You’re a freelancer and you just had an accident. Now what?
Preparing for a catastrophic event makes a huge difference when you’re self-employed
Image via Pixabay
Picture this: things are going swimmingly. You’re healthy, happy, and even have great clients.
You decide to celebrate with a mini-vacation in NYC.
You’ve got tickets to Alladin on Broadway and made a reservation for dinner at Becco.
The crisp autumn air is refreshing and the NYC crowds are exhilarating.
You step off the curb to cross 42nd Street (lawfully, you’re not jaywalking), and
BAM!
A bike courier who just ran a red light slams into you at 35 miles per hour. You’re knocked down to the ground, your head hits concrete, and you notice that your leg is making an angle not found in nature.
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Let’s assume that you don’t suffer career-ending injuries, but you are going to be out of commission for a couple of months. Are you going to be OK?
Will you have a business to come back to? Will you have the money or the credit to stay afloat without income coming in and medical expenses piling up?
This kind of hypothetical may sound overwhelming - so much so that you’d prefer not to think about it. I get that - I’m a big fan of the ostrich strategy myself. But having recently experienced an emergency and having friends who’ve gone through their emergencies with varying degrees of lasting damage, it’s become crystal clear that avoidance is not our friend.
How to plan for a catastrophe
The first step in planning for a major emergency is to take a deep breath and admit to yourself that your plan likely won’t prevent all the bad consequences. But it will mitigate them as much as possible. This is important because thinking about what you CAN do as opposed to what you CAN’T prevent will give you a sense of control, which will motivate you to take action.
The following actions can make a big difference:
Build relationships with your clients. We, at Write & Prosper, may sound like a broken record as we preach treating our clients like partners, not just sources of income. A major benefit of this approach is that you become a valued and not-easily-replaceable resource to your clients, too, and you create a human connection with the folks who are responsible for giving you work.
Therefore, when you face an emergency, your clients are likely to react in a more compassionate way and will try to accommodate your situation. Perhaps your deadlines will get extended. Or you’ll be assured that new projects will continue to flow as soon as you’re able to work again.
Develop a list of backup freelancers. One of the ethical rules for attorneys is that you’re required to have backup attorneys that can step into your cases and continue to represent your clients if you become incapacitated. This is a good rule to adopt as a freelancer, too.
You want to keep your reputation as a responsible professional. Nothing will destroy that reputation faster than a missed deadline or bad work product (remember that clients hire you to do work they need for their business - they’re relying on you!). Having a list of trusted backups will reduce the probability that you’ll leave a client in a lurch.
Don’t worry about handing your clients over to the competition. If you’ve been doing great work and you’ve developed relationships with them, you’re not a fungible widget!
Build a book of standard operating procedures. The more clearly you document your processes, the easier it is for someone else to step in and help you out. From sending out invoices to doing research on a particular topic - there are steps that you take over and over again. Once you write them down, you’ll have greater peace of mind that they’ll get done right by someone other than yourself.
Save a little more. I know...I know...everybody gives this advice. But it’s still good advice! It’s the difference between having the money to pay rent next month without any checks coming in and not having it.
When an emergency hits, you’ll have plenty to stress about. Having a little more breathing room will take a big stressor off your shoulders.
Here’s why this is extra-important for freelancers. Stress can do serious damage your ability to concentrate on client work. If you can’t concentrate on your work, you won’t do a good job and you may end up with unhappy clients - which is a recipe for even more stress. So, reducing avoidable stressors is just good business strategy.
And here’s one thing that may be a little controversial:
If you don’t live anywhere near a doctor that charges a flat rate of $35 per visit, Get health insurance. And get it from one of the big providers (Cigna, Aetna, Blue Shield…). Even if the plan you get is one with sky-high deductibles, you’ll be benefitting from the discounts these insurers negotiate with their network providers. That’s how a doctor’s bill for $265.53 gets discounted to $58.45 and a bill for medical supplies goes from $677.98 to $181.20 (these are real numbers).
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Here’s hoping that no emergency ever befalls you and yours and that you’ll never need to test this advice. But the beauty of the actions outlined above is that they have many “peacetime” dividends, too.