I Know a Guy Who Knows a Guy

I’ve been freelancing here for about a year. I also have  contract (about half time) with my day job - at the dance academy - but I had been working at the language school and someone suggested I go freelance. Part of the reason was that the pay differential between a zero-hour contract (like I had) and a freelancer contract is about five euros an hour - nothing to squawk at. The other part is that I was coming up on my three years with the language school and after giving me three one-year contracts, they would have either had to give me a permanent contract or let me go. I knew that if I made them decide, they would drop me like the proverbial hot potato. And with this economy, they’re being pretty lame about getting me work any way.

Becoming a freelancer isn’t complicated, but having my own personal translator (who is also good with figures) helped immensely. Alastair did it on his own (shout out to Alastair), and I probably could have, but I’m glad I didn’t have to. We had to go to the Chamber of Commerce and then to the tax office. I had to register in both places and get special numbers. On one of the forms, I had to estimate how many clients I would have during the year. The choices are (I think) ‘less than three,’ ‘three to seven,’ and ‘more than seven.’

I think with less than three, they turn you down. If you’re only going to have one client, then the client becomes sort of an employer. Anyway, I chose three to seven. And, wonder of wonders, I got the three that I needed plus another, just in case. One is the language school and the two others are two very big names who I won’t mention here by name, but whose names I love to drop at parties.

I got one of the jobs because I knew a guy who knew a guy. Actually, I knew the guy with the job, but I got invited to the party where they guy was because of another guy, the contact guy. It’s all about knowing people, isn’t it? The contact guy has some other people he’s putting me in contact with, which is nice. He gets a nice kick back. It’s a sort of ridiculous percentage, but I’m willing to pay it if he’s going to bring in the work.

Last Tuesday, I signed my first contract. I haven’t really used contracts before. It’s just been a verbal agreement and they send me the money. This time I actually went to a meeting, had the woman sign the contracts and handed her one of my freshly printed (and hand cut) business cards.

All this is to say that it’s a lot of work to get all this started. There’s the name of the business, which I went back and forth on. There are the business cards, and I need to get real ones designed and printed. There’s the contract, which was a total mind blower. There’s my signature for emails. There’s the website. It’s a lot of deciding. It’s not exactly tattoo territory, but there’s a feeling of permanence. You can’t keep going back to people and saying, “Yeah. I came up with a new name - again.”

By the way, the business is editing, translating and writing. It’s a lot of website stuff, but I’ve done some newsletters, booklets, business correspondence, CVs and ‘covering’ letters, which I found out is British for cover letter. And it’s a lot of work. I spent two days here last week writing and researching and looking stuff up. And then I go to work on the other days and deal with teenagers.

The photo above, by the way, is an elephant statue I bought for my favorite sister, Kathy. It’s the mammoth elephant from the elephant parade that was here several months ago. I thought it would make an nice housewarming gift. I said, “Fred, can you do something artsy with this for the blog?”

Good ole Fred.