Question for business owners about communication when hiring freelancers

[random_username]

So let's say you are hiring a freelancer to fix something in your business. I'm curious how do you think about following situations. I'm especially interested in American or Central European people. I'm asking because I'm probably miscommunicating during initial LinkedIn conversations, but just want to be sure.

1. Let's say we talked for some time, and you ask me am I available right now. I say I'm available full time for 1 month, and my hourly rate is X EUR, total amount will be calculated at the end of the month where I will send you invoice and list of where the time was spent. When you do napkin math to get total amount, how many hours you assume I will bill you?

2. I say I'm a contractor, do you have any assumptions about how many hours or for how long can I be engaged for on your project?

 

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[Bounce Back]

So let's say you are hiring a freelancer to fix something in your business. I'm curious how do you think about following situations. I'm especially interested in American or Central European people. I'm asking because I'm probably miscommunicating during initial LinkedIn conversations, but just want to be sure.

1. Let's say we talked for some time, and you ask me am I available right now. I say I'm available full time for 1 month, and my hourly rate is X EUR, total amount will be calculated at the end of the month where I will send you invoice and list of where the time was spent. When you do napkin math to get total amount, how many hours you assume I will bill you?

2. I say I'm a contractor, do you have any assumptions about how many hours or for how long can I be engaged for on your project?

I hire freelancers by flat rate and I recommend contractors to bill flat rate too.

Detach yourself from hours as business owner to eliminate financial risk as well force yourself to put a $ value on what you need done - gut check.

Detach yourself from hours as a contractor to actually scale and value your abilities better. Folks have mental roadblocks when it comes to what to pay others per hour but if you are solving a problem they think differently.

 

[random_username]

I hire freelancers by flat rate and I recommend contractors to bill flat rate too.

Detach yourself from hours as business owner to eliminate financial risk as well force yourself to put a $ value on what you need done - gut check.

Detach yourself from hours as a contractor to actually scale and value your abilities better. Folks have mental roadblocks when it comes to what to pay others per hour but if you are solving a problem they think differently.

I agree that charging a flat rate, and fitting the service in the box will probably be better if I want to scale. But I'm not looking to scale, I'm just freelancing to pay the bills while I work on my projects. Another problem is that I don't know how to make that a reality. Reason is that I'm providing custom development, and minimum I've ever worked on something is 1 month, and most of the time it's hard for me to tell how much time exactly will it last. If I'm fixing stuff, there are always skeletons somewhere. If I'm writing something new with "specification", let's just say I don't think highly of product managers. I've tried few times before to charge flat fee, but there was always "big important thing" that needed to be done last moment, causing me to have to work harder and stress to finish it.

When I charge people hourly, whatever new they need doing, and they always need something, it's simple." That will take extra €, is that OK with you?". When I communicate like that, their decisions have weight. Obvious counter argument is that I could do same when charging a flat rate. Since the initial idea of what needs to be done is always wrong, then it becomes a verbal judo, what was expected and what not. So it seems easier to just do hourly rates for now. I guess this could be improved with better discovery process and better quality of leads. I'm thinking out loud, feel free to call my bullshit if I'm missing something.

Reason I was asking the above is that I often get messages on LinkedIn, like the one below. To me contractor or a freelancer is a person you hire for maximum of few months on a B2B contract. I ask this question directly as soon as possible to filter out people that are looking for long term employees. But they always ask me to clarify what full time and contractor means.

 

[Bounce Back]

I agree that charging a flat rate, and fitting the service in the box will probably be better if I want to scale. But I'm not looking to scale, I'm just freelancing to pay the bills while I work on my projects. Another problem is that I don't know how to make that a reality. Reason is that I'm providing custom development, and minimum I've ever worked on something is 1 month, and most of the time it's hard for me to tell how much time exactly will it last. If I'm fixing stuff, there are always skeletons somewhere. If I'm writing something new with "specification", let's just say I don't think highly of product managers. I've tried few times before to charge flat fee, but there was always "big important thing" that needed to be done last moment, causing me to have to work harder and stress to finish it.

When I charge people hourly, whatever new they need doing, and they always need something, it's simple." That will take extra €, is that OK with you?". When I communicate like that, their decisions have weight. Obvious counter argument is that I could do same when charging a flat rate. Since the initial idea of what needs to be done is always wrong, then it becomes a verbal judo, what was expected and what not. So it seems easier to just do hourly rates for now. I guess this could be improved with better discovery process and better quality of leads. I'm thinking out loud, feel free to call my bullshit if I'm missing something.

Reason I was asking the above is that I often get messages on LinkedIn, like the one below. To me contractor or a freelancer is a person you hire for maximum of few months on a B2B contract. I ask this question directly as soon as possible to filter out people that are looking for long term employees. But they always ask me to clarify what full time and contractor means.

I can explain a bit there actually - used to be in that side of the industry a bit too.

What they are asking you back is trying to get at if you want is typically called "corp-to-corp" / "c2c" and it is used in recruitment industry to onboard usually foreign workers into otherwise in all effects "permanent" positions quicker and with less headache to the hiring company (they don't have to navigate so much bureaucracy. It'd be a whole long write up to explain what they think that is advantageous in the first place....

Point being no, especially in the states, you do not want to call yourself a contractor. All though it makes perfect sense to do so besides the above like maybe ~30-40% of our tech work force is technically behind the scenes contractors even though they work in the same company same job for sometimes a decade or more. This has to do with the fact it allows companies to avoid a lot of other laws and benefits they'd be forced to pay/comply with in especially California. So the word has kinda lost its meaning - think contractor here means more "second class employee".

Really what you are looking to label yourself as (again at least to the USA) is simply a freelancer, service provider, outside consultant, or something like that (I'd personally stick with freelancer).

 

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[random_username]

I can explain a bit there actually - used to be in that side of the industry a bit too.

What they are asking you back is trying to get at if you want is typically called "corp-to-corp" / "c2c" and it is used in recruitment industry to onboard usually foreign workers into otherwise in all effects "permanent" positions quicker and with less headache to the hiring company (they don't have to navigate so much bureaucracy. It'd be a whole long write up to explain what they think that is advantageous in the first place....

Point being no, especially in the states, you do not want to call yourself a contractor. All though it makes perfect sense to do so besides the above like maybe ~30-40% of our tech work force is technically behind the scenes contractors even though they work in the same company same job for sometimes a decade or more. This has to do with the fact it allows companies to avoid a lot of other laws and benefits they'd be forced to pay/comply with in especially California. So the word has kinda lost its meaning - think contractor here means more "second class employee".

Really what you are looking to label yourself as (again at least to the USA) is simply a freelancer, service provider, outside consultant, or something like that (I'd personally stick with freelancer).

Thank you for taking the time to write that up, that was helpful.

 

[random_username]

I'm talking to another person on Linkedin, and I'm confused again with the language. I specifically said I'm a freelancer, the person replied with what seems to be B2B contracting in line with BounceBack wrote above. If I understood it correctly this is basically a job offer, but we call it a B2B contract for legal reasons. In my mind, long term means over 1 year. So this is basically a job in a agency as far as I see it. It's cool, they look for what they look for, but I don't understand why they don't just call it a job. Obviously I'm going to ask about all the details, but I'm really confused with this again. Am I missing something?

 

[Bounce Back]

I'm talking to another person on Linkedin, and I'm confused again with the language. I specifically said I'm a freelancer, the person replied with what seems to be B2B contracting in line with BounceBack wrote above. If I understood it correctly this is basically a job offer, but we call it a B2B contract for legal reasons. In my mind, long term means over 1 year. So this is basically a job in a agency as far as I see it. It's cool, they look for what they look for, but I don't understand why they don't just call it a job. Obviously I'm going to ask about all the details, but I'm really confused with this again. Am I missing something?

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Yup you are getting it now - this one is one more step involved though - they sound like a software shop themselves that is going to resell your labor from client to client. AKA even more annoying employment gig where you have to learn many different peoples stacks/environments/business logic.

 

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[Kevin88660]

I hire freelancers by flat rate and I recommend contractors to bill flat rate too.

Detach yourself from hours as business owner to eliminate financial risk as well force yourself to put a $ value on what you need done - gut check.

Detach yourself from hours as a contractor to actually scale and value your abilities better. Folks have mental roadblocks when it comes to what to pay others per hour but if you are solving a problem they think differently.

Paying you hourly sounds like I am hiring an employee.

That one freelancing that charges hourly and makes sense is teaching.

Paying by assignment sounds more logical.

 

[Fox]

So let's say you are hiring a freelancer to fix something in your business. I'm curious how do you think about following situations. I'm especially interested in American or Central European people. I'm asking because I'm probably miscommunicating during initial LinkedIn conversations, but just want to be sure.

1. Let's say we talked for some time, and you ask me am I available right now. I say I'm available full time for 1 month, and my hourly rate is X EUR, total amount will be calculated at the end of the month where I will send you invoice and list of where the time was spent. When you do napkin math to get total amount, how many hours you assume I will bill you?

2. I say I'm a contractor, do you have any assumptions about how many hours or for how long can I be engaged for on your project?

You probably don't want to let hourly rates run on for a full month - that is high risk for you. Bill weekly, unless you have a clear way to already trust them.

But hourly rates are the lowest leverage way to get paid. It is best to switch to charging for the completed work and/or results as soon as possible.

The better you get... the faster you work... the less hourly billing matches your output potential.

 

[random_username]

I figured out what was going on. Some time ago, I clicked on LinkedIn Open to hire and selected Contractor. I thought that was a signal I'm open to be hired as a freelancer. What I didn't know at the time was all the language differences listed above, that contractor means something else. Also recruiters don't look at any of that shit, and they just spam you with messages if the flag is set. Anyway, now I know. Thanks everyone for taking the time to reply to this thread.

 

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