Overcoming the Covid Crisis (And Possibly Covid) As A Freelancer
In March 2020, when I stumbled out of my bedroom after over 2 weeks of Killer Flu From Hell, most of my income was gone.
April of every year is Tax Season for me. In addition to paying VAT over the final quarter of the year before, I do my accounts for the entire preceding year and file my tax return, trusting my rough calculations were sort of in the right ballpark and my savings account labeled ‘Taxes’ covers the damage.
At the end of 2020, this account had a lot less money in it than in other years. So did all my other accounts. This will sound familiar to many, since 2020 was not just a sad, crazy year for humans as a species, but also for many people personally and economically.
2020 was going to be a great year…
When 2020 started, I was doing pretty well. I was working an IT-consulting gig and doing copy writing work on the side. I knew the consulting project would end before the summer, so I was talking to lots of leads for new projects. Two of these leads were about to sign off on rather large tenders that would pretty much put me ‘in the money’ for the rest of the year… While strange stories about some new killer virus had started coming from China, then Italy, my business was good. The last week of February 2020 and the first week of March, I was out and about. Working in the overcrowded office at my consultancy gig two days a week, visiting new clients, teaching classes and working with other freelancers in my home office. In the first week of March, when infections had started reaching my home town and I had already stopped shaking people’s hands, I hosted an event with 140 attendees and I visited my brother at his office, still packed with over 20 employees.
Calling the authorities
This may all sound extremely stupid and careless in retrospect, but remember: no one, including the authorities and doctors, had a clue what was going on at that time. Before hosting the event, I called every authority I could think of, including the Dutch Center for Disease Control and the Public Health Office. The message was the same everywhere: get disinfection gel, don’t shake hands and have fun with your event… Strangely enough, hand disinfection gel had already become impossible to get, while almost everyone at the event ignored the advice to not shake hands.
Flu-like symptoms
By the end of the month, our country was in lockdown and the proverbial excrement had hit the fan big time. Around that time, I developed flu-like symptoms with a serious fever and an ominous feeling in my chest. Like a big, strong hand was clamping down on my lungs. I hadn’t felt this sick in decades, but 10 weeks into the pandemic, PCR tests were not widely available and I was never tested for Covid.
Waking up to an empty schedule
I quarantined myself and stayed in bed for over two weeks, unable to do any work. When I emerged from my bedroom and started calling my clients, the damage turned out to be extensive. The consulting project, expected to be a source of income for the first six months of the year, was terminated abruptly. Both clients about to sign big contracts with me shelved the projects until further notice. All I was left with, were a few small writing jobs that had previously served as side hustles. Within weeks, over two thirds of my income had vanished.
Thank Heavens for risk mitigation
I have to state here that, thank Heavens, our household does not depend on my income alone. My Significant Other works a stable full time job and makes more than enough to support our day to day expenses (in fact, she makes more than me). But even though our world kept turning financially, apart from postponing some mortgage and tax payments and rescheduling work on our house, being suddenly almost without work was a shocking experience for me as an entrepreneur and as a person.
Calling in help and sharing your troubles
So, what do you do? You start calling people. First, your inner circle. Then, everybody else. And it turns out I know a lot of people that were prepared to help me out. In over 15 years of freelancing, I have always tried to treat everyone I meet friendly and fairly and do the best work I could. Many a time, this resulted in me losing money, time or both on work others were telling me to walk away from. But now, this investment came back to me and people I knew were actively working to get me back on my feet.
Sharing the misery
Being open about what I was experiencing and posting on social media about it also helped a lot. Scrolling through your timeline on any given day, it always seems like everyone is always crushing it, sharing business success after business success. Sharing doubts, fears and failures, it appears, is something you just don’t do. I decided to break this paradigm and the results were really positive, up to a point where people I had worked with years before started calling me to ask how I was and how they could help. In the end, rescue came from a marketing agency that I have worked with quite a bit. I had left them to pursue other avenues, and they had been busy recruiting in-house writers until the economic uncertainties led them to put recruiting on hold and continue to work with freelancers. Me, fortunately, among them.
Filling the days with poetry and JavaScript
Between my recovery and finding new work, I started every day by sending out pitches and reaching out to my network on LinkedIn. Then, I would close my email and social media and open up the poetry manuscript that had been sitting on my hard drive for years. I ended up not only revising the manuscript completely, but also cleaning up my entire archive of 800+ unpublished, unfinished and mostly terrible poems. This was a project I had been procrastinating from forever. When that was done, I put to work all the JavaScript and web development tutorials and courses I had read and taken through the years and built myself a completely new website. By the time paid work started coming in again, I was almost sorry it did. Given another month or two, I might have finally written a novel or built myself the basement workshop I have been dreaming about.
Seeing the positive
Aside from the new website and the finished poetry collection, there were several other positives I took from that period. The first is that I really dig working from home. And I mean: really. Never, ever, no way in hell do I want to go back to getting up at 6:00 in the morning, putting on a tie, navigating traffic jams and spending the whole day in some office when I could be at home, in my house in the woods, with my lovely family and my cat.
PRO TIP: try coming to this realization before you sign a 5-year car lease. Ask me how I learnt this nugget of wisdom…
Another positive is that, in hunting for new business, I realized I have an above-average connection with IT companies. Having been an IT consultant and a programmer myself, I tend to work together with techies pretty well. Many IT companies, in scaling up their online operations, were looking for someone like me. These co-operations worked so well, that I decided to completely specialize in IT-related content.
Ending on an uptick
The last 4 months of 2020 were absolutely crazy. With the summer over, the second lockdown upon us, most companies well-settled into working from home and the world realizing this Covid thing was not going away anytime soon, everybody got back down to business. And, since I am in the online business and all business had gone online, there was a lot to do. By the time Christmas arrived, I was completely spent from day after video conference-filled day of hammering out white papers, blog posts, web sites and social media campaigns. And though rates had dropped quite a bit, this had gone a long way towards saving my business year, finishing on a turnover about (or: only) 20% lower than usual.
Looking to the future
The conclusion has to be that many — a great many — have been much, much harder hit than me. Yes, there was a month or two of great anxiety. And yes, there was true financial loss. And yes, there was a lot of hard work, much of it very stressful. But in the end, I was spared any true economic misery. This is mainly because I am in the online content business, which only seems to have profited from the crisis. IT companies, finding themselves unable to organize events or do sales in person, are adopting tactics like marketing automation and social selling at an astounding rate. And all those little digital marketing and sales machines need blog posts, social media content, video scripts and white papers. So, looking ahead, I see great opportunity. Already, my turnover is picking up big time, so it looks like 2021 is going to be a successful business year, as well as the year we finally get our shots and hug again.
Ask me for help!
In writing this, I realize you might be much worse off than me. I personally know people that have lost loved ones to Covid, lost their jobs or were forced to close their businesses. I write this in the full realization that I am one lucky $%&* to have come out of this crisis this way. Throughout this whole thing, I have tried to help others by giving them access to my network for prospecting or job-hunting, with advice or by just listening to their stories and trying to relate. Since you, by the act of having read to the end of this story, are now part of my Worldwide Network of Awesome People, I invite you to contact me if there is any way I can help you!
