Why do problems never happen singularly? Just like the old adage about buses in the UK, you don’t see any for a long time, then three come along at once.

Well the last week has seen my three buses arrive in quick succession. Firstly I am snowed under with work right now, not a problem in itself, but definitely a problem when considered as part of the overall situation. Secondly, Nuth has been sick, meaning I have had to take care of Leon, no time for work, anyone who thinks you can take care of a baby and still get a full days work in is living on a different planet. Lastly, the Internet in the apartment building has been terrible lately, most of the time it is unusable. So between looking after Leon, and a dodgy Internet connection, I have managed to dig myself in to quite a hole with a huge backlog of work. This week I am going to need to put in something like 60 hours just to catch up! Oh well, fingers crossed I can clear my desk by the end of the week and take a couple of days off.

I mostly earn my living as a freelance writer these days, nothing grand, I don’t write novels or anything so spectacular. Mostly, I write marketing materials, sometimes short 20 or 30 page eBooks, quite a few essays and business reports and now and then I get to do some product reviews.

I started off charging a flat rate. I can write around 1000 words per hour so was bidding at $2 per 100 words, or £10 an hour basically. The problem is, I am getting more and more work of a complicated nature, right now I have 2000 words to produce on:

Organisational Culture may be visualized as being an implicit set of references that guide and influence the behaviour of individuals within the organisation.

You see the problem? I’m probably going to have to spend more time researching this than actually writing it. The $2 per 100 words just doesn’t cut the mustard in this situation. I’m going to have to work out some sort of pricing structure based on the type of work I am asked to do, if a lot of research is required then I will have to reflect that in my pricing.

You might remember me posting something a while back about having to employ a couple of people to help me out with my increasing work load. This has proven to be somewhat problematic in organising.

I have employed 2 people, and they could not be more different. The first one is a young guy who has a degree in business studies and produces very good work for me, the main thing I like about him is the speed in which he produces results, I get a 24 hour turnaround with him every time, always perfect.

The second person is a chap who writes well, better than the first guy actually, but he is unreliable, this is worse than not having anyone to help out at all. For example, today I have ha to take back some work from him as he has found various reasons not to complete it for the last week, this means I now have to do the work myself, thus causing me to delay my other work. Really this is no good at all.

I think what I will do is complete the stuff he hasn’t done for me and then send everything else to the first guy, at least he produces the work in a timely fashion.

On of the biggest problems I face as a freelancer is trying to work out the correct price to quote a prospective customer. In an ideal world I would just take the amount of work that needs to be done, divided it by the number of man hours to complete it than multiply that by my  hourly rate.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work out like this, there are all sorts of other considerations. Is this a possible long term repeat customer? If so I should quote keenly. Is it one of my friends? Can I really charge my friends full price? Do I actually want to do the job or should I price it high so that if I win the bid at least it makes the job more appealing?

As you can see things are far from simple, it has gotten even more complicating since I have started to outsource some of my work, I now need to factor in bank charges, employee rates, add a small percentage to cover jobs that don’t get paid due to the customer disappearing but that I will still have to pay my outsource people for, all sorts of things.

I think I will start looking around for some software to help with all of this, there must be something out there, hopefully web based that can deal with business administration. Either that or find another outsource person that can handle the administration for me but I have a suspicion that will just compound the problem.