Freelance hell, year 5.

Way back in January, when I posted my first blog entry of the year, I was feeling a mix of pessimism and optimism. (It seems like a lifetime ago now, given what my wife and I endured this year.) I weighted the pessimism a little more heavily. Not long after that post, work and life seemed to be showing signs of improvement. Then everything started into a a slow spiral downward.

It would take probably a couple thousands words to describe the hell we went through in 2022. The worst of it was my wife needing brain surgery to remove a meningioma that had been discovered by accident, and had grown in size. She had it removed on March 1, and our lives became very complicated after that. Her recovery was slow. She had balance issues, appetite issues, weight loss, emotional outbursts, and temper tantrums that were very unlike her. Many other health problems, tests, new medications (and stopping some others), and doctor visits followed.

In October, I contracted Covid-19 despite my best efforts to prevent contraction. Then my wife got it from me. A couple days later, she was hospitalized due to a bout of severe IBS-C and had to be admitted to the hospital while sick with Covid. We both recovered somehow, and started to wonder if things were ever going to be back to normal.

By default, I became a nearly full-time caregiver while trying to freelance. I did manage to take on a couple new clients, but the year never took off like I’d hoped it would.

In terms of business and freelancing, I’ve had one steady client for a year and a half now, and it’s satisfying work, but 2022 was yet another year that kept me in the category of “under-employed.” I managed to get another client out in California who represents two companies, and he’s been a real pleasure to work with. I hope that relationship continues in 2023.

Overall though, I have to say I’m not super encouraged by what’s happening in the US economy. The business confidence and pandemic recovery doesn’t seem to be there yet. I depend on the marketing budgets set by companies, and whether or not they feel that new creative efforts are worth spending money on. And even if they did feel flush with new money to spend, I can’t even guarantee that I have a place on their roster of go-to freelancers. All I can do is email them quarterly and remind them that I still exist and I’m available for work. My self-promotional efforts and marketing assets are in good shape, so at least I have that to rely on.

By Thanksgiving, it seemed like the worst of the year was behind us, and the December holidays were overall pretty good. I have no idea what to expecte for 2023. I can only hope and pray for a healthier, calmer year.

To those of you who’ve read this, I wish you a healthy, happy new year. Enjoy!

Freelancing, year 5.

As this new year kicks off, I’m pitching myself into it with a mix of optimism and pessimism. If I had to weight that mix, I’d put it at roughly 40% optimism and 60% pessimism. Here’s why.

I think the tilt toward pessimism is mainly due to the fact that I’m not a young man anymore. And the business world is enamored with young talent. This is nothing new. Young people are cheap to hire and they possess a naive exuberance about work that I sometimes wish I still had. That’s ok. A few failures down the road they’ll be wiser too.

Also, the freelance talent universe is expanding (regardless of the average age). And, the pool of freelancers on the market who will work for less is in abundance.

Then of course, there’s the pandemic horror show that won’t let up. That’s not helping. At all.

Let’s not forget about the stigma of the white male. And in my case, the 50-something white male. I’m theorizing that we’re all being lumped into a demographic profile that hirers are looking past.

So that’s my uneducated, unscientific guess as to the “why.”

I think this means 2022 has a good chance of being another year of under-employment for this stigmatized white guy. I cringe at the term “under-employed.” But, it’s fitting. I am one of those people ... the guy who was laid off and whose income or employment opportunities never really recovered … the guy who had a good job at a growing digital agency but account losses triggered layoffs and he became a statistic … the guy who has submitted hundreds of job applications but can’t get an interview. Yeah, I’ve become him.

That doesn’t mean I’ve given up. But it puts a busload of stress on the ego.

Mind you, it hasn’t been all dire straits. I’ve had freelance work each year, but it hasn’t exactly gotten us a dee-luxe apartment in the sky. And all the business relationships seem so fragile these days. I’m sure my clients — past and present — have all endured some level of Covid-19 instability the past two years. I’ve seen all types of upheaval on the client side since the pandemic started. Staff layoffs. Career changes. Maternity leaves. Reorgs. Early retirements. People who resign. A company is sold off, merged, or acquired and people get laid off due to role redundancies. A promotion (which usually leaves me at the mercy of the next marketing person to figure out who I am). It is, without question, really tough being on the outside always looking in, constantly asking for work.

And it’s not like I sit around waiting for jobs to land in my lap either. I’m very proactive about the process. I browse Upwork nearly every day. I cold email new clients every week — week after week, without fail. I circle back and email older clients with whom I’ve not worked in X number of months or even years. I connect with new people regularly on LinkedIn. I direct-message people sometimes too (though I think that’s a loss leader).

The other thing that continues to frustrate me year-over-year is the disappearance of the courtesy reply email. When exactly did this become the norm? People who are in a position to hire me simply won’t take 15-30 seconds to write a reply email. Or even to paste a stock reply into an email and hit Send (which would take about 3-5 seconds). Even amongst former clients, I usually get no reply if I send them a follow-up inquiry about work. I don’t really understand this behavior. I’d estimate that about 1% of all prospecting work I do via email gets a reply. The no-reply is unprofessional, in my opinion. But I guess it also points to the fact that most full-time employees are over-scheduled, over-worked, and dread having to wade through a stack of emails all day long.

One factor that I thought might be hurting my curb appeal was my website. While comprehensive, it wasn’t sharp looking or super well organized. So, last year I spent the entire 4th quarter completely overhauling my site’s UI and the work shown on it. I sunk literally hundreds of hours into it. (See my December 2021 “Year-End Productivity” post).

If you’re here reading this blog, maybe you’ve browsed my site. I hope you like it and appreciate the effort I put into it, not to mention the quality of the work itself. I’ve had a long career so far, and I hope there’s more to come. Otherwise, I’m going to have to seriously look at a career change. Then again, who’s hiring white guys in their late 50s?

Well, thanks for reading. Until next time, stay safe, do good things, and if you have a job, take a moment to appreciate it.

Year-end productivity.

As 2021 comes to a close, I once again feel the annual pull of my undernourished little blog. I truly wish I had more time to sit down and write, but alas, it doesn’t seem to exist in my daily routine. It's usually during the holidays, like now, when client activity winds down and I’m able to set aside a couple hours to prattle on about my feelings.

So, what a year, eh? Holy shite.

Obviously, all you have to do is mention The Pandemic, and immediately everyone gets you. I'll say the year sucked, but on the other hand I’m thankful none of my closest family members have gotten any variant of Covid ever — knock on wood. But I did hear stories from neighbors and acquaintances whose friends or family had contracted the coronavirus, and in some cases people died. I guess it doesn’t seem real until it hits that close to home. It's really a tragic way for one's life to end.

If that weren’t enough, many more issues weighed heavily on my psyche during the year — health issues my wife had (in addition to chronic Lyme disease, she suffers from IBS, which landed her in the ER twice in one weekend, then a third time at a hospital ER, whereupon she was admitted and treated); one of our dogs had knee surgery and required 3 months of rehab and recovery care; my mother-in-law has been inhabiting a world of dementia for quite a while now and needed family to fill in while her home health aides disappeared; I began was working on a book project with my mother (which is still ongoing); I was caregiving for my wife while doing all the domestic duties at home; I'm on the Board of Directors of my condo complex and we faced some daunting infrastructure expenses and budgeting; and there's that nagging little voice that says "find more work, ok?" every day; and so on. And what else? There are probably more issues I can't even think of right now. That’s enough though, right?

Professionally, 2021 was similar to 2020 — try to get more freelance work while a pandemic rages.

And yet, if I was going to find new clients and get new design and writing projects, I felt my portfolio site might be hurting me more than helping. It did get me a few new client projects this year, so it seemed “good enough.” But it still bothered me. I had a ton of work over the past several years that hadn't made it’s way to my site. And the work I did have on my site was not presented well.

After 7 years of having basically the same UI theme on Squarespace I was beginning to think, well, maybe this is that year I do another overhaul. But the thought of doing a gut renovation of my site just made me want to lie down and sleep, and hope that when I woke up, by some miracle someone had done all the work.

It turned out to be a fairly decent year work-wise so being busier than I was in 2020 helped me put off the portfolio site revamp. New projects also meant new work samples that I could show. This meant at some point soon I was going to have to rip off the band aid and start into my site overhaul. So I set a goal: get it done by the end of the year.

The summer passed quickly and I picked up two new clients that kept me very busy in the 3rd quarter, and would stretch into the 4th quarter too. By October, the site redesign was still hanging over my head. I really didn't have extra time in the day to set aside for a monster effort of this size. It just made me groan. I was going to have to go back and rebuild a lot of work samples that I'd had on my site for several years. They were blurry and low-res and needed to be bigger and high-res. (More groans mixed with muttered profanity.) I could see the way forward clearly: it represented hours and hours of grunt work. Lots of image processing, importing, exporting, uploading, yada yada yada. Blech. But if I didn't do it nobody would.

I decided I'd have to use mornings as my site makeover time. Get up a little earlier, get some coffee in me, and "sac up" as they say.

So, it began in mid-October.

I did a deep dive into my Squarespace theme and found new settings and site preferences that actually got me excited, and I was beginning to find my enthusiasm for the process. I found fonts that I'd already been using as part of my professional branding, I selected some fresh new colors, and I found better ways to organize my content and streamline the UI. I took advantage of some free tech-y looking video clips from Adobe and added a short video to my home page to jazz it up and set a “digital landscape” tone that I ended up liking a lot.

I also had to start the curation process—of deleting old and irrelevant work samples, bringing in fresh new work, rethinking how the work would be displayed, and developing a workflow that would become my own "best practice" for converting native files into engaging layouts on my site. And, spend some time on content organization.

In addition to that, I had to extend my rebranding to social platforms, my email signature, on promotional pieces, and on my résumé. Like I said, it was a monster project. But I managed to build momentum and I stayed in the groove for over two months. That’s what you call a “long tail.”

I'm really happy to say I met my goal of getting it done by end-of-year and I even beat my own deadline by a couple weeks. I'm actually proud of my portfolio now and I feel it shows off my best client work. More importantly, I can build upon what I have going forward.

And just under the wire, I’ve added this blog section, which includes all my posts from Blogger, going back to 2009. There really aren’t that many, so don’t freak out if feel you really want to read all of them. If you do, well, have at it.

Anyway, share some comments and feedback if you'd like.

As always, thanks for reading.

Happy holidays and happy new year! Cheers.