Ashley Chiasson, M.Ed

Instructional Designer & Consultant

Freelance Advice

Freelance Advice: Pricing Yourself Appropriately

One of the freelance questions I get asked most frequently is: How do I price my services? 

When going freelance or taking on contract projects, pricing yourself appropriately is critical. Your. Time. Is. Valuable. I’ve been on both sides: freelancing myself and hiring freelancers, so I feel like I can offer some advice in this arena. You can even take some of this advice and apply it to the “a prospective employer asked me ‘what is your salary expectation?’ – how do I respond?”

But first, a story…

When I first began freelancing it held a very simple goal: pay off my student debt faster. Kthx. And I did. And I learned a lot from my very first freelance gig. I went on a bid site (freelancer.com), bid on any job I thought I was even remotely qualified for, and won several contracts. One such contract was transcribing 40 hours of interviews for someone’s PhD research. I did this job for ONE. HUNDRED. DOLLARS. WHAT?! Yeah. I had no idea what to price transcription services at. This was obviously a steal. This is a period of my life that was absolute agony for me. I’m not a quitter. I did the job. I hated the job. I learned that my time was valuable. #lifelessons. I now know that, and that will never transcribe anything ever again. Never.

Cool story. That was dumb. Now get on with the advice please.

Alright, so there are several things you want to consider when pricing your services:

  • What do you want to earn?
    • Be realistic; I initially based this annual value as what I was making at my first ID role
  • Consider the things you have to pay out, such as taxes, HST (if you’re Canadian), and health care
    • The biggest mistake I see people make is pricing their services too low and only finding out when they owe a bunch of $$$ to the CRA or IRS. It can be an expensive lesson to learn.
  • Do you want project based pricing? Hourly pricing? Salary?
    • Salary is self-explanatory, but you still need to factor in the things you’ll pay out to. Hourly pricing can be good if you’re unsure of how much time you spend doing each type of task you’ll be doing. Project-based pricing is typically higher, but if you do project-based pricing you may get into an underpaid pickle if it takes you longer to complete a project than what you had quoted.

For me, as I previously explained, I initially priced my services based on the hourly breakdown of my first ID salary. I then added to that. So, let’s do a simple example:

  • Starting rate: $20/hr
  • I set aside 35% of each project for taxes, and 15% for HST, so I would add those two things (50%) and then add that to my rate – so now I’m at $30/hr.
  • Then, I add 20% to that to put aside for healthcare – now we’re at $36/hr

Now, this takes a bit of research, but I recommend you start with your provincial/state/federal tax sites to identify how much you need to pay in to taxes based on certain tax brackets. It might suck to contribute more to your tax account than necessary, but at the end of the day, it’s always nice to not have to pay out all of your tax savings vs. owing more.

The other major things to consider is: What experience do you have? How long have you been doing certain types of jobs/roles? Where do you live? These factors all play a part in pricing yourself appropriately.

Pricing yourself can be incredibly intimidating, but I’ve learned that valuing myself accordingly and confidently negotiating my pricing has more often resulted in prospective employers not batting a lash versus balking at my pricing. And if you’re being fair with your prices and still encountering prospective employers balking at your pricing…are those the employers you want to work for? For me, it’s not. There will always be more contracts. I promise you.

Resources:

  1. The eLearning Guild has an incredibly helpful calculator: 2018 Salary Calculator, and you can use this as a starting point to base your annual value according to various elements (e.g., state in which you live, education, years of experience, etc.). Another thing the eLearning Guild does is an annual salary and compensation guide – aimed at recruiters, but also helpful to peruse if you’re looking into working for yourself.
  2. Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design by Donald Clark provides a great overview.
  3. The Chapman Alliance – How Long Does it Take to Create Learning is a resource I recommend OFTEN.

E-Learning Advice: Where to Find Work

Outside of “How do I get started?”, the next most populous question I receive is “Where can I find work/jobs/contracts?”, and I’ve written a couple of posts on this in the past:

  1. Where to Find Freelance Instructional Design Gigs
  2. Update: Where to Find Freelance Instructional Design Gigs

Both of these posts are certainly worth the review though, because I’m going to regurgitate some of the information in this post (and offer some other resources). However, before you can look for work, you need a portfolio of some sort because the potential clients…they’re going to ask you for one!

If you don’t yet have a portfolio, I’ve talked a lot about building them, and even have a free course: Build Your E-Learning Portfolio – check it out! It’s updated periodically, so if you’re enrolled, you’ll get an email blast whenever something’s been added or changed.

Word to the wise: If you want an Instructional Design or E-Learning job, you need to have something to show potential clients you’re capable of doing. So, stop making excuses for your lack of portfolio and just take the time to get something together! When you look prepared, you also look more professional/marketable.

Okay. Enough preaching, Ashley. On with the post!

Referrals

Referrals are still where I find most of my work lately, and I’m still flattered by each and every referral. Once you’ve established yourself within Instructional Design/E-Learning communities, and you begin promoting the work of others while also promoting your own work, the referrals will begin to trickle in. But the key to these referrals is participation within communities, on social media, etc. You need to make yourself known in order for people to know you’re available for work.

And don’t be selfish! Referrals are cyclical, so ensure you’re referring to others when you’re swamped and unable to accept work.

Job Boards

For Instructional Design or E-Learning gigs, I find the most relevant job boards to be:

Outside of these job boards, you can sift through craigslist.org for work, which can yield good results, but is a bit more tedious.

Your Website

Next to referrals, most of my inquiries funnel through this website. This is great, especially if you’re busy working on contracts and don’t have admin time to dedicate to hustling for more contracts. There are a few keys here:

  1. Build a website, and if you don’t know how to do so, hire it out. While an initial cost, it will pay for itself.
  2. Include some sort of portfolio on your website (even if it’s not the most up to date).
  3. Include a contact section. THIS is critical. Prospective clients won’t contact you if they don’t know how to do so.

Social Media

If you’re an Instructional Designer or E-Learning professional (or hope to be one someday), you’re looking for work, and you’re not active on either Twitter or LinkedIn, get on both of those platforms.

A lot of work-related inquiries will happen on both of these social media platforms, but unless you’re active and have a relevant profile, they will not be of much value.

Another ‘social media’ type of community I would recommend is the Instructional Design Sub-Reddit; there’s a lot of great advice in that community, but there are also occasional job postings. Be present on many platforms and you’ll increase your ability to be seen and/or hired.

Bid Sites

Lastly, I will include bid sites. I now consider these sites a last resort, only because I believe there is a lot of effort involved for little pay off. Now, this is where I got my start, but not where I felt the most valued. Of all the bid sites, the one that I would consider most worthwhile, and where I believe you will be compensated fairly (in most cases) is: UpWork.

But even on this site, you’ll need to put in your dues. A lot of employers will specify a percentile of quality that they want in their applicants, and to achieve these quality ratings, you need prior work through the site with employers who may not be offering your goal compensation. Often times you’ll need to work some of these smaller contracts in order to increase your profile clout to succeed in winning larger contracts.

3 Tips for Tax Time

This is my third full year in business, and my second year filing taxes for my small business. I’ve learned a few things since last year, and I thought I’d share some of that with you! This year has been a breeze doing my taxes, and hopefully these simple tips can help you hate tax season just a little bit less.

1. Allot Administrative Time

This sounds incredibly boring, but I promise – you will save time in the long run. If you allot a certain number of hours per week or per month to completing administrative tasks, you will have a much smaller headache come tax time when you’re trying to track down invoices, calculate sales tax, itemize expenses, etc.

I try to give myself 3 hours per month to tackle anything and everything administrative. Most times I need fewer than 3 hours, so overshooting the allotment makes me feel better about myself when I finish in less time.

2. Maintain a Spreadsheet

Some folks I know use bookkeeping Xero Services software to track all of their expenses and income; I have gone back to the stone age a bit and maintain an excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet has been pre-programmed with calculations to account for sales tax (a necessary evil here in Canada), and it pulls information from my various income and expense books into one main book that balances all of it out. It’s glorious!

My spreadsheet goes hand-in-hand with point #1; when I work through my administrative tasks, I populate this spreadsheet as I go. Doing this throughout the year saves a TON of time in the long run. Instead of spending days labouring over my tax forms, I simply pull data from my spreadsheet and toss it into the tax software.

3. Invest in Software

I know I just mentioned going back to the stone age with my spreadsheet, but hey! Excel is software, right? It might not be bookkeeping software, but it does the trick.

When it comes to investing in software, I am specifically talking about tax software. I use H&R Block’s tax software because 1) I don’t have time to manually calculate all of my taxes, 2) it’s free up to so many returns, 3) my refund comes expediently, and 4) they have built in information related to my provincial tax requirements and rebates. Last year I used their software and it was easy peasy!

Freelance Advice Round-Up #1

Over the past couple of years, I’ve written and spoken frequently on the topic of freelancing and independent contracting. After presenting on How to Become a Successful Freelancer at the Articulate Community Roadshow 2015: Toronto, I had a lot of questions that involved things I learned through doing (e.g. sending my first invoice, drafting a contract, etc.). In an effort to respond to these questions, I’ll be starting a new blog post series!

The series should go live next week, so stay tuned, but in the meantime, here is a collection of some of my most popular blog posts where I become your Freelancer Sensei and impart all of my wisdom:

Take a look through those posts and let me know if you have any pressing questions – just leave those in the comments section; I’ll address them, I promise! And don’t forget to pop back frequently next week when the new post series goes live.

Articulate Community Roadshow 2015 – Toronto #ELHToronto

This year I’m presenting at the Articulate Community Roadshow 2015 – Toronto; I presented at this event last year, and it was so much fun! So nice I thought I’d do it twice! All of the presenters are fantastic and the group looks like a fun one.

Last year I presented on How to Build Your E-Learning Portfolio, and you can check out some blog posts based on that topic below:

Screen Shot 2015-06-17 at 10.49.18 AM

This year I’m presenting on How to Become a Successful Freelancer; the presentation is very broad in the sense that users from many industries can take this advice and run with it. It’s based entirely on my own experiences as a freelancer and independent contractor, and I really hope that you can glean some good tips. I’ll post the presentation after I give it, but for now here are some resources for the presentation:

Freelance Sites:

Where Clients Might Be Hanging Out:

Time Management:

Answering Reader Questions #1

Over the past few weeks, I have been getting some fantastic questions from readers, and I’ll slowly be trickling through and responding to each.

The first question comes from Tristan (by the way, I love your WordPress theme – start blogging!):

Would you consider doing a follow up article on cold emailing techniques?

Cold emailing is certainly not the most fun activity, but it has landed me quite a few opportunities, especially in my early days as a freelancing Instructional Designer. First off – You need to get over yourself if you aren’t already. Take all of the fear and shame out of the idea of cold contacting prospective clients. Ain’t no shame in that! Back in the old days, businesses did this all the time, and businesses still do door-to-door, which is similar, but a lot more difficult. A cold email is how I landed my role at a university, which had I waited for a posting and applied traditionally, would have been looked over for one of the 100+ over-qualified applicants with more experience.

I had a great conversation with a friend a few months back. He was looking to break into the Technical Writing scene and wasn’t sure how to do it. I encouraged him to do some cold emailing, but he was nervous about what he would say. This happens when we’re anxious about whether we’re capable of doing the job. So my second piece of advice is to exude confidence from every fibre of your being. You enjoy what you do and you know (or are pretty darn sure) you can do what you’re saying you can, so just own it!

Now, when it comes to specific techniques, I took several approaches:

  1. I created a canned, but modifiable, email that could broadly address any individual or organization. Once developed, I modified it based on who it was being sent to. Key elements included: introduction of me and my background, explanation of how my expertise might work for the individual/organization, link to my portfolio, attachment of my resume, and a thank you for taking the time to read the email.
  2. I researched the heck out of the people I was cold emailing. This is important because it sets your email apart from anyone else who may be cold emailing, which in my experience, few people do this nowadays, so you really want to show off your best self because you’re already putting yourself out there. After researching, I modified my email appropriately.
  3. I followed up! In most cases I followed up 2-4 weeks following the email.

One great thing about cold emailing is that often times, prospective clients don’t realize that they need their services, so when they’re offered (and explained clearly and without jargon), some folks will have an “Aha!” moment and realize that you’re just what they’ve been looking for to resolve a problem that has been plaguing them and/or their organization.

I will say that cold emailing may not be as fast as other means in terms of securing gigs; the university didn’t contact me until a year and a half after I emailed – how they still had my email, I don’t know, but they did, and I’ve been here ever since! However, those are the techniques that I used, and I hope that this information can help you.