Now you’re ready to really start finding clients. In fact, by now you might even be attracting them.
One thing you need to decide soon is what your project minimums will be.
A project minimum is the minimum amount of budget and time a project has to have before you’d even consider looking at it.
Think of it as a low bar. A potential project that isn’t high enough? Skip.
You need project minimums. Otherwise you could be wasting time (and money and energy) chasing projects that don’t pay enough.
If you spend 1 week chasing a project and you can only bill $200 worth of work, there’s a good chance you just lost money.
Don’t think what you decide is set in stone and never-changing.
When you first get started freelancing you’ll probably pick a lower amount. You just don’t have enough clients and experience to justify the top tier projects.
But as you gain experience and "level up" your clients, you can walk your project minimums up.
(This is the same process as raising rates. In fact, I’d recommend reviewing both your rates and minimums at the same time every year.)
When I got started my minimum was $500 and 8 hours of work. My hourly rate was around $60 so that was about 8 hours of work. That let me pick up a few small projects that other freelancers passed up, but still kept me profitable.
As I started to raise my rates I also increased my project minimums. More recently I’ve set my minimum to $1,000, then $1,500, and finally $2,000. (I’m considering increasing it again but I haven’t had a small project recently.)
One thing I’ve noticed is that the amount of time to find and win a small project is very close to the time to win a large project. Even more importantly, closing a long-term project (12+ months long) takes just as long as a short-term project (1-2 months).
- This discovery is what’s behind my decision to increase my project minimums
- It has cemented the idea that focusing on long-term projects is a better business strategy
To get started with project minimums, pick a number. If you’re freelancing full-time then 8 or 10 times your hourly rate works good, which is 1-2 days of billable work. If you’re part-time, 4-5 times might work (which is still 1-2 days but of a part-time workday).
Alternatively you can pick the number of days if you bill by the day or week. A one to two day minimum to get started is probably best.
Eric Davis