Ben Bleikamp's blog about technology and college

Freelancers live and die by word of mouth

Most readers know that my primary source of income is from freelance design. Most readers might not know that 94% of my work (that’s an actual calculation) comes by word of mouth. Friends, family, and previous clients are the most common people referring work to me. Without them I might not have my excessively large monitor, and we all know that’s a prerequisite to being cool in the blogging world.

My point is this: keep the people that are referring work to you happy. My dad told me an interesting story recently. When my parents were getting new hardwood floors in our house they hired a contractor who had just started installing hardwood floors on his own, he was “freelancing” so to speak.

He did a great job and they told some friends about him. Suddenly he had a few clients, they all told their friends, and so on. A few years later my parents called him to get some more work done - he gave them a great price because they “got him started” so to speak. The first time he installed all the wood himself and the second time he had a bunch of employees do all the work - he had grown quite a bit. But he still hadn’t forgotten the people who helped him get started.

This goes for any service industry. When I started taking work more seriously this past summer I emailed a few people - Noah, David, etc. - and mentioned that I was looking for some clients to fill up my time. They both figured out a way to get me some work and without that I might have been sitting at some typical summer job or internship wondering why I hated work so much.

Right now I am working on a new redesign for Noah’s site. It’s actually the second one because the first one I did sucked. But I like keeping Noah happy because Noah sends me work. If I ever hire some employees to start doing work, I’d still offer Noah gigantic discounts because he got me started.

When you’re relying heavily on repeat customers and referrals to make money you better make sure your customer service is better than everyone elses, or at least make people feel that way. There are dozens, even hundreds of great designers out there - people need a reason to pick me. Noah’s first design sucked, I was busy, I put something up I wasn’t happy with. Noah knew that - but now he gets a new design that will actually do his blog justice.

Hopefully in the future he’ll remember that and say “Hey, Ben does a great job and is committed to giving people his best work - go ask him to do your $1,000,000 website.”