#150: What Do You Do When You Have TOO Much Work?

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. You can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com Episode 1 50. Those notes include a summary of our discussion as well as links to resources that we've mentioned during the show and other additional information. So in this week's episode, we're discussing an issue we've yet to address in this podcast and it's the issue of what do you do when you have too much work as opposed to too little work? And. Sounds like a great problem to have, right? But, but if you've been freelancing for some time, you've probably experienced this challenge at some point and you know how difficult this situation can be. It's fun until it isn't. My guest today is Don Sadler, and Don is just an awesome dude and he's going to show you how to manage yourself and your business when you're book solid and how to retain your sanity and your health. And if you're nowhere near experiencing that problem in your business, I still encourage you to listen because you'll learn how you can get to this level from someone who has and continues to stay at this level consistently and then what to do once that happens. Don's a great guy. He's a fellow writer here in my hometown of Atlanta. He's super smart, very good at what he does, and incredibly generous to share what he's learned with others. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. Don, welcome back to the show, man. Great to have you back.

Thanks, Ed. Good to be here.

You know, it's, I want to plug real quick our first interview together and I'm, I'm linking to it in the show notes because you'll, for those of you listening haven't heard of Don before, you'll get to learn a little bit more about his background and how you became a freelancer. It's a fascinating story, but for folks who are not familiar with that or maybe forgot, why don't you give us a bit of background, tell us about your business today, what kind of work you do, what kind of clients you work with, that sort of thing.

Sure, sure. I've been a full time freelance writer for a little over nine years now. Decided to hang out the Shingle. In early 2009, when I got laid off from my last job working for a publishing company, I spent the first 24 years of my career working for several different custom publishing companies. Anybody who's been around for a while will recognize that term. Newer people probably like what is custom publishing. But anyway, started 1985, first job out of college was with a custom publisher down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Worked there for 12 years, which is almost unheard of nowadays for most people, and a first job out of college, but really learned the craft of marketing writing, marketing, communications, specializing in the financial services industry, which has turned out to be a great niche for me. Moved to Atlanta in 1997 to work for another company, actually a competitor, doing pretty much the same thing. And then in 2005, that company was acquired by a much, much bigger company, again, another custom publisher, still doing pretty much the same thing. So spent the first 24 years of my career really learning and honing the craft of marketing writing in the financial services industry, which like I said, has proven to be a very profitable niche for me. And we'll talk more about that later. However, by early 2009, the financial crisis was in full. Well, we were in full fledged crisis mode, of course, and I could see my job basically dwindling before my eyes. And sure enough, by early 09, they had to let me go because the book of business I was working on just barely existed anymore. But since I saw that coming for at least six months, if not a year before it actually happened, I had some time to think about what I would do if and when the layoff happened. And so as soon as I got laid off, I decided I would see if I could make a go of it as a freelancer before I went and looked for a new. With the experience that I had and the niche that I had and the contacts that I had from many years in the industry, I was able to get the freelance business up and running pretty quickly. And I just celebrated nine years of self employment. And that brings me to where we are today.

Yeah, and you were able to do a lot of this on the side right before you left. So you had a kind of a head start in some ways.

Yes, yes, definitely. That was. We could talk. We could talk about how to get a freelance business started in a whole other conversation.

Oh yeah, well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to send people to our first interview because you definitely expand on a lot of that and why it's such a great idea. To do this on the side while you have a day job. And it's, you know, it's kind of a hard thing for many people to do because, let's face it, you work, you know, let's say 50 hours a week, maybe even longer. Last thing you want to do is run a business on the side where you have to work evenings, some weekend time. But it's many cases, it's the best insurance policy you can buy. In your case, it really paid off when you had that bit of a surprise.

One of the first things I did when we moved to Atlanta was started looking for freelance work and I was able to land a couple of steady gigs pretty soon. And that really laid the foundation for going full time freelance. Gosh, 12 years or so later.

All right, so let's shift gears a little bit and talk about our main topic of conversation today, which is what do you do when you have too much work? So this is something that I get asked about every once in a while. I do work with established writers and copywriters and this, you know, if you're not there yet, believe me, you're going to have a different set of problems at one point in your, in your freelance business, even though it may not seem like you'll ever get to that point. But it is a challenge. What do you do? And it really creates a whole different set of not just challenges, but stresses that you have to learn how to manage well. So I want to. One of the reasons I'm coming to you with this topic is every time you and I have talked, you're busy, you got all kinds of work lined up, and I'm sure you got your dips. And I know a couple of times we've talked you've had like a little bit of a dip. But what you consider a dip is like, you know, it's. Some people would love to have that problem. It's very, very temporary. So I'd like to maybe open up the discussion with, maybe kind of set the stage for us a little bit, you know, kind of give us an idea of what. What do you consider to be book solid? You know.

Sure, great question.

We talk about that. What do we mean?

Great question. Book solid for me is when I'm working a full workday. And for me, a full workday is pretty much 8:30 to 5 ish. And if I'm working a full workday with paying work for the most part throughout the entire day, then I would consider that to be booked solid. I'm there pretty much all the Time very rarely does a day go by that I'm not doing some kind of work that I'm billing and getting paid for.

Gotcha. So yeah, and that's pretty intense because some people even tell you, oh, you know, book solid, maybe 50 or 60% of your day because you need the other time to do some other things such as administrative marketing and so forth. But in your case, you're at a point where you can spend a bigger percentage of your day doing this. And I mean, that really is kind of pushing it to the, to the limit.

And I do keep track of that. I keep kind of my own personal timesheet where I keep track of the time that I spend on every paying job that I have, how much I'm earning on that job, and then the time that I spend on other non billable miscellaneous tasks. So I'm kind of anal along those lines in terms of doing that. And that really helps me keep track of, as you said, my level of busyness and how book solid I am in terms of having paying work and how much money I'm making and how much time it's taking me to earn that money. These are all key variables if you ask me, when it comes to running successful freelance business.

Now, just your best guess, and I know you track it, but what's a good ratio for you? Is it 80, 20, 90, 10 in terms of billable versus non billable?

80, 20? Yes, I've never thought about that, but I think I would say if you're spending, if, if I'm spending 80% of my time on billable work, 20% on non billable work, that's about what I want to shoot for.

Yeah, I think that's a good ratio and outside of the scope of our discussion, but by the way, I mean that, that could, that could be 10 episodes right there is how do you get there? And I think that's a healthy place to be, by the way. So I was thinking, Don, for, for just to kind of give our discussion some structure. I was thinking through some questions I could ask you in the, maybe breaking down the process into steps and maybe the good starting place would be okay, so if you're in the situation where you're starting to consistently book solid, let's start with maybe one of the first areas you can address, which is qualifying new prospects. So your, you're pretty much book solid and you're having leads come in, people who want to see if you can help them out. So what kind of criteria, steps, processes or standards do you feel you have to put in place in order to do a better job of staying book solid and not just taking everything that comes your way.

Good question. I want to take one step back before I answer that question, which will help lay the foundation for answering the question. And that is what? How am I able to stay book solid in the way that we just described? There's three main, three main keys that I've identified here. The first is the experience and I talked about it. At this point, I've got over 30 years of experience doing what I do in a very specific niche financial services. I branched into a couple of other niche areas, but for the most part, 70, 80% of what I do is financial services. So that's huge in terms of just people knowing about me, people making referrals to me, people that I've met over the years, coming back, needing work, sending other people my way, that kind of thing. So the experience is huge. And I realize that you don't just get 30 years of experience rolling out of bed, but for me that's been huge. Another factor is the niche industry experience that I have. And we could do a whole show on being a niche freelancer versus being a generalist. I feel very strongly about the power of being a niche freelancer because it's worked so well for me. The more specialized your niche and the more in demand your niche when it comes to needing writing services, obviously the better and the more technical in your niche the better too. Again, I write about some pretty sophisticated financial topics. I'm also doing some work in the IT area, which is obviously very technical and sophisticated as well. So the more technical, the more sophisticated, the more difficult to write. Obviously the higher rates you're going to be charge. The other thing that's worked for me in terms of generating a pretty steady stream of leads is the SEO work that I did on my website. About six or seven years ago, I realized that I could do some do it yourself SEO work on my website in terms of on page optimization with keywords. As soon as I did that, it was like turning on the faucet and the leads just started coming in pretty steady and they really haven't stopped since. And so those are the three things that I would say are the main factors in me being able to stay pretty much fully booked with paying work pretty much most of the time. So all of that to lay the foundation for answering your question, which was how to qualify these prospects that come in. That was a big issue when I first did the SEO work and started getting a really steady stream of leads that just, I mean, I didn't even have to do anything to do that. It was amazing. All of a sudden, I'm getting a pretty steady flow of calls and emails from people needing a freelance financial writer, which is what I am. Which, by the way, is the. Is the key. One of the keyword phrases I optimized on my website. And so I call it. I learned pretty quickly how to spot the tire kickers. And at first, almost every lead that would come in, I would get really excited. And then through time and experience, I got better at figuring out which ones were just tire kickers and which ones were actually really good prospects that were really looking for someone with my experience and my riding caliber and prepared to pay the rates that I wanted to charge for the work that I do. It comes down to qualifying the prospects, as I said, experience. And again, I know that you don't just get experience rolling out of bed, but experience goes a long ways and, and asking good questions in terms of weeding out the prospects who really aren't good prospects and the ones who really are looking for the kind of services that you can deliver and prepared to pay the kind of rates that you want to charge.

Are there any red flags that you have over the years? I'm sure there's several, but any that stand out that you look for?

To be honest, nothing I can put my finger on. It's just a matter of nowadays if I get one of those tire kicker emails, they're just so obvious nowadays. Yeah, yeah. I can't really point to a specific red flag, but they get pretty obvious after a while and you get to the point where you really don't even need to spend any time on it other than just sending a nice hey, thanks for the email reply, but I don't think we're a good fit or something like that. It really doesn't take that much time anymore. With some exceptions. Now, there are some exceptions to that. For the most part, it doesn't take too much time to weed out the tire kickers. Now there are prospects that come in that you might think are good prospects and you spend some time talking to them, asking questions, and then you realize that they aren't really that good prospects. But even then I'm not spending a tremendous amount of time not wasting a lot of time on prospects that end up not really being good prospects after all.

So in terms of. Yeah, with prospects who at some point, whether it's early on or later, you realize you're not going to be A fit that's kind of an easy no. I think where it starts getting a little bit more difficult is for clients who either you do a decent amount of work for or you've had a long standing relationship with, even if they're not your biggest client. I'm curious how you say no gracefully or do you say no? How do you handle that?

To be honest, it's really not that big of an issue. It hasn't been that big of an issue for me. Yes, of course there have been times when I've said no, as we just talked about a graceful email or a graceful phone conversation, when you simply point out that it doesn't appear to be a good fit for whatever reason is usually sufficient. It's usually pretty self obvious. Pardon me? It's usually pretty self evident. Also as you talk it through, it usually becomes as apparent to the client as it does to me that it's just not a good fit for whatever particular reason.

What if the no is due to timing? It's just, you know, they're a good fit. You've worked for them before. But right now and over the next two months you are, I mean, really book solid and they want something that's going to take you 20, 30 hours, for instance.

Yeah, I had that situation come up. It was last summer, like late last summer, and I just was going through one of those, you know, hair on fire, busy phases when I just didn't know how I was going to get the work done every week, every day even, and a prospect came through with a big project, it would have been really big and there was no way that I could take it at the time. And I just told him, I said, I'd love to work with you. This looks like it would be a great fit. It's a big project and I can't even get started on it until about a month from now. If that works for you, great. Let's touch base again in about a month. If it doesn't work for you, I'm sorry, I'm just going to have to say no to this one. He completely understood and it ended up not coming through after all. But that was a good example of what you just talked about. A potentially very big, very lucrative project that I simply had to say no to if they had to get started right away because I would have had to. There just literally weren't enough hours in the day do it. And I was not going to renege on work that I currently had in the books in order to do it.

This was somebody you hadn't worked with before or was this an existing client?

It was not an existing client. It was just a prospect that came in out of the blue. If I were faced with that situation with an existing client, well, that makes it a little bit easier because it is an existing client. And they're probably going to be a little bit more understanding in terms of what your current work situation is, what your current deadline capabilities are. Obviously, if it's a current client, they're going to know what my skills and abilities are. And so they're probably going to be a little bit more willing to be flexible if it's really critical that they work with me on that project.

I think that's the situation many established writers find themselves in is with new prospects, it's a little bit easier sometimes if it's a kind of a dream client situation, yeah, those are hard to say no to. But it's really when this is someone you've worked with a lot before and you enjoy working with them, but you're in a situation right now where you just can't for another month, you know, it's, it's really handling that delicate situation. And we can talk more about, you know, maybe negotiating timeframes and all that. But I was curious just to, at a high level, you know, if you differentiate between the two and then kind of generally how you handle them when it's, when it's a client. So let's talk about productivity a little bit too. So are the things you do because sometimes part of the answer lies in our ability to kind of expand our capacity. You're a very disciplined guy. You talk about how you know what your capacity is. You measure this, you track it weekly. What things have you been able to do over the years that have made more time for billable work?

Well, the first thing that I do is I keep regular office hours. And I think this is just part of having worked in the business world for 24 years. All three companies that I worked for over that time basically had an 8:30-5 workday. Now of course there were times when, you know, you had to stay past 5 or come in earlier than 8:30, but the official work hours were 8:30 to 5. And so when I started freelancing, my very first day of freelance, I was at my computer working at 8:30. It's just been ingrained in me ever since. So I try to work an 8:30-5-ish workday five days a week. Now, of course I take vacation and days off and there's Days when that's flexible. But for the most part, unless there's something going on, I'm working from 8:30 ish to between 5 and 6 every day. I've talked to lots of freelancers over the years and a lot of them don't maintain a regular workday schedule like that. And again, to each his own. Different people have different work styles. But I don't like working. I'm not going to sit down at 9 or 10 o' clock at night and work till 12 or 1. I'm just not going to do that. And I'm not going to get up at 5 or 6 and start working. It's just not my, it's not how I work. But I would say so for me, one of, if not the biggest keys to productivity is just maintaining that regular workday.

No, that makes a lot of sense. I hope people understand. Listen, this is not about doing exactly what Don's doing. This is about, okay, fine, if you got the kids some days, if you got to work during school hours, you got certain appointments on a regular basis. This is really more about the discipline, not about the number of hours or the hours that Don works. I think it's really the biggest lesson.

Yes, exactly. It's about the work discipline. That's exactly right.

Yeah. And what I find is these constraints create an opportunity for improvement because it's no longer kind of an open ended week. When you have constraints, you're forced to be a good steward of the time and resources you have.

Exactly. And I love what you just said about good stewardship. And that's actually the reason why I started time tracking the way that I did when I very first went self employed. Because the first few months, again I was disciplined, I was working every day. But I found myself at the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of the month. Not having kept track of the time that I spent and what I was earning during that time, it just kind of felt, I just kind of felt lost. And it occurred to me that as a freelancer, my inventory consists of my time. And if I'm not tracking any business that doesn't track his inventory isn't going to be in business for very long. So as a freelancer, your inventory is your time. And so that's when I started tracking my time and have every day since. And I can't imagine a workday or a workweek where I'm not tracking my time. It just wouldn't, it wouldn't work for me.

Well, before we move on to maybe some other elements of tackling this challenge. I do want to touch on a couple of things that I guess are kind of related to productivity. One is scheduling. The other one is maintaining focus throughout the day. So in terms of scheduling your work, you talked about set hours. Have you found. Is there something that works really well for you in terms of what times of day to do certain things or how to split up your day? Any tips there that have been working for you?

Well, I mean, I definitely have. There's definitely a rhythm to my workday and my biorhythms, if that's the right term. I'm a little slow getting going in the morning. Like I said. I make sure I'm at the, you know, and I have a home office. I work from home. I have a spare room that is my. Is my home office. So it's not just like a corner of the kitchen or something like that, but it's a very dedicated home office. And I'm in there between 8:30 and 9 every morning. Getting started. I usually start my day a little slow with a little bit of web surfing. I'm a big sports fan, so I'll go and check out my favorite sports websites, see what's happening with my favorite teams, and kind of ease into the day like that. But by 9, 9:15 or so, I want to be at working on work, and I do that pretty much throughout the day. Again, I'll take a few breaks here and there. In fact, one of your questions, I know ad was about staying focused in the age of the Internet and social media and all that stuff, that that has got to be one of, if not the biggest challenges for any freelancer when it comes to staying focused and staying productive. And that's just staying off of the stupid social media sites and not wasting time, you know, running down Internet rabbit holes. And I'll admit that can be a challenge for me. And so what I try to do is, you know, I'll stay focused on something as long as I need to stay focused. And then if I need, you know, literally a 1, 2, 3 minute little mental break, I'll treat myself by jumping off and going and, you know, reading an article on something or checking a social media feed or something like that. And for me, that. For me, that works well because different people have different personalities and work styles when it comes to, you know, staying focused and staying diligent. But if I allow myself the occasional little, you know, cheat break to go surf the web or, you know, check Facebook or whatever, so long As I get back into it again pretty quickly, within a few minutes, which is, which is my discipline then, then I'm usually okay. Yeah.

And I find some people have to set a timer because they can get lost. Right. So without some kind of trigger, it's a, whoa, wait a minute, 35 minutes have gone by. How is that possible?

Yeah, I definitely don't let that happen. It's more than, you know, more than a few minutes and I'm over my limit. But with my work rhythms, my bio rhythms, by, you know, by 9, 30, 10, I need to be hitting it hard. And I really get usually going between 9, 30, 10 till around lunchtime. And that's a real productive time for me. You know, I always take a lunch break. I have no need to eat at my desk. All I have to do is, you know, walk around the corner of my office and there's the kitchen. So, you know, I take a 30 minute hour long lunch break every day and then I'm back at it, hitting it hard. And I grind pretty hard through the whole afternoon. By five o' clock or so, I'm usually pretty much done. I try to hit the gym two or three days a week. So I try to knock off it at 5 o' clock on my gym days and make sure I do that. And even on non gym days I work till between five and six. But you know what, after six o' clock I'm definitely fried. I'm not doing any work after 6 o'. Clock. And so for me the key to being productive is really hitting it hard during those productive hours and not wasting too much time. And that's usually not too hard to do because I've always got enough work to keep me going that I really can't afford to waste too much time.

You know, it's almost, I just had a thought. Being able to handle a lot of work and just kind of juggle all of that well, it's almost like being an athlete, a great athlete. Right. So we talked about setting boundaries, productivity, scheduling, maintaining focus. You know, there's, there's a discipline here and that I think is key. I'm curious though if we're kind of going to go down that road before again we shift gears to another area is you mentioned you, you have gym days. Any other things that have worked for you to stay healthy, not just physically, but also kind of mentally and emotionally because those are, as a creative professional, those are important too. Right. Sometimes what's going on in your head can impact your productivity and the quality of your work?

Sure. Great question. Well, again, physical exercise is important to me. I try to exercise regularly. Having hobbies and interests is definitely important for me. I'm real active in sports. I play a lot of tennis, I play a lot of golf. I wakeboard in the summertime when the water warms up. And so those things, you know, physical activity and hobbies and interests and things like that outside of work are really important when it comes to not letting yourself get overwhelmed with work, but to try to keep that work life balance. Work life balance is a phrase that's thrown around a lot nowadays, but it really is important. And just keeping that balance found to be really important for me and the spiritual side of things as well. I try to keep my spiritual life healthy as well. I'm a Christian. My wife and I go to church regularly. We fellowship with a lot of our Christian friends regularly. Home, Bible studies, these kind of things. So between faith, physical fitness, family, and, of course, work, trying to keep the right balance between all of these things is really important to helping me keep my emotional stability and sanity.

I want to go back to just shifting gears a little bit.