Solo design work, currently five active clients plus two on retainer who go silent for a fortnight and then need everything on a Tuesday. Delivery is still fine but my mornings are pure context switching and I have started dropping small promises - a callback here, a file there. Is there a number people settle on, and does it depend more on the type of work or on how the clients communicate?
I tracked this for a year in a spreadsheet because I did not believe my own feelings about it. My ceiling turned out to be three clients in active delivery plus two in maintenance, and the tell that I had gone over was not missed deadlines, it was that admin time per client roughly doubled - more status emails, more re-reading of old threads to remember where we were. The number of clients is a weak predictor; the number of open decisions I am holding is the real one.
Open decisions rather than open clients is a much better unit. Two clients waiting on me for a choice cost more head space than four who are happily building from a spec.
I have run both shapes. Eight small clients paid the same as three large ones and cost me roughly double the unbilled hours - kickoff calls, invoices, chasing, onboarding to their tools, one Slack workspace each. The large-client version is more fragile and less exhausting; the small-client version is more resilient and slowly eats your evenings. Neither is correct, but you should choose one deliberately rather than accumulate the second by accident.
One Slack workspace each is the hidden tax nobody quotes for. I now charge a small onboarding fee partly to make people feel the cost of adding me to another tool.
Disagreeing slightly with the framing. Five is not too many - two clients with unscheduled demands is too many. I would keep the count and change the contract: retainers get a named day, anything outside it is quoted as new work. My load did not change and my mornings came back.
I took a sixth because it was interesting and I lost two within the quarter, both because I got slow at replying rather than because the work was bad. That was an expensive way to learn that responsiveness is most of what small clients think they are buying.
@visible_stitch · 3mo ago
Whatever the number is, the retainers that go quiet and then explode are not counted properly in it. Give them a fixed slot per week, used or not, and either they use it or you have found free hours.
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