Treat Your Freelancers the Way You’re Not Treated

Treat Your Freelancers the Way You’re Not Treated 28.November.2012

Why do we not do this?

We go into client engagements, hoping that they’ll give us the credit we’re due. We want a budget big enough to accomplish their goals. A timeline long enough that we can work a 40 hour week. We want them to trust us regarding the color scheme and logo placement (and size). We want them to treat us like the experts we are. But most of the time they don’t. We may be lucky enough to get lip service, but all too often the client acts like they are the designer.  We demand respect (demand them as much as we can without actually turning down work). So we take the work, gripe about the client and hope for no scope creep.

We say creatives should be respected, the process should be respected, but then we turn around and ask the same from our freelancers who are helping us get our projects done. This makes sense on the work where we were already given the short end of the stick. What doesn’t make sense is when we do get the rare project in which we do have a long enough timeline, or a big enough budget or creative freedom. We still turn around an tell a freelancer, “it finished piece has to look exactly like this”, “Are you sure you can’t do it for cheaper?”, “are you busy this weekend?”. We all do it, you know it. Anyone who has subbed out part of a project has treated their sub like crap, at least once.

I am at a point in my career where I have great clients, and great people helping me get those projects done, but the above scenario is far too common.

Why? There are no real good excuses. We can plan ahead, we know that value of the creative process, we know we’re know other designers can help make a project better…or at least we say we do.