Hi Friend,
Many of us started our money-earning lives as an employee of some sort. Maybe you started in a minimum-wage job serving burgers and fries, or you folded clothes at a trendy store in a near-by mall.
Me? I started off working at a neighbour’s store that sold maternity and baby clothes. It wasn’t a great fit (pun intended) but I could walk there after school and work a few hours or pick up shifts on the weekends, listening to the radio and helping pregnant women find comfortable jeans.
What’s typically common amongst those of us who have jobs is that we started off as employees. We had bosses and supervisors who told us what to do and what our hours were worth. They set our work schedules (sometimes with input from us, but usually that input was. minimal), dictated our responsibilities, and let us know when we could have breaks.
When your formative years are spent working as an employee, it’s difficult to get out of that mindset. It’s what we’re used to. We’re familiar with someone barking orders at us and jumping to attention, scrambling to get the work done—no matter how unreasonable or impossible the task.
For many of us, self-employment is a rejection of that system.
We want to be our own bosses so we can control our schedules and decide what projects to work on. So we never have to be told at 5:30 pm on a Friday that we’ll have to work the weekend or we can’t have the Monday off like we’d been promised because “there’s no one to cover the shift.”
And yet many of us—myself included—allow our clients to treat us like employees. And while we tell ourselves that we do it to encourage them to work with us again, or because we need a referral, or we need the income from this project, the truth is that the more we allow ourselves to be treated like employees, the harder it is for us to see ourselves as contractors. In the long run, we’re hurting ourselves by saying “yes” to our clients’ demands.
If your client
Expands the scope of a project without paying you more,
Changes the timeline of your project without your input or compensation,
Subjects you to last-minute meetings and other demands of your schedule,
Expects you to do a lot of last-minute work, or
Dictates when or how you work
then they’re treating you like an employee. (Note, this is not an exhaustive list of ways you could be treated like an employee.)
From our clients’ perspective, it makes sense. They’re paying us and they’re used to treating their employees as, well, employees, so naturally it follows they’d treat you like one, too. Their employees are willing (forced) to work long hours to accommodate a last-minute change to the project. Or they’re willing (forced) to have endless meetings in which nothing gets done except that supervisors stretch the limits of how long time can be wasted. Or they’re willing (forced) to get the work done on an unreasonably short timeline, even if that means giving up their personal time. If they do that without extra pay, why shouldn’t you?
You, gentle freelancer, are not an employee.
You have none of the benefits or protections of an employee because you are not one. You are a contractor (literally, a person who provides a good or service on a contract basis). You (should) have a contract that lays out what you will and won’t do, and the amount you will get paid for carrying out the activities specified in that contract. If they want you to do anything beyond the terms of the contract, you should be compensated for it.
This problem becomes especially noticeable in retainer work or long-term, on-going projects with multiple deliverables, where clients might tell themselves that the nature of retainer work is that you should be available for them when they snap their fingers.
What can you do to address this situation?
Keep a very visible note on your desk that reminds you you’re a freelancer, not an employee. Trust me, this helps with your mindset.
Never answer a request right away. If the request is made via email, give yourself some time to think about it before you replay. If it’s made in person (or in a virtual meeting) tell them you’ll give it some thought and get back to them. Answering right away fosters a “say yes” mentality. In the moment, a request may not seem all that unreasonable. It’s only when you consider it for a few minutes that you realize what’s really being asked of you.
Create a list of things you will not do without additional compensation. This should be a somewhat dynamic list. After all, you can’t possibly anticipate every “employee-like” request a client will make of you. Create policies around your boundaries, so you can point to those policies when you firmly but politely decline.
Learn to say “no” without saying “no.” This can look like, “I’ll happily add this extra blog post to my work, but the additional charge is $250 for that post,” or “Yes, I can complete this report in two days, but you will need to pay a rush fee of $500.”
Get used to requesting more time. I have clients who constantly want work done in two days. And I always respond that I’ll need more time to complete the work. Even if I really don’t need more time, I’ll get the work done early and the client will be happy. Negotiating deadlines gets you comfortable pushing back against client requests. If the client asks when I can have work done, I’ll automatically tell them two days after whatever my internal deadline is.
Have a contract or letter of agreement that clearly spells out your terms. Make sure they sign it. Refer them to it when they try to add more work in.
This is not just about protecting your ego.
There are legal lines drawn by tax authorities in Canada and the US as to what constitutes an employee versus a contractor (spoiler alert, it’s about a lot more than just the job title). If you’re an employee but you’re calling yourself a contractor, you could get in a lot of trouble. And before you think it’s just the company who would be punished for the error, it isn’t. You could be in trouble, too, for claiming self-employment expenses when you’re actually an employee.
The next time you feel yourself being treated like an employee, push back against it. The sooner you start, the more comfortable you’ll get with doing so.
Here’s to your ongoing freelance success,
Heidi