Freelancing sounds fantastic—choose your hours, work from home, be your own boss—but the truth is, you’ll have a dozen bosses competing for all your hours, making conflicting demands and chaining you to your desk. Furthermore, even when you have a great month and bill a lot of work, that doesn’t mean you get the checks any time soon.
The first work I did for this one client, they gave me a check on the day I finished the animation for their website, and asked me back for another job. I thought, wow, this is a great client; but it was because they knew they needed me for the second job so they wanted me to feel good about them. The next job, though, they took forever to pay. No one accepted responsibility for not having paid me. They passed the buck to someone in Payables who I wound up knowing better than I knew the people I had worked with. Finally, around the third or fourth time I called her, I was a little rude. I thought I’d caught her in a lie, and I probably had, but it was before I realized that everybody knows what everybody’s bluff is and you don’t call them on it because it’s better to focus on your next move and do that. It’s bound to be counterproductive to tell someone that she’s inconveniencing me by doing her job. I said something like, “Quit jerking me around.” At which point she got offended, and then made a point of taking even longer to mail my check.
Freelancing doesn’t necessarily teach you what you need to know to deal with big businesses, with suits and office buildings and all. Those guys know what they’re doing. Self-employment isn’t big business and it isn’t small business. It’s little business, more like personal finance. It brought the problems I had with money right home to me in a big way. When you’re a freelancer or a sole proprietor, you are more like a hunter-gatherer than a business. It’s like being a small fishing boat, compared to a big ship with a working crew. You have to do all the jobs; you better keep your gear well organized and close at hand, and you better not need any sleep. On a large vessel, there’s a whole organization in place providing for everyone, and rules and traditions and schedules.
