks in a row and planning out the year. Meanwhile, the pandemic was becoming the only news item all day long, and my clients began to pump the brakes on their marketing.

By February, fear had taken hold my clients and their marketing efforts, and from that point on it was a slippery slope into a budget freezes.

Then March rolled in and a lockdown situation was happening everywhere in the US. I'm in Florida, and you all know the story in this state. We all began to adapt to this "new reality." The new reality for me, which continues at the time of this writing, is that no freelance projects have come in, and it has become painfully obvious that any new business development efforts on my part would be wasted time.

The fallout from diminished marketing budgets rippled through ad agencies and design departments all over the country. Layoffs and high unemployment created a surge of fresh new freelance talent for design and writing. This in turn is driving creative fees down, and my skill sets have become a commodity.

For example, take a freelance site like Upwork. You'll see hundreds of projects posted by potential clients with tasty budgets of $100 or $150, for things like a logo or a branding style guide. These items normally fetch thousands of dollars — even for a solo practitioner. It's a well established site, but you'll pay Upwork commissions for jobs you finish, as well as fees required to place bids on jobs. So that $100 job becomes $80 when all's said and done. Oof.

You'll see similar low-dollar budgets with low-end projects at Fiverr or Freelancer (I've deliberately not posted URLs to the aforementioned job sites because they're not paying me to promote them). I have profiles on all three sites, and I scroll through them almost every day looking for projects that pay well — basically until my eyes bleed.

In short, competition is fierce on these project sites. If you don't bid on a new project posting within the first hour or two, you'll be lost in a pool of 10 to 50 bids. The key is to keep tossing bids out. It's a numbers game like anything else, and you just have keep playing the job lottery until something hits.

Having said that, I'm part of the ever-growing category of the under-employed in America. And, it begs the question: what do I do next? Or rather, what should I do next? Do I retrain myself and change careers? If so, given that we're in the midst of a depression, what do I pivot to? (Let's be real: I'm not going to be the next YouTube star or social media influencer. I have a healthy amount of contempt for that form of marketing.)

I read somewhere that human beings have about 10,000 thoughts a day and 90% of them are the same ones we had yesterday. I guess that's the root cause of my doubts. I'm living in a real-world Groundhog Day movie virtually every day. I don't have an inspired answer for what my next career move is right now. I guess opportunity will present itself. All I know is not much is going to be actionable until the coronavirus has been disarmed.

The good news is I haven't spiraled into any form of addiction or depression. I think what keeps my hope alive is the knowledge that the virus won't stick around forever. A vaccine will be developed. The $10,000 question is: when.

Well, that's all I have to share this time around. In a few months maybe we'll ring in the New Year with a new President ahead of us, and the pandemic behind us.

In the meantime, be safe and stay healthy.