True tales from the dark side of freelancing: 

A colleague and I collaborated for days on a project, working with the client to get everything perfect. My colleague and I proudly wrapped up the job, believing we had fulfilled our mandate. Then the client said to us: “Okay, I think we’ve got this to a point where I can send this to my boss.” 

Uh-oh. My colleague and I believed we were finished. And, before taking on the job, we had asked who the decision-makers were. Everyone said that the person we were working with was the decision maker. And while we were expecting the decision maker to be the final authority, they were not. The person we were working with was indeed the decision maker but he was not the person who had to sign-off on the project. He had decision making authority to manage the project but it was HIS boss whose name would be on the project at the end. 

There are two cases of “cover your butt” bureaucracy going on here. The big boss wants to delegate authority with just about everything (but wants to retain final sign-off). The person we were working with (the “little boss“) doesn’t want to send anything to his boss until it is near-to-perfect. 

But what the little boss doesn’t realize is something that we freelancers know all too well: If you give someone the chance to review something, and if they feel that their career depends on how much this project looks like they’ve had a hand in it, their review will be thorough. 

Not surprisingly, my colleague and I received back our once-perfect project with numerous edits that weren’t substance changes but were style changes, yet were done by someone with a level of authority that required us to make the changes no matter how little they mattered. 

There are a few lessons here for freelancers who want to work for large companies:

1. Get a list of the names of everyone who is going to look at the project and when. Map it out against your project plan so you can see where they fall and what impact they can have on the budget, scope, and timeline of the project. Be sure to ask about decisions makers, sign-off authority, budget authority, and veto power. You may work with the full confidence that you are in full agreement of the decision maker but there could be many others who can still put their hands on the project.
2. Remember that good deliverables are key but many of your contacts large organizations are saddled by bureaucracy that you just don’t have in your own business. This not only slows projects down but it can completely alter projects. Expect projects to be impacted by lots of reviewers with varying levels of interest and very, very different purposes.
3. While I don’t want to paint every employee of a large company with the same brush, I would suggest that many people you’ll work with at a large organization can fall into the “cover their butt” habit, which tends to impact that project. Check in with your key contacts periodically to make sure that the work you are doing is still in line with what they want to produce. By checking in regularly, you can avoid hours of rework when your contact decides that the project no longer makes them look good.

 Freelancing is fun. You can be flexible and fast. But expect your business to be very different when you work with large companies.