Unsurprisingly, most prospective clients want at least a brief chat before deciding whether to hire me, and likewise I want to know a bit more before working for them – although I do have clients who I have never spoken to and everything has been done via email. I call this an initial consultation and it is free of charge.
In the very early days, I was extremely laid-back about this – I would pretty much let clients have as long as they wanted as I needed the work. However, this did end up with some people taking the mickey, including:
- Having two in-person meetings, then right at the end of the second one trying to bounce me into accepting much longer payment terms (more than double what I would normally offer).
- Dragging me out to a faraway location only to try and recruit me as full time employee, even though I’ve been clear that I’m a freelancer and have other clients (the offers were never good enough to make me even think about changing).
- Turning up at the prospective client’s offices, only to find that either there was no record of my meeting or that the person I was supposed to meet was busy and would be late (I am never late for meetings unless something catastrophic happens like a public transport meltdown, and I call ahead as soon as I know).
- Getting my (free!) advice and help on deciding on the best way forward, then going to someone else to do the paid work.
I did spot one pattern – the further people asked me to travel, the less likely they were to be serious and give me any work. Anything outside of Greater Manchester had a 100% failure rate.
After being messed about many times, I decided to switch to allowing one hour for the initial consultation, and charge for anything beyond that. This also ruled out in-person meetings unless they were within walking distance of my flat, so effectively everything was remote-only. This became much easier to justify once the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to get used to remote working, even though I’d been doing it since 2015.
60 minutes was definitely an improvement on open-ended consultations, but I was still struggling with people taking up a lot of my time and then not giving me any work.
Eventually I settled on 30 minutes for the following reasons:
- I’m generally booked up 70-80% of the time on an ongoing basis with regular work.
- One-off projects take up the rest of my time and I’m fully booked on those 4-12 weeks in advance.
- 30 minutes forces people to think about what they want to discuss and stay on topic, whereas 60 minutes allows meandering and chit-chat, like asking whether I support City or United (neither: I have zero interest in football other than how the game is financed).
- I can fit 30 minute calls in around other work much more easily than 60 minute calls.
It’s a tricky line to tread though – I did have one prospective client decide not to work with me because they felt that 30 minutes wasn’t enough to explain their situation, and as a result they thought I didn’t consider them important.