“What?!” I hear you crying as you frantically reread the title, “that’s outrageous! You’re a drunkard and a fool!”
But, I assure you, I am no fool. Working for free can actually help you as a freelancer to earn more money. The concept is actually very simple, and it’s value is often overlooked.
Now, before the flame war begins, I’m not talking about jumping all over creation looking for charity work to boost your karma and win the lottery (although, that might work as well). The idea is based on two things:
Working for free can expand your list of business contacts, resources, and potential clients.
The first is business networking. You can never have too many contacts. In my own experience, it seems that business owners always have a few friends in need of a Web Developer. Those friends have friends who have friends, and so on and so forth.
“So what?” you’re thinking to yourself, “I can do that and get paid for it!”
Yes, you can. The problem is, you can only do that for those people who can afford to pay your pretty little salary. Those people tend to have things like business plans, associates, bosses, consultants, lots of red tape, and a little black book of people to call when you screw up.
Then there’s the group of people who can’t necessarily afford you. You’re looking at the little guys — the Mom & Pop pizza shop, the just-out-of-school art student, the hair stylist trying to get her business of the ground — who might not have the few thousand dollars to shell out for a nice website. You have a serious advantage here: they don’t have many people clamoring to do their website pro bono, which makes you their go-to guy for both their business, and their friends. You could have quite a bit of paid work coming your way.
Important Note It is important to express to the person you are providing your free services to that you do not normally work for free, so that they don’t go telling everyone and their brother that there’s a free web designer in town.
Second, and most important to me is skill development and portfolio expansion. Admit it: despite your all-powerful knowledge of the web development process, there are just some things you never got around to learning. What was it for you? Flash? Drupal? E-commerce management?
For many projects, learning-by-the-seat-of-your-pants simply isn’t an option. So what happens when your client asks you to do something you don’t know how to do? There are generally a few avenues you can take:
- “I don’t know how to do that, maybe there’s an alternative.”
This can go in a multitude of directions. Some clients think it’s good that you think outside the box. Some don’t like that things aren’t going according to plan. Others have no input at all (my least favorite) and you have to think of a way to give them what they want.
- “I don’t know how to do that, I’m going to need to bring on another person to help me.”
This might not go over so well, especially if your client is on a tight budget. Bringing on another person might sound pricey, and it carries the added risk of making you seem incompetent when you tell them you can’t add this feature or that imagery. Control freaks and micromanagers will find this especially annoying — now they have yet another person to manage and talk to (even if they don’t, it still carries an “added work” connotation).
- “I don’t know how to do that, but I’ll give it a shot”
It might sound ambitious to your boss but, in many cases, doesn’t bode well for the resulting product. You spend a week or two… or three… trying to learn it, and it may or may not work by the time your deadline approaches. You might botch the project and upset your customer, and have to go with option one or two anyway. Depending on the severity of your failure, you may even lose a customer. Bad for business, methinks.
If you’re working for free, however, there’s much less pressure to make it perfect. If you’re working with one of the “little guys” I mentioned above, they probably won’t have much of an issue with you taking a little longer to learn something a little better and do it right. In fact, they’ll probably encourage it. By the time you’re done with your project, you’ve learned something new. Something that you can take back to your bigwig clients and use to really melt their old, leathery rich-guy faces. I do free projects all the time to simply expand my knowledge of the new technologies out there: new languages, frameworks, strategies, and even hosting providers (see my post on VPS Providers).
So what do you think? Is working for free worth it? Have you done it before? Leave it in the comments.
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