Adjunct, Three Campuses

Reading native material at N4 sounds miserable, honestly.

Fixed price per phase, hourly for anything outside the phase. They always know the ceiling of the current step and you are never doing unbounded work for free. Pure hourly with an indecisive client is comfortable for you and unpleasant for them — they watch the meter and it poisons the relationship.

Charge a deposit next time. 40 or 50 percent up front and the remainder before final files. It filters out the clients who cannot pay, and the ones who can do not blink at it. I lost exactly one prospect to this in five years and they were the one I would have been chasing for a year.

Works better than it should, but you lose bids you should have won and you never learn where the time is actually going.

Everyone's is between 1.5 and 2 and everyone believes theirs is 1.1.

Three changes fixed this for me. First, quote a range with the assumptions listed underneath — content supplied by date X, one language, no ecommerce — and say plainly what happens when an assumption fails. Second, estimate in tasks and include the boring ones everyone forgets: kickoff call, revisions, testing, handover, and the four hours of admin. Third, track your actual hours on every job even when it is fixed price, because you cannot price what you have never measured. After six jobs you will have a personal multiplier. Mine turned out to be 1.7 times my gut estimate, consistently.

Then tell everyone who has ever seen your work — old colleagues, people who did not hire you six months ago, the person who ghosted you in March. That list is longer than you think and every name on it is warmer than a job board.

Twenty percent reply and ten percent close is roughly normal for cold outbound, and cold outbound is a terrible way to get work long term. The rate to watch is not proposal to close, it is where the lead came from. My close rate on referrals is somewhere around 70 percent and on cold applications it is under 10, with the same proposal text. The fix is not better proposals, it is different leads: tell every past client you have capacity, be visible in one specific niche, and stop competing in places where 40 people apply to each posting.