PICA Member Spotlights
Q&A with independent consultants who successfully “made the leap” and created the consulting career of their dreams
Q: Why did you go independent?
A: I think I’ve always had somewhat of a business owner mindset in that I never saw myself as being pulled into a career path that was defined by somebody else. I had an idea of how I wanted my life to be and my financial needs. So even back 20 or 25 years ago I knew that a traditional career path job was not for me.
Q: So how did you actually make the leap?
A: I made the leap by accident. I was working for a company and they laid off a third of their employees on a single day. At the same time, I had a freelance consulting gig with another company that had a lot of work developing an entire suite of products. So that ended up being something I did full-time as a consultant or as an independent and that was the shift.
Q: How do you structure your pricing?
A: I price by the project. I've learned that there’s a certain pattern to pricing by the hour for writers (and I'm sure this is similar for other consultants). You start out working and you're happy to be paid anything to write and you set a price. But in the beginning you may not have your processes and formats well established. So, let's say you charge $50 an hour and it takes you 20 hours to complete the project. But eventually it doesn't take you 20 hours to do it, it only takes you 10 hours. If you keep charging $50 an hour, you're making half as much when actually your quality is better and the quicker turnaround time benefits the customer. So, I found that I had to switch to charging $1,000 or even $2,000 for the same kind of project. Otherwise, what happens is you get faster, you're producing better quality and faster service and making less money than when you were working your tail off to fill your book of business. [Note: More info about fixed fee pricing is here.]
Q: So what's been your biggest challenge?
A: One of the challenges is dealing with the ecosystem of staffing agencies, meaning that sometimes it’s hard to get a contract as an independent contractor. Even though I'm an independent, sometimes I have to go through these staffing agencies because that's the way the client company arranges things. So with that in mind, what I've done that has worked well for me is to pick projects with a beginning, a middle, and an end, rather than ongoing projects. For example, a company that’s building an app and they need a technical writer for that project, or there’s an initiative that needs process documentation. In those situations it's much less likely that I have to become a part of the company itself.
Q: What's the best way for people to learn more about you and your work?
A: They could look at my LinkedIn profile and visit my website.
