roxics
Veteran
First a little background (I apologize for the length, I’ve written a small novel here)
Four months ago I lost my full time video job. I was only there for seven months before they decided to get rid of the position entirely.
Previous to that I had been unemployed for four and a half months after losing the full time video job I had for over eleven years.
During both of these unemployed periods I’ve been able to fall back on a couple freelance clients I’ve had for a few years now.
When I lost my first job it was tragic. I had been there for over eleven years. It was stable and it was where I gained all my experience doing professional video. I had hope I would find another job like it and I thought I did with the second one. But losing that one after only seven months left a bad taste in my mouth. I now realize there is nothing stable about this career and I had just been lucky for a decade.
So I had to take a deep think about it and decided I would just try to do it on my own. Be my own business and freelance full time. Except I really don’t have a lot of experience with it. Just a few clients I’ve worked with on the side over the last few years.
I had been shooting with my GH4, which had been fine, but I decided to use one of my credit cards and buy a couple used Canon C100s. In all the years of working professionally I’ve never had a client ask me to shoot 4K and despite going backwards from 4K to HD, I would gain built in XLR jacks and ND filters. Both things I wanted. But just as important, I would have two matching cameras that looked more professional when I showed up on a shoot with new clients I had hoped to get.
I did end up getting a new client, referred to me by a friend. He’s a nice guy and owns a small agency. But that’s also part of the problem, he’s not an end client, he’s a middle man. I’ve never worked for a middle man in this capacity. My other clients are all end clients. I’m making videos for their organizations and they pay me what I ask, which is reasonable. Not too high and not too low. But I only get maybe a project or two a month from them. Often it tends to rotate where I’m working with one one month and another another month. So it’s not like I’m getting four projects a month between them. At most it’s usually just two.
With those other clients I work with, they know my rates. They know that I usually charge a half day or day rate, but they know what that breaks down to hourly. They also know my hourly rate for editing. Typically they will call me or send me an email with new project details, I’ll agree to do the project and then we’ll go do it a week to a month later. Then I’ll come back and edit it. We’ll go through a round or two of revisions and then I’ll send them the final video and invoice for my time shooting it and how much time it took me to edit, which is typically 6-12 hours. They pay the invoice and the process repeats.
This new agency client is very much a wheeler and dealer, let’s make a deal type guy. He’ll ask me to come into his office (usually that day or the next) to meet with him and his guy and they’ll throw two or three video projects at me that they picked up from clients. They'll show me the old stuff the clients had done with another vendor, call it all crap (even if I don’t think it is), say that we can do it better and ask me to quote them right then and there. At which point I’ll throw out something like my day rate or half day rate plus out six hours of editing time. Then he’ll tell me some reason why that’s too much money. Either the client’s last video guy was cheaper (so we have to do this one on par with that), or he himself is paying for this video out of pocket in a trade with the client (so give him a break on the price) or it’s only a two hour quick interview shoot so why am I trying to charge him a day rate or half day rate.
Often there is a promise for more work in the future, so he’ll make it up to me on future projects. Then he proceeds to tell me how long it will take me to edit. “This should only be a two hour edit” or something like that. While I’m like “no not really, it’s probably closer to four or six.”
I’ll give an example.
The first shoot I did with this guy was a trade he had with the client. So the client was installing their product in his house in return for him producing a video for them. Since he was paying me out of his own pocket, he asked me to give him a deal. I was hesitant but said ok. What he didn’t know is that the deal price I gave him is the same price I charge my other clients.
See I charged my other two clients a grandfathered in rate that I have been charging them for the last few years. I rate I was happy with since it was really just side work back then and I had a full time job. Once unemployed this year and deciding to go freelance full time, I decided to up my rate an additional $25 an hour. After all I would have to be buying my own insurance now, paying child support through these projects now and have to pay for new gear. So it only made sense to up my rate a bit.
So I gave him what I called the friend rate. Which is the rate I charge my other two clients(who are actually friends of mine that work for the organizations that are my clients). But told him this was a one time thing.
Somehow we agreed on this shoot being a total of six hours over three days. Two hours a day plus about seven hours of editing. I ended up shooting for nineteen hours over three days and cut a rough video and now have to go back and recut the video differently since it’s not what his client expected the video would be. The whole thing has been a mess. He says he feels bad about it and palmed me a hundred dollar bill on the last day of the shoot. He also payed me before the project is even done being cut and added and extra $300 on top of what I invoiced him for, which was just the original quote I gave him for the six hours of shooting and seven hours of editing. Ultimately I made $1200 off the project but am still editing it. If I would have charged him the full “friend day rate” for the three days worked, plus editing I would have come out around $2400. If I would have charged him my new rate it would have been closer to $3000.
But I decided to keep working with him, figuring this was probably just a mishap. At which point we are back to my new rate and he knows I won’t budge from that now. So instead he’s been trying to cut the hours it will take. He’s got a series of videos now that are interviews and he wants to do two hour shoots. Which realistically should only take an hour or two. The first one I did took exactly two hours because it had b-roll we had to shoot. Others won’t. I had originally quoted him a day rate, after being scared off by my fist shoot with him and how out of hand that one got. That way I would cover my butt. But he balked at that idea so I said I’d be willing to do half day rate. To which he also said “why would you charge me for four hours when its only a two hour shoot” At which point I felt a bit like a jerk and agreed to a two hour shoot since it was local and a simple shoot.
This is getting way too long so let me try to go quicker. He’s been very stressful to work with. I get a call or an email from him or his guy nearly every day about something and often times they want me to come into their office to have a meeting, when an email would suffice. He acts like I’m one of his in house employees who should be available to him at all times. They’ll call me when I’m on shoots with other clients and ask me to come in later that day for a meeting, even though I’m not going to be done with that shoot until who knows when. I sent that day aside for that shoot with that client.
He’s always asking for quick turn around times, because he has a meeting with the client and needs to show them something.
He’s even offered me some work space in his office and once they asked me to come into their office to do a quick emergency edit on a project (that wasn’t originally mine) because of some meeting with that client later that afternoon. They sent that email at 8AM and I didn’t get back to them until 1PM because I was on a shoot that morning with another client, out of cell range on a construction site. They got it figured out but later he gave me crap about it, saying something like I scared him a bit because their last video guy wasn’t that dependable. When they couldn’t get a hold of me to come in that morning to do the edit they questioned my dependability.
First of all, I’m not just there to do emergency edits on projects that aren’t my own. I'm willing to do them if I'm around, but I have other clients as well.
Second, I don’t come into my client’s office and edit on their machines. I work on my machines at my place. Does McDonalds come into your house and make you hamburgers on your grill?
Why they would even think I would do that, I don’t know.
So in summary, this client stresses me out compared to my other clients who are all really great. But I don’t know if I’m just spoiled by my other clients. Part of me just wants to drop this guy because I feel like I’m being taken advantage of. But the other part of me doesn’t want to turn down any work I can get.
I’m worried about staying afloat. I’m forty years old and this is the first time I’ve really gone at it being freelance full time. I have no college education and nothing else to fall back on and no one seems to be hiring full time video people where I'm at.
To make matters worse. I’ve become an agoraphobic with a fear of traveling. I can’t get on a plane at all and driving further than an hour away from home has me in a panic state where my heart is racing and I’m sweating and shaky and my vision becomes like low frame rate stop motion. It’s a mental illness most people don’t understand since most people can’t wait to travel. It’s even crazier for me because I used to be a truck driver in my early twenties. I would travel around the eastern half of the US a couple times a week. I would get in a truck at 9PM, drive ten hours, make my drop and drive ten hours back. Some trips were two days each way (going to Texas from the north). I did that for years. I used to love to travel. Now I can barely go an hour away from home before I break out in a full panic, let alone across the state or into other states. I literally have nightmares almost every night of traveling far away where I wake up in a panic. I hate it and it severely limits my profession. But this guy has local shoots. Whereas my other clients on average are taking me close to an hour away from home for each shoot. I love those clients and they’re friends of mine, but I’ve had to deny a couple jobs with them because they were too far out for me to handle. So I’ve been really reluctant to challenge this guy too much in fear of losing what work I can get.
Plus we’re also losing our rental house in the next few months and have to find a new place. The first time I’ll have to do that without being able to say I have a steady full time job. So I’m a bit stressed about that too. I don’t know how that is going to go. I know it will be more expensive than where we currently live, so I have to be able to pay for that.
Again I apologize for the length of this and honestly I’m hesitant to even post it. But I could really use some advice about what to do with this client and my career in general.
Four months ago I lost my full time video job. I was only there for seven months before they decided to get rid of the position entirely.
Previous to that I had been unemployed for four and a half months after losing the full time video job I had for over eleven years.
During both of these unemployed periods I’ve been able to fall back on a couple freelance clients I’ve had for a few years now.
When I lost my first job it was tragic. I had been there for over eleven years. It was stable and it was where I gained all my experience doing professional video. I had hope I would find another job like it and I thought I did with the second one. But losing that one after only seven months left a bad taste in my mouth. I now realize there is nothing stable about this career and I had just been lucky for a decade.
So I had to take a deep think about it and decided I would just try to do it on my own. Be my own business and freelance full time. Except I really don’t have a lot of experience with it. Just a few clients I’ve worked with on the side over the last few years.
I had been shooting with my GH4, which had been fine, but I decided to use one of my credit cards and buy a couple used Canon C100s. In all the years of working professionally I’ve never had a client ask me to shoot 4K and despite going backwards from 4K to HD, I would gain built in XLR jacks and ND filters. Both things I wanted. But just as important, I would have two matching cameras that looked more professional when I showed up on a shoot with new clients I had hoped to get.
I did end up getting a new client, referred to me by a friend. He’s a nice guy and owns a small agency. But that’s also part of the problem, he’s not an end client, he’s a middle man. I’ve never worked for a middle man in this capacity. My other clients are all end clients. I’m making videos for their organizations and they pay me what I ask, which is reasonable. Not too high and not too low. But I only get maybe a project or two a month from them. Often it tends to rotate where I’m working with one one month and another another month. So it’s not like I’m getting four projects a month between them. At most it’s usually just two.
With those other clients I work with, they know my rates. They know that I usually charge a half day or day rate, but they know what that breaks down to hourly. They also know my hourly rate for editing. Typically they will call me or send me an email with new project details, I’ll agree to do the project and then we’ll go do it a week to a month later. Then I’ll come back and edit it. We’ll go through a round or two of revisions and then I’ll send them the final video and invoice for my time shooting it and how much time it took me to edit, which is typically 6-12 hours. They pay the invoice and the process repeats.
This new agency client is very much a wheeler and dealer, let’s make a deal type guy. He’ll ask me to come into his office (usually that day or the next) to meet with him and his guy and they’ll throw two or three video projects at me that they picked up from clients. They'll show me the old stuff the clients had done with another vendor, call it all crap (even if I don’t think it is), say that we can do it better and ask me to quote them right then and there. At which point I’ll throw out something like my day rate or half day rate plus out six hours of editing time. Then he’ll tell me some reason why that’s too much money. Either the client’s last video guy was cheaper (so we have to do this one on par with that), or he himself is paying for this video out of pocket in a trade with the client (so give him a break on the price) or it’s only a two hour quick interview shoot so why am I trying to charge him a day rate or half day rate.
Often there is a promise for more work in the future, so he’ll make it up to me on future projects. Then he proceeds to tell me how long it will take me to edit. “This should only be a two hour edit” or something like that. While I’m like “no not really, it’s probably closer to four or six.”
I’ll give an example.
The first shoot I did with this guy was a trade he had with the client. So the client was installing their product in his house in return for him producing a video for them. Since he was paying me out of his own pocket, he asked me to give him a deal. I was hesitant but said ok. What he didn’t know is that the deal price I gave him is the same price I charge my other clients.
See I charged my other two clients a grandfathered in rate that I have been charging them for the last few years. I rate I was happy with since it was really just side work back then and I had a full time job. Once unemployed this year and deciding to go freelance full time, I decided to up my rate an additional $25 an hour. After all I would have to be buying my own insurance now, paying child support through these projects now and have to pay for new gear. So it only made sense to up my rate a bit.
So I gave him what I called the friend rate. Which is the rate I charge my other two clients(who are actually friends of mine that work for the organizations that are my clients). But told him this was a one time thing.
Somehow we agreed on this shoot being a total of six hours over three days. Two hours a day plus about seven hours of editing. I ended up shooting for nineteen hours over three days and cut a rough video and now have to go back and recut the video differently since it’s not what his client expected the video would be. The whole thing has been a mess. He says he feels bad about it and palmed me a hundred dollar bill on the last day of the shoot. He also payed me before the project is even done being cut and added and extra $300 on top of what I invoiced him for, which was just the original quote I gave him for the six hours of shooting and seven hours of editing. Ultimately I made $1200 off the project but am still editing it. If I would have charged him the full “friend day rate” for the three days worked, plus editing I would have come out around $2400. If I would have charged him my new rate it would have been closer to $3000.
But I decided to keep working with him, figuring this was probably just a mishap. At which point we are back to my new rate and he knows I won’t budge from that now. So instead he’s been trying to cut the hours it will take. He’s got a series of videos now that are interviews and he wants to do two hour shoots. Which realistically should only take an hour or two. The first one I did took exactly two hours because it had b-roll we had to shoot. Others won’t. I had originally quoted him a day rate, after being scared off by my fist shoot with him and how out of hand that one got. That way I would cover my butt. But he balked at that idea so I said I’d be willing to do half day rate. To which he also said “why would you charge me for four hours when its only a two hour shoot” At which point I felt a bit like a jerk and agreed to a two hour shoot since it was local and a simple shoot.
This is getting way too long so let me try to go quicker. He’s been very stressful to work with. I get a call or an email from him or his guy nearly every day about something and often times they want me to come into their office to have a meeting, when an email would suffice. He acts like I’m one of his in house employees who should be available to him at all times. They’ll call me when I’m on shoots with other clients and ask me to come in later that day for a meeting, even though I’m not going to be done with that shoot until who knows when. I sent that day aside for that shoot with that client.
He’s always asking for quick turn around times, because he has a meeting with the client and needs to show them something.
He’s even offered me some work space in his office and once they asked me to come into their office to do a quick emergency edit on a project (that wasn’t originally mine) because of some meeting with that client later that afternoon. They sent that email at 8AM and I didn’t get back to them until 1PM because I was on a shoot that morning with another client, out of cell range on a construction site. They got it figured out but later he gave me crap about it, saying something like I scared him a bit because their last video guy wasn’t that dependable. When they couldn’t get a hold of me to come in that morning to do the edit they questioned my dependability.
First of all, I’m not just there to do emergency edits on projects that aren’t my own. I'm willing to do them if I'm around, but I have other clients as well.
Second, I don’t come into my client’s office and edit on their machines. I work on my machines at my place. Does McDonalds come into your house and make you hamburgers on your grill?
Why they would even think I would do that, I don’t know.
So in summary, this client stresses me out compared to my other clients who are all really great. But I don’t know if I’m just spoiled by my other clients. Part of me just wants to drop this guy because I feel like I’m being taken advantage of. But the other part of me doesn’t want to turn down any work I can get.
I’m worried about staying afloat. I’m forty years old and this is the first time I’ve really gone at it being freelance full time. I have no college education and nothing else to fall back on and no one seems to be hiring full time video people where I'm at.
To make matters worse. I’ve become an agoraphobic with a fear of traveling. I can’t get on a plane at all and driving further than an hour away from home has me in a panic state where my heart is racing and I’m sweating and shaky and my vision becomes like low frame rate stop motion. It’s a mental illness most people don’t understand since most people can’t wait to travel. It’s even crazier for me because I used to be a truck driver in my early twenties. I would travel around the eastern half of the US a couple times a week. I would get in a truck at 9PM, drive ten hours, make my drop and drive ten hours back. Some trips were two days each way (going to Texas from the north). I did that for years. I used to love to travel. Now I can barely go an hour away from home before I break out in a full panic, let alone across the state or into other states. I literally have nightmares almost every night of traveling far away where I wake up in a panic. I hate it and it severely limits my profession. But this guy has local shoots. Whereas my other clients on average are taking me close to an hour away from home for each shoot. I love those clients and they’re friends of mine, but I’ve had to deny a couple jobs with them because they were too far out for me to handle. So I’ve been really reluctant to challenge this guy too much in fear of losing what work I can get.
Plus we’re also losing our rental house in the next few months and have to find a new place. The first time I’ll have to do that without being able to say I have a steady full time job. So I’m a bit stressed about that too. I don’t know how that is going to go. I know it will be more expensive than where we currently live, so I have to be able to pay for that.
Again I apologize for the length of this and honestly I’m hesitant to even post it. But I could really use some advice about what to do with this client and my career in general.
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