EP-57: Christy Tucker - Everything Freelance Design
On today’s episode, we are joined by Christy Tucker! We talk about all things related to freelance: knowing when to start, time tracking, finding clients, creating an LLC, pricing accordingly, making sure it’s the right fit, and much more!
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Transcript:
Luke Hobson 0:00
Hello folks before we begin today's episode, I have an update to a prior announcement. Save the date, August 19. As you may remember, my friend Dr. Robin Sargent, the founder of IDOL Courses Academy is writing a new instructional design book called the Do It messy approach, a step by step guide for instructional designers and online learning developers. I was fortunate enough to be one of the early readers are Robins new book, and it's awesome. Robin writes in a clear, concise way, it's simple to follow, it's enjoyable to read. And also you might be seeing an appearance from me somewhere in there. And more on that later. Now you might be asking about who should read the book, because obviously, it's tailored for newbies. It's kind of in the title itself. I will say, though, but experienced instructional designers should also check out this book. As a senior instructional designer myself, I loved hearing about other perspectives, reading about other stories, seeing what tips I could take away from this, and how I could apply those to my existing toolkit. So join the waitlist today and read the first 15 pages of the book right now and get a 20% discount when the book officially launches on August 19. It's only a few weeks away, I can't believe we're already at the beginning of August. This is crazy. So anyway, say the day for August 19. So sign up for the waitlist today by going to idolcourses.com/book that's idolcourses.com/book. Also enrollment for idol courses Academy is going to be opening back up again on September 12. So be sure to save that day as well. And you can learn more about IDOL courses Academy by going to idolcourses.com/academy. And now let's start the show.
Hello learning nerd nation and welcome on in to the nerdiest podcast you are going to hear today. My name is Dr. Luke Hobson. I'm a senior instructional designer and program manager at MIT. I'm also the author of the book what I wish I knew before becoming an instructional designer. And I also have a YouTube channel and a blog as well. And I make all these different types of things and content. Because my passion My purpose is to help you learn more about instructional design, wherever you're at inside of your own instructional design journey. All are welcome to the show whether you're an aspiring brand new instructional designer, and you just heard about the entire field today. Or perhaps you're a veteran and you have 10 20 30 years experience within instructional design, you have a home here, you're all welcome into this show. And of course, if you want to find anything else more about the show, and all the other pieces of information for things that I create, you can go head on over to Dr. Luke hobson.com. I know many of you have been messaging and emailing me asking for freelance design content, there is a ton of content on my YouTube channel and blog and podcast and everything else. And I talked about several different areas of instructional design. But as many of you notice, I really don't touch upon freelance too much. And there is a really good reason why I am not the expert when it comes to freelance design in any way, shape, or form. And I can't pretend I'm even close to qualify as far as we're talking about freelance work. However, I do know of an expert, a friend of mine in a field and I asked her if she will be willing to come on the show. And luckily for all of us, she said yes. So you are going to be hearing my conversation with Christy Tucker. Now you might know who Christy is. She's very active on social media. She's been a guest on many different podcasts and YouTube series over the years. But for me, this actually was a really surreal moments. And I actually talked about it a little bit in the episode. When I first heard about instructional design for a friend of mine. This was back in 2014 or so. And we first started to talk about the entire field. After our conversation I went to back to my desk, I fired up Google and I just simply typed in a term of just so what is instructional design? And sure enough, Christy's blog was actually the first thing that popped up and somehow we've never really connected too much over the years a bit here in a bit there. But this time it was so awesome to really have a full blown conversation. And Christy is absolutely amazing everything like I thought she was going to be so this episode is fantastic. I know you are going to be getting so many amazing pieces of advice, so many different golden nuggets that are going to be coming from this episode, so I'm not going to waste any more time. Here is the one and only Christy Tucker.
Christy welcome to the podcast.
Christy Tucker 5:05
Thank you so much for having me Luke.
Luke Hobson 5:06
Absolutely. Thank you so much for being here, this is going to be a ton of fun. But before I get ahead of myself, could you just please introduce yourself to the audience and tell us a little bit more about who you are and what it is that you do?
Christy Tucker 5:18
All right, so my name is Christy Tucker, my company is Sinead learning. And that's a one person company of just me. I've been in business for myself since 2011. So over 10 years now, most people however, know me through my blog, which is experiencing elearning. And I write about, specifically a lot about scenario based learning and storytelling, and that's the thing where, where people know me, but I do, you know, conferences and speak various places and and teach branches in Scenario course, and do do a number of other things. But specifically, a lot of this is, you know, because I've been running my own business for 10 years that's, you know, doing doing the freelancing and consulting thing. That's part of what we're, we're here to talk about today.
Luke Hobson 6:18
So, absolutely, absolutely. And one thing I actually I didn't tell you purposefully, because I was waiting for the podcast to share it with you is a fun fact, the very first thing I ever read about instructional design was your blog. Ah, right.
Christy Tucker 6:35
But you know what, but it is a thing of, because I, I have been blogging since 2006. So it is that like it literally, you know, 50 years, but I wrote those, that series of posts on instructional design careers, which is the what does an instructional designer do? And those are the posts that a lot of people, especially people coming from education often find first in or early on in their searching. And so that is a big chunk of how I built my reputation was those was was answering those questions, because I recognized like, Oh, I've answered this question four times, I should probably post it on my blog and just point people to it. Because clearly, exactly people have and it is still a question people have. What is it?
Luke Hobson 7:26
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. As soon as I heard about it from one of my friends is doing some networking. And he mentioned he's an instructional designer. I was like, interesting. And I heard his perspective. And of course, I went right to my work laptop afterwards. And was this like, Okay, what is instructional design? Then? There you go. So that is really funny. Now fast forward to 2022. We are here. And it's just so awesome. So I can't wait to dive into this. And actually, I have a selfish question before we even begin. I'm just curious, how did you become an instructional designer? Because I don't know. I don't know your backstory?
Christy Tucker 7:56
Yeah. So my career has always been about helping people learn in one way or another. I started as a K 12 music and band teacher. So I did three years of K 12, teaching public school. And then I switched to doing corporate training, back in the days when companies had computer labs on site, and you would get everybody all in a room together to learn how to use Microsoft Office, and have a trainer come and stand up and, and deliver that training.
And I found out that I like working with adult learners a lot. But that training job, I was working with canned curriculum that was purchased from somebody else. And they had all of the books and frankly, the things that were the most fun for me was making the extra little job aids or extra little, you know, supplemental materials to go with it and not necessarily standing in front of a classroom for five days a week delivering the training. And so then when that was the training office that I was working in closed and I needed to figure something else out and started researching for me the reading about instructional design was from the big dog little dog instructional design site as old and as dated looking as that is all of the information on that is what helped me find my way to the field when I was researching in 2003 2004. And eventually it took me a long time to get the first instructional design job. But once I did finally get a job it was at a online for profit University.
Christy Tucker 9:38
And so I learned a ton while I was there and then I did a some bouncing back and forth between kind of corporate and higher ed. Well, most people end up in either one side of things or the other. I actually have kind of done both. My nowadays, almost everything I do is workplace training. But I have kind of done a little bit of both along the way.
Luke Hobson 10:06
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that actually is a perfect segue into my next question, because I think for a lot of people out there right now, they're just discovering about instructional design, clearly, we were just talking about, and a lot of people only seem to think that there are two sectors of higher ed, and corporate and there's obviously more, but the one that doesn't get as much attention, I think, as it probably should, is with freelance and that's why I'm so glad you came onto the show to share your words of wisdom about the sector, because quite frankly, I do not know enough about freelance to guide people. So I'm really glad you're here, because I am not the expert by any means. But since you worked in both corporate and higher ed, you had that experience and taste of both, what made you decide to actually leave that and instead explore an opportunity within the freelance sector.
Christy Tucker 10:53
So I had, so I had been kind of interested in, in going out on my own and having the flexibility to be working on my working from home and to have control over the clients that I would take on and, and to do some more of those things. So it's somewhere been interested,
I was working, the last full time job that I was doing was a contract at Cisco. And I had gotten some freelance work. So I did, I was doing some part time work on the side, while I was at Cisco, I think, for a lot of people, that's often you know, like, you work a full time job, and then you take on some freelance things to make some money. So I had taken on a project that gave me enough money to buy a work laptop for myself, and to pay for the whole Adobe suite and captivate because at the time, that was the software I was doing. So I could pay for all that stuff. I didn't make any, I made very little profit on that, if anything, but I could break even. And I could pay for all of those things that I needed to be able to take on other stuff.
So I had finished that up, I was kind of interested in looking starting to look for other things. And at the same time, this is in 2011, and Cisco started going through, they had the first of what was several rounds of layoffs, all of the contractors at the time, then were switched, so that you had to your contract had to be renewed every three months. So I was full time and W two. But I only had work for three months at a time. And then my contract got re negotiate like every three months. So there was no stability in it.
And I had just seen all of the middle managers from my team get fired. And I found this other freelance project that I had done, you know, I had done the numbers and had what I thought was going to frankly, be at least three months and maybe like four or five months worth of expenses. If I did this project based on what I was looking at that that would be like, Well, four or five months would be more than the three months I have guaranteed it by Cisco job right now. Let me go try this, I'm not burning any bridges. And if I hate freelancing, I'll just go back No Go work again.
Christy Tucker 13:07
So as it turned out, I quit my job at Cisco and then the freelance project got delayed AM. So also it was good that I had done like I had them some, you know, because I had done that little bit of the freelancing beforehand. And we had been saving up money to have some buffer was really good that I had that financial buffer because as it turned out, I technically started in August during the freelancing, but I really didn't get anything paid for that other freelance project until October.So I had a little gap that I was not anticipating, but just a little bit. Not terrible.But it was good that I had some some money saved up so that you know, work fulltime. And, and and yeah, for me, it was that I was I was looking for sort of the next challenge of things. And I had started to hit a point where I actually was getting people contacting me about doing freelance work because of my blog. And so it did seem like okay, if people are contacting me, there's clearly interest to do this. So, you know, now, like, all of those things sort of all happened at once. And it seemed like yeah, this is the time to just bite the bullet and go out there and do it to make that leap.
Luke Hobson 14:28
It makes sense. And speaking of taking that leap, I'm sure that was absolutely scary and petrifying, to be able to actually to do something so for the folks who are just starting off and they're actually thinking about doing the same path as you and going down this this freelance world how do you know if you're ready? Are you trying to measure as far as for acquiring a certain level of skill set foundation? Confidence, like how do you know you're ready to do this?
Christy Tucker 14:58
You know, I think that that is it. I tricky question. I will say that having money set aside if if you have the flexibility to make the choice, right, okay, let's take two question do Virgin's discretion, right? Because because there's the, oh no, I've got to do something right now, this question, in which case, congratulations, you're ready.
And like, oh, you need to pay your mortgage, congratulations, you're now a freelancer, let's figure out how to get it done. But the, the, if you are planning it, you know, trying to be at the point where you are saving up some money, I think that that is a good idea. You know, everybody talks about having that, you know, three to six month buffer saved up. And even if you can go more than that, I think knowing that there is this potential of recession coming in the economy, that's a good idea for everybody to probably have some money set aside. So you have some buffer.
I think that having skills of having at least some area of the instructional design process where you know, that you can, in fact, do it competently and, and do it well, and it might, it does not mean that you have to do every part of the process from start to finish really well, or that you have to know everything higher ed and corporate and government and like, right like this is this is not the thing, but at least that you you have identified for yourself, what are the strengths that you can lean into.
And that's part of being ready, you, you may also have to do some of that self reflection to figure out where your gaps are, because you, you are probably going to have to fill some skills, I think for freelancing, everybody who does some freelancing has to learn some business skills, like you have to learn how to read agreements, and you have to learn how to do some amount of sales, marketing, networking, something. And I know we'll talk more about that. But like, there are skills to that, that you have to do some amount of you have to be the other thing is, you have to be good at
it estimating your time. So if you are thinking about doing this, the things that I would recommend is, you know, figuring out your skills doing your assessment of like, where are your skills now? Where are your strengths? Where do you maybe need some more work, saving up some money
and tracking your time on your tasks as you're doing them now. Because the thing to be able to estimate the time it will take you to do things in the future, is having records of how long it took you to do those tasks in the past. Makes sense. And I still I still struggle with that as like trying to do activities. I remember reading that in your blog, because you mentioned that you actually call that out on your blogs, you're like, I spent X amount of hours doing this, and according to my time tracking sheet, blah, blah, blah. And I was like,
Luke Hobson 17:56
That's so smart. Like I should really do that.
Christy Tucker 17:59
And it really is one of those things of like, even if you are a salaried person right now, but you think maybe in the next couple of years, you might go to freelance, start tracking your time, even if you are salaried, having some time tracking for yourself with oh, well, this is how long it takes for me to do a design document. This is how long it takes for me to storyboard. So that then you can go back and you can have some of those records because
I had gotten into I mean, I did this in looser amounts, and you know, various amounts in in previous jobs. But even when I was salaried, I did do at least some of that tracking for myself. It is a good habit to get into even if you never end up going freelancing. Frankly, knowing how long it's going to take for you to do things is a useful skill for project management and instructional designers do end up doing project management. Oh, I think freelancers do more of it. I do more project management as a freelance as a consultant than I did on my own. But that time tracking piece because it's one of the hardest things for people that that estimating.
Because even if you're going to build hourly, and I think for a lot of people when you first get started, because it is so hard to do estimates, you should fill hourly, probably so that you don't get yourself stuck with a you know, effective less than minimum wage rate.
Christy Tucker 19:23
It's, you still have to be able to tell people, oh, well, I think this is going to take me 80 hours to develop this. Right? You still have to have some estimate makes sense. You can even still you can also get lost with just spending hours on something you love. But it's still ours. You still you know you still should be dragging that makes sense for thinking about decisions beyond that as well.
Luke Hobson 19:46
I know one of the things that always comes about and let me throw out the caveat there that you're not a lawyer. So just FYI, this is not legal advice, but everyone always asked about like Okay, so let's say I've identified my strengths reflected upon everything figured out time tracking project management. Fantastic. Do I start an LLC? Should I just go for sole proprietorship? What advice would you give someone from there? And once again, not a lawyer, but what would you advice this is like barely even legal information.
Christy Tucker 20:18
So I think for a lot of people, it does make sense to have an LLC, you can have an LLC, and the IRS will still count you as a sole proprietor. So for tax purposes, it's not any more complicated than being a sole proprietor.
An LLC gives you the protection, that if for some reason somebody were to sue you, they would only go after the assets of your business and not your house. Now, I know zero people in our field who have ever gotten sued, where it would have mattered. So that's probably such an edge case that it's, you know, paranoia, and I have seen people argue that that's the case. But I will say that there are contracts for whom you having an LLC, where it's a business to business contract, and you are clearly then a business and you're serious about doing it. And LLC, in most states is pretty easy. And you can probably do it yourself. If you have ever filed your taxes yourself, and you've you know, gone through whatever and like gone through a wizard and filled out the instructions. The LLC is probably easier to fill out than that.
When I did mine, I had a lawyer friend who I had asked like, Oh, hey, can I like hire you to do my LLC paperwork for me, and he's like, like, well, you can and I'll take your money, but all I'm going to do is call the same number from the Secretary of State Office. So you should probably just do it yourself, and I won't take your money. So I did. And it was it's in North Carolina, it's 200 or $250. And it's, and then I pay another $200 a year to renew it. And the Annual Report takes me 15 minutes, maybe online,
it's pretty easy. It gives me some protection, it makes me look more like a professional business. And I have had contracts, I do see contracts sometimes where it is officially a business to business account. For me that at my bank, having the LLC also made it easier I so even if you're not going to I do recommend that you at least get an EIN an identification number instead of us instead of handing out your social security number to every client that you go to. So that your social security numbers in 10 different places, get the employer identification number and have the other tax ID
which for me was again easier with I had the LLC, I got the had the tax number, and then I could get a separate checking account from my bank. And in that order,
easier to keep the end again, then keeping the finances separate. So I would say that for most people, you should. For most people, when you're starting out you do not you can probably be a sole proprietor for tax purposes. And you do not need to do an S corp until you're making a certain amount of more money. I do also recommend that you go talk to an accountant early on. I very early on, I paid I had one hour with a CPA to say here's the stuff that I'm tracking. Here's how I'm tracking it. Here's how I'm categorizing. Am I on the right track? Is there something else I should be doing? And it was hugely helpful and 100% worth the one hour consult
to get that advice now, and I still keep my own books 10 years later, like mine are not complicated enough that I need to do more. If you're hiring lots of subcontractors, then it's probably at the point where you need to. But yeah,
and if you're not sure you can always get you might need an attorney to look at agreements for you. You can always do like see if you can find a local attorney that does focuses on small businesses to help you consult and figure out legally what you should do. It is not necessarily as expensive as you think it is. So especially to do like a one hour consults kind of thing. It can be fairly affordable. So if you're not sure if you're talking to a lawyer,
fantastic non legal advice that was still very helpful.
Luke Hobson 24:41
Well, I think the most common question beyond LLC I think it's probably beyond that one for most common question though. But I always see our newbies trying to figure out what do they find clients and contracts and I've seen some people ask questions a lot of the times about some of the different types of websites like Fiverr and up
work and things of that nature? Would you recommend starting off with those? Or do you think it makes more sense for the long term to use networking, your connections and trying to grow base like word of mouth kind of marketing.
Christy Tucker 25:15
So Upwork and Fiverr, are inherently, often a race to the bottom for rates. And so you are competing with people all over the globe, who potentially live in places where the cost of living is a lot lower than wherever you live. And so it can be hard for people who are just getting started, it's not necessarily a terrible place to go. And I know, You've had Nicole pop piano llogara, on your show, and she has talked about repeatedly that she has used up work, she has had people find her on Upwork, that has ended up leading to more work elsewhere.
And so it is one way to make yourself findable. So I wouldn't say it's a terrible thing in terms of just getting yourself started.
In the long run. Most of the work, really in this field, so much of it comes from networking, and referrals. So the things that are important are things like your LinkedIn profile and making your LinkedIn profile very clearly, you know, show your show your things. And I admit like my needs to be updated probably for my services. But but you can do things with your LinkedIn profile, because LinkedIn helps you be findable.
And it is a place where people look for things that the other thing is to simply like be out in the communities and where people are talking about things. And to be helpful. Right, like, like, you've talked about being in online groups and seeing things and being like, Oh, well, I can answer that question. And like, so post, you know, like posting the answer and being helpful. I once got a $16,000 job.
Because I answered a question. In LinkedIn group, the person who hired me is not the person who answered the question. It was somebody else who saw that I answered a question and was helpful and knew what I was talking about. And that then led to a contract.
And it is one of the things that I have seen Jackie van dice and Ashley shish son, and other people talk about that, if you are out there and sharing in the community and being helpful that you are answering questions in the eLearning heroes forum, or you're answering questions on LinkedIn or in Facebook groups or whatever. That stuff just happens to land in your lap. Like it is just one of these things. Being a good online neighbor, where people think of you as Oh, right. You know, Luke is the guy who answers those questions.
Oh, you know, you know, oh, we have this problem. You know, there somebody posted about that online in the group. Oh, right. That's right. Because look at this answer. Let's go see, like, maybe he can help with this. Because you build that reputation for being somebody who knows what they're doing.
And for being somebody who was helpful and who like has knowledge and, and people think of you because they see you.
The other thing is that this is a field where within freelancers, all of us sometimes get overbooked, or we get projects that are like not the thing that we want. I do not like doing software training. I know I did talk forgetting, I've done enough software training in my career, I do not need to do more software training in my career. I don't want it I will refer all of that to somebody else.
And so I have some people who I know really liked doing technical training and doing software training. And so when I get those sorts of leads, I just pass them on. Yep, I do it all the time, too, because I'll get requests about storyline. And I'm like, nope, not me. Send them off.
Exactly. Yeah. And, and so much of it in our field is is that kind of stuff. I mean, it's and, and there's lots of different ways to to network. But I will say that the general idea of you know, be a good online neighbor and be helpful to people and trust it in the long run. That will help. That is clearly not the strategy of like, you need something now so you can pay your mortgage next month. That is not the strategy that you're gonna use for that. For that strategy. It's a lot more of I will say that the short term strategy is often directly asking for referrals. So if you can ask people who you know people you have worked with, if you're just starting and you don't, you obviously don't have any past clients.
You can go to you know, the people you've worked with and say
Hey, I'm now freelancing, and I'm going to do storyline development. And do you know of any organizations that are looking for help with this kind of development? This is the stuff I'm looking for, you know, could you give me their names? Right? And so that as the short term strategy of the how to get work next month,
asking directly for referrals in the how do you get work six months from now, do the networking and build your network and lick LinkedIn and connect with people and comment on other people's posts and be visible, be findable? So let's say we're talking about the long run, actually. And we have the luxury and the opportunity to try to be able to pick and choose between different clients. And this was something I was actually talking about with a friend the other day, because it was the first time ever where she was offered a job. And she was like, I'm not the right fit. And I was like, Yeah, I know, it's weird that you're actually turning down an employer. But the warning signs, were there. All the red flags were like, no, no, no, you don't want to be here. So she politely said, No, thank you and, and recommended somebody else in the world of freelance, what do you look for as far as for making sure that the client is going to be the right fit for you, not just with the fact of like software training you like, now, I'm all set. But is there something else that you really look for to make sure that yes, I definitely want to work with this person, or maybe not someone else's, is better suited. So so some of it for me is, you know, I'm because I focus, especially on the scenario based training, I tend to be looking for things that are the soft skills training, or that they're looking for scenarios that they are, at least interested in trying some bit of scenarios, that doesn't necessarily mean I'm doing advanced branching simulation things all the time, it it often, frankly, means that we're doing little mini scenarios, because they've never done it, we need to get them move them a little bit on the path towards doing something better, rather than change everything. But some of it is that like, the people who just want me to make their PowerPoint pretty is not me, frankly, they don't need to pay my hourly rate for that they can find somebody cheaper than me, because my hourly rates, not at the low end of the rate.
But so I, my my flow for things is that often clients will contact me. So of course I'm in I'm in a position where generally speaking, it's either a referral, or somebody fills out the contact form on my blog, or on my website, with my portfolio.
I have a set of qualifying questions that I ask. And I have those saved into TextExpander. So I can just like put it anywhere. But so it is
that I asked them about their goal, and what are they trying to accomplish?
Because I do want generally to be doing things that are making some impact on something, and at least that we're starting by talking about the problem that we're solving. Not we need a 30 minute elearning. Right. It's, so it frames the conversation that way. Sometimes it is like we need a 30 minute elearning because we've got a legal requirement, and but
I asked him about budget. In those qualifying questions. I have a question in that list that says, you know, do you have a budget set aside? Is it at least x $1,000? I will say I tweak the how much that budget is based on kind of if I've gotten any preliminary information, you know, I kind of have that, and I've increased that threshold. And then I have a note that says like, you know, having a bed at 12am. That doesn't is not a deal breaker, but it does help us focus the conversation on the right types of solutions. Because if I say do you have a budget more than $8,000? And they come back saying no, but they've been talking about like building four hours of elearning as a certification program with significant assessment or something.
I know right at the beginning, I've got to re scope that. And I've got to you know, the people who have $200 budgets are like we need to get that conversation redirected pretty quick.
I asked if they have ever worked with instructional designers before, or if this is a newer type of project for their organization, not a deal breaker, but it does change how I have the conversation and tell me how much education I need to do at the beginning.
I also asked a question of you know, Are you the owner of this project or should we invite somebody else to the initial call?
Oh, it's a great question. I love that because the like one of the projects that I had a really hard time with was one where the person who really owned the project and was the decision maker
I was four months in before I got to have 115 minute phone call with her. Everything was relayed through a project manager who I had assumed understood the vision.
And she got it wrong. And we had to go literally back to the beginning and like scrap what we had done for probably four months worth of work. So the know who the stakeholders are, and who's the owner early on. For me, the red flags are often artist. So like, all of those questions are related, frankly, to red flags of some sort, or at least, to know how to have the conversations. It's the are you trying to fix a problem? Or are you just like, are we just doing check the box training?
Which, and I do some check the box training, but like, given my choice, it's I maybe we'll choose something else if I have two projects to choose from?
Is this actually something where there are 17 reviewers? And we're going to have to go first off? So, you know, again, is that an automatic deal breaker? No. But if there are two attorneys who have to agree on the wording for every single thing, then I need to scope the timeline appropriately if to have to agree to lawyers agree on the wording.
Or have 17 Different people review it and know that there's that much feedback because that's the other thing is the like how many people are reviewing and how many people need to approve things? And do you have one person who can be the final decider?
Generally speaking, red flags for me will turn up. For one thing, if I asked about the budget, and then they ghost me.
I didn't need to spend any more time. And so I have already just basically screened them out because I asked them a question about budget. And even with that whole, you know, less than that isn't a deal breaker in there. I have a lot of people that even that even if I say oh, you know, $5,000, which we know for elearning is a pretty that's a small budget. And I asked that question, and then I never hear from them again.
So just asking a budget question right at the beginning means I don't spend any time talking to people. It's very smart. The other thing is just like people who drag on the whole process of like getting an agreement signed and figuring out what the scope is, and all of that. Those ones are also I think I had I had another one that I had turned down. I guess officially probably turned down earlier this year. I mean that we'd had an initial conversation, I'd sent her proposal, six months with like two options in it. Six months later, they had come back and said, Oh, well, you know, can you do this? Like, cool. I gave you options, like what did you want? Oh, well, actually, we want to do like we've changed it and we're going to change the scoping. And can you do like another proposal?
Well,
like, and, and and eventually. And eventually we gotten to a point where it was the Okay, yeah, we've got this, but I'm not available until X date.
But if you want to get into my queue, like I'm in a position right now, where I tend to be booked several months in advance, which is a great position to be in does mean that I'm turning down work just based on timing.
And people who haven't, you know, haven't planned ahead and need work to start right away, are probably not working with me. But that client was definitely on the, like I had said, Okay, well, I'll be available in you know, I have some availability in February, if you want to get in my schedule, you need to make a decision and answer these questions. And we need to get an agreement signed so that I can get you into the queue. And they ghosted me until February and then came back and said, okay, like we're ready and I'm like, Cool, the other people who signed agreements got in line before you and so that's kind of where things are of like, you know, if you can't and and also like you there were questions on scope that you never answered and
they're, they're nice people like the product, the project had some interesting things to it, but they can't make a decision. And they can't sign an agreement. And honestly, like clients who can't make decisions and can't sign agreements are also going to be probably slower and paying. And I'd rather not. There are also like other I will say like of other red flags, agreements that have horrendous non compete
clauses in them that if you're freelancing, you cannot sign a non compete because you are going to have multiple clients going on at the same time. Like you have to work with other clients. Most of the time I work with two or three clients at once. The you know, club
clauses that say, Oh, well, you can't poach our clients or our vendors, like that's a normal thing. But I've seen some pretty egregious non compete clauses in agreements for freelancers like, No, this is your agreement for employees, and this isn't going to work. So, you know, that those, those are sorts of the things to other than that it's, it's generally, the red flags would be things like, you know, people who yell at you, people who are angry people, the the one, I mean, I talk, I had a blog post about the word project, which I was, I was so stupid about this, taking on this project, because it all like the email came in with all of these, like, all of these all kept things like how, why are instructional designer so also hard to work with? And why can't I get anybody you can do the job and like, just do the things that I always have to be the creative director and make the decisions and blah, blah. And, and, and I never should have worked with him like I
was, I will say that that was very early on. That was some of the, like, part time things I did while I was
working full time that I made some extra money on that the only thing I did right with that was get a 50% payment upfront. Because then when he bailed on me, I at least had gotten paid something.
But like, it was one of those things where I was did not value my own work enough to, like, value the boundary of like, no, don't yell at me. Yeah, let's not yell at people. That's cool. Let's, let's not do that.
Luke Hobson 41:39
No, it's fantastic. That's fantastic. I loved all those details. And you mentioned about something too, that was incredibly insightful about how you knew to put in that that clause of 50% down now, because of somebody like that, how did you actually know about that, like when it comes to creating a contract or an agreement? How are you finding the flexibility to be able to do this, but obviously the same time the security for you, because you knew to do that?
Christy Tucker 42:06
Because that person was clearly a piece of work. So yeah, that one wasn't that one was a piece of work. So so the I had done some reading about things, to try to figure things out, I will say the, the book that I read early on is called consulting basics by Joel Gendelman. It's from a TD press. It's a little dated now.
But it did have a sample agreement in it and a sample, you know, like how to do scope of work documents and how to do deposits. And
the, the thing I had screwed up in that one was that I had not really specified how many revisions were included and what the revision scope would be. And that's the place where people get screwed and agreements is, that's, that's definitely another thing where you, you do have to look at it. So I had gotten that consulting basics book, I had done some reading online, the Freelancers union has some good resources. They've changed things now. But there is still I think they do still have a wizard, where you can enter in some information and get a sample agreement. So you can kind of say like, here's the clauses and here's what state I'm in and kind of get some things. So you can find some of those things. I did kind of, you know, I mean, I built it over time. And I've gotten better at specifying what my revisions are and what's allowed.
But I think that there, there are some more of those things out there. For for templates. But those the, the I think there's there's some more of that information out there now, but you can find some of those things.
But that was that was the book that helped me at the beginning. Nice, I'll be sure to write that down or include that in the show notes as well. So we'll make sure to give that book A shout out. Did any of those resources actually talk to about how to set your fixed rate you've talked about that quite a bit, but I did just want to like ask as well too about trying to find the right formula of years of experience budget, the client, etc. Okay, so the pricing is always a big question and and pricing is a lot more poker than science.
Okay, so like that's kind of the starting point of this. So hourly rate, quick rule of thumb is that whatever your W two rate if you're in the US your your full time hourly rate is you should at least double that rate for your freelance rate. And you maybe should triple it, especially when you are getting started. You will not not all of your time will be billable. In fact, when you're first getting started, probably 50% of your time will be not billable working on your business and
building up your networking and building up your pipeline and figuring things out. And so your price need your hourly rate needs to assume that frankly, you aren't getting more than 20. And you'll frankly have more gaps in between things as you're getting started. So when you're first estimating, you probably are better off assuming that you're only getting 20 billable hours per week,
do not assume that you will get 40 billable hours per week and that, and therefore set your hourly rate accordingly.
That's the difference in taxes and things. So that's, that's the quick thing, I do have a post on my blog that has a number of other benchmarks, there are several calculators out there that you can use, where you can kind of punch in, like your expenses and things. So the good news for us as instructional designers,
if you're working from home,
you don't have tons of expensive, it's not like you're renting an office or anything, right, you have a computer, you have several online, you have your your online website, because you do need to have a website, if you're freelancing, you know, I think having some business website having your portfolio having it on a custom domain, and your software subscriptions, which, you know, depending on what you're doing, you're gonna have more or less of that, right? If you're not doing storyline, and don't ever take it I have, I have articulate and captivate and beyond and but you're going to at least have zoom probably are and you're going to have you know if a few other things, project management software, maybe your or whatever, but you have tons of expenses. So you know, I think that all of that's, you know, you take that into account. But now that your your percentage of it that's profit is probably pretty high.
But you can use the calculators and just, again, double your hourly rates a good place to start for hourly. In terms of pricing projects, perfect. Thank you simple enough, simple enough equation to be able to do it. Yeah. So that's awesome. Well, this next question I have for you is great one because I didn't come up with it. So I can say it's a great one. This actually comes from a member of our Facebook group, her name is Susan, and she is curious about your methods with finding out if an idea is on the right track or not when you're aren't able to actually run it by someone else. So this is actually more on you compared to with another person. So she asked if you are a one person entity, just you the Freelancer how do you check yourself? Or what systems or structures do you have that help you get feedback, troubleshoot a problem, or a hash out ideas of another person who is not the client? So I think that there are a couple of couple of answers to that. So for people who are just getting started, especially if you're new to instructional design, I do think it's helpful to start out by sub contracting through other agencies. Because then you have a team. And you are working part as part of something that is an established team. And there are other people to bounce ideas off of.
And, and that first instructional design contract that I had gotten when I left Cisco was through an agency. So there were other IDs to work with. And there was a project manager who could review my work, and who I can bounce ideas off of. And I could talk to the developer and say, Hey, I've got this idea. You know, will this work? You know, when you're building this, right? So we could do?
We could do those things. And so do you think that subcontracting is is frankly one of the things
when you're more experienced and you're wanting to do things more on your own or and have more direct clients. Subcontracting often pays a little less than getting the direct clients because somebody else is taking their cut for doing the sales part of it. There are a couple of groups for freelancers, I'm in one called the online network of independently learning professionals, oh, and ILP, which is a free group, and we have a Slack chat. And we have twice monthly zoom calls that usually are just a community hour where we come in and we say, like who's got some problem? And so we talked about the like, oh, like, how do I delicately fire this client? Or like somebody in the in the slack group had just posted something about? They had signed an agreement had a client
they had expected to start a month ago.
And the products been delayed. So our question was like, how how long do I give them like she's been turning down all their work? Because she had this other big project coming? And so how does she handle that? And how does she tell them? Like how do i professionally tell them that they've taken too long? And in that group, frankly, we do some of that we often do the things to have just the like, Hey, I've got this thing
I'm gonna do it in Storyline. Can somebody take a look at this? There are a couple of Facebook groups. We've mentioned Nicole, before Nicole runs a freelance group, Nicole and Robin Sargent and I run the elearning, Freelancer boot camp. And that group is definitely a place where I see you know, where people can can comment. There's a freelancers group on LinkedIn, that might might be helpful, frankly, you could kind of post some things sometimes on LinkedIn, or you know, like, just say, like, Hey, did somebody have 20 minutes to look at this and give me some feedback.
If you've done that networking, you will probably get responses from people even if it's something you can't share, because it's client things its proprietary.So that's the other thing about building your network is that yes, it is the thing to you know, build your business and to get clients, but it is also the that place to go. And I do think that the networking is really important because if you're freelancing, it can be very isolating.
Right? Because you are on your own and you don't have that team to go bounce bounce things off of the the own ILP group has done that for me but you know, TL DC or the Facebook groups or those those other communities you can use
and, and you know, take advantage of those as that place to go post questions and, and bounce ideas off of people. So communities everything always comes back to people and community relationships. It's basically the answer girl when it comes to these types of things.
Luke Hobson 51:41
Oh, fantastic. Well, Christy, thank you so much for sharing so many amazing gold nuggets here because I learned a lot too. Once again, I'm not the freelance guy. So I learned a ton today from this episode. This is absolutely fantastic. For folks who want to go more and check out your work and be in contact you with you and everything and follow you online. Well, where can they go, please feel free to share away all of your different types of things show some media handles, website and everything else.
Christy Tucker 52:04
All right. So my blog is ChristyTuckerlearning.com, it's C H r i s t y Tucker learning or you can do CTuckerlearning.com. So you don't have to remember how to spell Christie, and it will redirect you to the right site.
On Twitter, I am Christy A Tucker.
And I'm on Twitter, you can find me on LinkedIn.
I teach a course called Build Your branching scenario, which I'm going to relaunch in probably September run another cohort of that, that is
teaching how to create a branching scenario from start to finish in what probably will be nine weeks when I relaunch it to I'm going to change the update the program for what I did last time. I also run the elearning freelancers boot camp with Nicola and Robin that I mentioned that's on the idle courses website that you can find that
and so I'm on those places I'm occasionally on Reddit in the once in a while in the Instructional Design sub on Reddit, even though it is a grumpy place.
I mostly don't I'm more on the on twine.
Christy Tucker 53:22
In there's a twine subreddit and I probably been there as much as on the the instructional design. There's discord for twine too, but
Christy Tucker 53:32
And if people are interested in I know I mentioned the ONILP group, that one's a free group. And if people are interested, you can find it there is a group on LinkedIn that doesn't where most of our activity is, but you can find out how to get the invites to our calls and our slack through that group or people can contact me and I can get you an invite. So that's awesome, perfect sounds.
Luke Hobson 53:58
I'm gonna link all of that in the show notes by the way so that people don't want to try to Google this thing to the bike. So I'll put that all down there. But once again, Christy, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it.
Christy Tucker 54:07
Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun conversation.
Luke Hobson 54:09
Well, that was my conversation with Christy. Christy thank you so much. Once again for coming on the show. I learned so much and I know that everyone else who was listening to this episode right now also learned plenty the same time. So folks, share this episode and tag us on LinkedIn and tell us what was your biggest takeaway from the entire episode? And of course if you enjoyed today's episode give it a five star rating wherever you are listening Spotify Apple podcasts Stitcher, I am not picky. All of your five star positive reviews are always so welcome. Always so fantastic to read. If you haven't yet, subscribe to the YouTube channel of course this podcast and obviously check out my book what I wish I knew before becoming an instructional designer, which you can find over on Amazon and also if you haven't yet already do
joined the new LinkedIn group learning nerd nation. You can go into the show notes as well as this by going into LinkedIn and searching for learning nerd nation, and it is going to pop right up. And as always, you can find everything else that I do over at Dr. Luke hobson.com. But that's all I have for you today, folks, stay nerdy out there. Now talk to you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
