Spring Cleaning; Get Out of Your Own Way; Do I Really Know You?

This weekend, I’m hosting the WIFV 48Hours Film Contest Team, as they’re using my house as the location, and so naturally, I’m handling location and props. I’ve been cleaning the house to prepare, and it’s spring, so yeah, spring cleaning. It got me thinking about what kind of spring cleaning can be done in freelancing. No, I’m not talking about taking a side hustle cleaning houses (though I’d understand if you did- no judgement!), but on the business side, what can we clean up to make work life a bit easier? Here’s some ideas:

Email cleanup. I’m totally guilty of this, and I’m always looking for better ways to stay on top of my email. My favorite tool is Sanebox.com (not free, but totally worth it). In addition, when I can, I set aside an hour, on airplane mode, to just sit and clean email. I could do another whole article on email.

Equipment cleanup. What do you need to get rid of, and how can you better organize your cables, gear, and work area?

Contact cleanup. Do you have your work contacts organized in the way that best serves you? How could you do better?

Photos cleanup. Like email, take an hour and try to delete some photos on your phone. Great thing to do on a long car or plane ride.

Filing cleanup. If you didn’t do this in prep for your taxes, it’s not too late. And if you need shredding done, just google “free shredding near me”, and there’s likely an event happening that will let you drop off a box of shredding.

I recently wanted to refer a freelancer to a client of mine. I hadn’t actually worked with the freelancer yet, but I had talked to him on the phone because I would be working with him on a different client’s job the next week. I reached out to the freelancer to request a proposal that I could pass on to my client. The freelancer had a very handy form on his website that was comprehensive enough that he could provide an estimate based on the questions he had asked. For contact info, you could put in your email address and phone number. I put my office number in, and a bit later, I got an email that had the estimate in it. However, to open the estimate link in, you needed to get a code by text….and the phone number I had put in was my office (LANDLINE) number. So it would never receive texts. I actually had to send a screen shot and tell him I couldn’t open his estimate, and after a bit of back and forth, he finally sent me a PDF. It turned out his pricing was very reasonable, and the quote was professional. My client agreed to work with him, the event went well, and I would love to add him to my freelancers network…but I am a bit concerned about how his business practices- designed to promote him as very professional–are actually getting in the way of communications. All he would need to do is change the one question in the form to “mobile phone” rather than “phone”.

Don’t ever make assumptions about how people like to communicate or be communicated with. Don’t make it hard to hire you. The easier it is to communicate with you, the more jobs you’ll be able to get. Or at least you’ll know THAT’S not the reason you weren’t hired.

Related to the other two articles above, I have a decent database of freelancers, and it’s organized. If I’m looking for a camera person for a Tuesday (which I am!), I can go to my database, and find some camera people that I think would be a good fit, contact them and make a decision. Well, easier said than done.

Here’s where it falls apart:

Freelancers in my network don’t provide me enough info for me to better decide if they have the equipment, experience, and/or rates for the project. If they provided it, it would be in my database listing for them.

For those in my database that I do reach out to, they don’t necessarily respond. I can actually SEE that they’ve opened the email. But I don’t get a response. Not even a “let me check on something and get back to you”. It’s a big waste of my time when I could be checking to see if others are available. And quite frankly, it’s rude.

When I don’t have a range of rates for jobs, it makes it hard to budget properly. I recently learned that the rate I had budgeted for production assistants has gone up. It sucks to learn this after the budget has already been accepted by the client, and now your production assistant contacts think you’re being cheap. You’re not. You just didn’t know what they expected to be paid because they never told you.

If you’re getting this email, you’re in my freelancer database. If you’d like to update your details, please send them to [email protected] with the subject line: Freelancer Update.

And, if you’re available to shoot interviews in a conference room on Tuesday from 10am- 3:30 pm with your ENG/EFP camera, let me know- you can simply reply to this email. Rate is $650, and I can provide audio and lighting gear, if you provide the camera/card.