Your First Priority is to Stay in Business
This headline sounds a little cold but it’s a fact that every business faces at the end of every day and at the rise of every morning. You’re either in business or you’re out of business… it’s as simple as that. Your first priority is to remain solvent, pay the bills and keep the lights on.
It can be easy to be seduced into a vision that being a freelancer is about the guts and the glory, putting in the hard yards in the trenches and having laurels laid in honour of your passing. If only it were that simple. If only it was the romantic vision of making super cool web designs for super cool appreciative people who understand our unique vibe.
You all know that just isn’t true and it never has been. This is a tough industry. Margins are tight. People will ask you to work for free, to work below your living wage, or to work on spec. Simple. Don’t. I say don’t because you live in a world where everybody else is taking a slice of your wallet to stay alive… and that’s the relationship between customers and businesses.
Did your dentist just give you a free root canal? Nope? And I can bet the next time you take the kids to McDonald’s they aren’t going to bust you a big fat smile and wave you through in sympathy. So I’m saying – get with the program and get with it early.
Incumbent in your responsibility as a freelancer / small business is to earn a living wage and to ensure that everybody working with you, for you, or around you is also paid according to their value AND their need.
Think about this for a few minutes. When you get paid a fair wage for your effort you can then spend a fair dollar in your local store. That makes for a better world and a commercially sound neighbourhood. Money empowers and provides for person after person in an ad-hoc daisy chain throughout society – making your community better educated, healthier and providing everybody’s children with choice and opportunity.
If you look at the flip side… when you work for free or spec or below your true value you are denying the shopkeeper and everybody else down the chain from you any access to that money. That impoverishes your community and deprives your neighbourhood of opportunity.
I’d like you to think about the meaning of money for a second. What does it do? How does it move? It’s not that paper or those coins… it’s an idea that we share about the value of things. And it’s your responsibility to understand your relationship with money.
If the lights go off in your business because you failed to earn a fair income then it impacts more people than you may have considered.
