Best Practices

Apr 2nd, 2008

10-Hour Days

It seems I hear a lot of stories about workaholic entrepreneurs. They spend 80 hours a week working on their business, and the few hours left over each week goes to their friends and family. I’m the exact opposite. I think.

Mar 26th, 2008

We vs. I

When I was first starting this company, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. I had the technical chops to build web sites, but I didn’t know much about running a business. Sales? Budgeting? I was just proud that I had completed the paperwork so that the state of Indiana recognized me as a [...]

Feb 27th, 2008

What Goes Through a Potential Employee’s Mind

Last week I hired an assistant. Can I legitimately still call myself a freelancer? Probably not. This gig has grown into something that any casual observer would describe as a fully functioning (albeit small) business. Well, I’ll always remember my freelance roots. I started this business on nights and weekends, and I continued to work [...]

Feb 20th, 2008

The Mother of Invention

The month of February has meant a lot of traveling for me. I’ve been out of town every weekend. On my birthday, which fell on a Wednesday, I drove an hour away to have dinner with some friends. This means I haven’t had as much free time as I’m accustomed to. My preference is to [...]

Jan 30th, 2008

Accepting Online Payments

Why does anybody offer online payments? After all, there is a mark-up that takes money out of your pocket on every transaction. Unless it’s the only way you accept payments (which is true for some businesses), you’re complicating your accounting and business processes by adding another special case for how a payment is received.

Jan 2nd, 2008

Price Your Service Like a Product

Up until a few months ago, I always started from square one when I needed to create a quote for a client. I’d go through the requirements for the project and estimate how long each item would take. I’d estimate how much time I expected to spend communicating with the client based on what I [...]

Nov 21st, 2007

Suck It Up, Freelancer

Sure, you’ve got a lot to complain about. Let’s start with the ups and downs of work coming in. One week you spend so much time on client projects, you barely have time to eat. The next week you twiddle your thumbs and set a new high score on minesweeper… on all three difficulty levels.
That’s [...]

Oct 24th, 2007

Priority Home Office Expenses

I was recently pointed to a blog post (via Freelance Switch) that proposes some of the most important things you can spring for in your home office. The logic on all of these is that you are spending a lot of time here and need to be able to work comfortably and efficiently.

Sep 26th, 2007

Counterpoint On Hosting the Sites You Design

Early in the life of this blog (and my freelance business) I made a post advocating the idea of reselling hosting to your design clients. I came across this post old again as I was scanning the archives. The truth is I don’t host the vast majority of the sites that I’ve designed, even when [...]

Sep 5th, 2007

6 Reasons to Turn Freelance Work Down

If you’re just starting out in the world of freelance web design, it may be hard to imagine that you would ever want to turn down a paying client. I’ll admit it is certainly easier to do when the coffers are full, but there are some times when you should at least consider turning down [...]

Running a Business