How Roleplaying As A Plumber Can Improve Your Freelance Business

This article is part of our "Guide to Freelancing series" – consisting of guides and tips to help you becoming a better self-employed. Click here to read more from this series.

Ever hear the phrase ‘starving artist’? Given the current state of the freelance design world – especially among less experienced designers – it should probably be ‘starving designer’ instead. Why? Because there is no professional artist, alive or dead, who is going to give their work away for free, or allow payment to be deferred indefinitely.

Designers, on the other hand, are often eager to create valuable work for shady clients with no guarantee of payment. Today, we’ll explore how a simple roleplaying exercise can help cure you of this malady, and ensures that you get paid on time, every time.

The Obvious First Step

First, the obligatory essentials. I don’t write often about contracts because every freelance designer should already be using one. If you don’t use a contract for every new design project you take on, I’m sorry, but you’re basically asking to be screwed over.

The contract doesn’t just protect you from shady clients who want to take advantage of you – it also protects good clients, who make honest mistakes, from unknowingly costing you time and money. Clients are only human, but a contract helps keep people on track much more often.

Passion For A Price

Okay, so on to the exercise. Imagine you’re a plumber. Get a good visual going – perhaps you look like Super Mario. I don’t know – this is your scenario! Anyway, one day you’re approached by a client who wants you to do a complicated repair job. The price they’re willing to pay? Nothing. This client wants you to do several hours of plumbing work absolutely free.

Would you do it? Furthermore, how do you think other plumbers would feel if they heard that you said yes to these terms? Would they say “Well, at least you’ve got some good experience you can show to your next client?”

Of course not. They’d lambast you and call you a moron for getting taken advantage of. Yet somehow, when a designer does the same thing, it’s overlooked as something acceptable. Why? Because designers keep allowing it.

Know Your Worth

Designers may have gotten into the industry because they love design, but they also need to make a living. A professional designer knows the importance of a solid design in the pipeline of a business. The difference between a well designed product and one poorly designed can often mean the difference between thousands – sometimes even millions – of dollars of revenue.

Yes, marketing is important, but if it weren’t for strong design, companies like Apple would be obscure, tiny, and non-competitive – if they even existed at all.

You are a very valuable part of your client’s business. If you weren’t, they wouldn’t have bothered hiring you in the first place. Keep in mind that they need you – just like someone with clogged pipes needs a plumber. The value you provide is just as important in its own way.

Stopping Delays In Their Tracks

Many times, a client who is withholding payment is not intending to be malicious. As Mike Monteiro reminds us in his iconic 2011 presentation at CreativeMornings in San Francisco, “No client enters into a relationship with you just to be a jerk” (I’m paraphrasing a bit, naturally).

They genuinely needed your design services at some point, and their delay in paying you could simply be a bookkeeping error or some minor oversight on their part.

There are also times where the client feels that you failed to provide a satisfactory result, which is completely fair. Going back to our plumber example, if you went to use your newly fixed toilet, and found that the pipes were now leaky, you’d do everything in your power to withhold payment until that problem was fixed.

Sometimes, it’s a simple communication error between you and your client, which can be fixed with a simple, polite email or phone call.

Practice Your Acting Skills

You can put yourself in the shoes of a plumber, or any other independent contractor, every time you have to deal with a payment issue. By remembering that your client needs a valuable solution to a problem only you can provide, you can maintain the upper hand and make sure you receive the promised compensation.