The day that every freelancer dreams of finally comes–you get contacted by a big name client. The want you to do some work with them. You’re excited and as soon as you get off the phone you jump around your office screaming “YES!”. Surely that means if you’re doing work for one large company, you’ll never again have to scramble to find work.
However after the initial excitement has worn off and you’ve finally calmed down, your next thought hits you hard–now what? Is this just another client? Do I treat them the same? Can I charge them more? Can I use their work? Should I pretend to be a large agency?
I recently did some projects for Audible, an Amazon company, and a very large company that I’m not allowed to mention the name of and I was faced with many of these questions. I’ve learned a lot by dealing with these two large companies. I hope that what I learned is as helpful to you as it was to me.
How Do I Interact with Them?
Dealing with a large client is similar to how you’d deal with normal agency clients. If you’re not used to working with agencies, you can breathe easy because it’s actually a lot easier than working with regular business owners and clients. After all, they know what you do and how it’s done so they’re less of a pain to deal with.
The difference in dealing with a large client really stems from the fact that you’ll most likely have to deal with more than one person. With both of my large projects I had several contacts with the designers, programmers and project managers. This can make communication a bit tricky, especially if they’re not all on the same page. To avoid this, make sure you copy all of your contacts on one page.
Can I Charge More?
Technically, a larger client means a larger budget. However, I don’t believe it’s ethical to charge more or ask for outrageous prices just because it’s a larger company and you think they can pay more. If, however, they’re asking you to fit their project into an already overscheduled week, there’s nothing wrong with charging a rush fee.
My fees tend to be a lot more than most developers, so I charged them the exact same rate that I charge my regular clients. If your rates are pretty low and they don’t know what you charge, you may want to go ahead and ask for a bit more than you normally do. You want to make sure you do an extra awesome job for them, so put in extra time. Also, they may not consider you a professional if you tell them your rates are $5 an hour!
How Do I Charge?
While I normally advocate charging by the project only, it really helps to have a mix of hourly and project rates with larger clients. The problem with these larger clients is that things tend to move beyond the scope quickly.
I’ve found that by giving them a project rate at the beginning for the scope of the work you’ve been told about and then switching to hourly once they begin to add on projects is the perfect way to deal with these large clients.
For example, I coded over 97 mockups for Audible’s mobile site! I gave a set price for the first batch, but after that I just quoted hours. Had I stuck with set pricing, I would’ve been out of a lot of money, considering the difficulty of mobile coding and the revisions to the layouts. With a project that large, it became much easier to just charge hourly rates rather than trying to guess a project rate.
How Are the Projects Different?
Working on the actual project was quite different from working on my normal projects, and a happy difference at that. Because the projects and budgets do tend to be larger, I was able to take my time with the projects and I made sure that I adhered to all the coding best practices. The clients actually appreciated validated code, and I was able to use the best in CSS3 and HTML5, since neither client had to support Internet Explorer.
It’s interesting how the larger clients actually put a value on clean, validated and semantic code. Both of the projects allowed me to practice some advanced coding techniques that I’d previously been unable to try due to browser support. I believe I’ve learned as much from those two projects as I have all year.
How Do I Get Paid?
You might think that getting paid by larger companies would be more difficult, since you normally have to go through the company’s red tape and hierarchy. Perhaps I got lucky, but payment was quite quick and painless for me!
Make sure you send an invoice as soon as they ask for the files or work. This ensures that if they do have a mandatory payment time (14 days, 30 days, whatever) that you’ll be paid as quickly as possible. One of the companies didn’t mind paying by PayPal, but the other preferred a check, so make sure you factor in their payment terms with how you budget your money.
If their terms are different from yours, don’t immediately agree to them. Tell them your terms and ask them if they can change theirs to match yours, or reach some compromise. One of the companies I’ve worked with said they don’t pay for 45 days (45 days???), but when I said I require immediate payment before I hand over files, they were happy to accommodate me. It never hurts to ask!
Can I Put Them in My Portfolio?
It depends. Some companies don’t mind, and others go so far as to demand that you don’t even use their name and say that you’ve ever done any work for them! Alas, my dream client (and yes, they were the ones I dreamed about working with!) demanded this. Which stinks, especially because you want to tell the world how awesome you were to get that client!
Even if you can’t put it in your portfolio though, you can still use the projects to your advantage. You can drop their names in personal conversations to potential clients as well. Hinting at it never hurts either!
Your Thoughts
Have you been able to freelance for a large company? How was your experience?
Image by wwarby.
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