Day job plus family means I realistically have about ten hours a week, mostly evenings. I've got an offer to do ongoing work for one client at roughly £45/hour that would eat all ten, or I can keep juggling three smaller clients at £30-35 who each want a few hours and are unpredictable about when. Money is close to even. What am I not thinking about?
The thing you're not counting is unbilled time. Three clients means three sets of emails, three invoices, three chase-ups, three context switches every week. In my experience that overhead runs 20-30% on small clients, which means your £30-35 is really more like £24-28 and the single client wins on money too.
Counterweight: one client at ten hours a week means one client is 100% of your side income, and when they pause for a quarter — and they will — you're at zero with no warm leads.
That's what I'd do. Take the £45 client for eight hours, keep your best small client for two, drop the other two. You get most of the rate and you keep a second door open.
So is the answer to take the big one but keep one small client alive deliberately?
Before you decide, ask the £45 client whether it's genuinely ongoing or a three month project that they're describing as ongoing. Those are very different bets and people use the words interchangeably.
And ask for a notice period in writing. Even 30 days changes the risk profile of putting all your hours in one place.
Ten hours a week of evening work on top of a day job and family is more than it sounds. Whichever you pick, plan for eight and treat the other two as slack, or the first bad week will put you behind and you'll never catch up.
Slight disagreement with the crowd — three clients teaches you to sell, one client teaches you to deliver. If you're early and still bad at finding work, the practice of keeping three plates spinning has value the money doesn't show.
@overlap_owen · 5mo ago
Evenings matter here more than the maths does. Unpredictable small clients wanting 'just a quick thing' on a Tuesday night is what burns people out of side work. A single client with a predictable weekly rhythm is far easier to sustain for a year, and sustaining it for a year is worth more than an extra £3 an hour.
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