Value your services

After a good two years of doing contract work here and there I learned some bits that have convinced me to put worth into my work. I started as all freelance/contract workers do, doing the small websites and development jobs here and there just to get my name out there. The problem that I saw with most people doing this was that often it was for friends, family, friends of friends, and so on. This brought upon the "I can do it for you cheap cause I know you" motto. This was a bad way of thinking and advertising my services because that would come to haunt me a year down the road. People who I was getting referred to were often saying that they heard they could get a free site or cheap site done by me. As much as I appreciated the publicity it wasn't worth my time to take on these jobs being that they were more headaches than they were worth. I would sign people up for these 2 or 3 year hosting plans under a server I managed personally and tell them I would help them build there site here and there. This was all without any knowledge of what was soon to come of these sites. I had harbored some sort of on call mentality to these customers because of the urgency they saw with their site being down, page missing, etc. They thought the little that they paid had also included support. I got calls at various times of the day just to discuss such issues and I had no option but to take the calls cause of the hole I had dug myself.

Two years and many customers later I finally broke. I couldn't handle supporting such a client base without going insane. I finally had to slowly wean them all off this support they thought they had. They were all told generously that I was no longer looking to be a freelancer and that any and all support from then on would have to be paid hourly due to my full time job taking priority. Surprisingly most of them took to it well and didn't mind paying me by the hour to do the work that they saw as useful to their business. That caused me to realize that without valuing work people would walk all over me. From then on all contract work that I did was valued at what the quality of my work is as well as explicitly noted as to what was to be done.

As freelancers one often mistakes all offers as great opportunities but one must remember that we need to take caution and value our time and work. Don't overwhelm your self to try and make the most cash you can. Work comes around often and being burnt out is not worth any amount of money. The quality of work often drops when a person is burnt out due to the lack of focus.