Shop Talk

Monday Postcard #19

Dear friend,

Springtime is always busy, so I generally don’t plan on having a personal life, but the past months were especially stressful. I spent every hour either working, talking or thinking about work and budgets. I was exhausted, and I’m happy to report that I’m taking back my weekends and my healthy boundaries. But it was a good reminder we need to discuss more about the behind-the-scenes.

Let’s say you are a freelancer making custom, creative pies, on special order. As you are the only one in your kitchen, half of the time you’ll not be cooking. You will do all the other jobs that get you in the position to cook. You will communicate with clients, establish budgets, draw up contracts, research recipes, perfect new techniques, acquire ingredients and tools, keep inventory, clean up and even do some pest control.

So, even if you have orders perfectly lined up, and they never get postponed or delayed (and that never happens), 50% of your work time must earn you 100% of your income.

We will assume ingredients are paid by the client, but you still need money for your accountant, rent, subscriptions and utility bills. Let’s set aside 8K per year for that and some 2K for tools, pans, pots, knives. Then you need to pay your taxes, because we need hospitals and roads and retirement funds. Where I live, salary taxes are 43% and that means you will pay 15K tax to take home 20K.

So in our imaginary kitchen, in the time you get to spend cooking, you will need to make a 45K pie to get a 20K net yearly salary. Of course, this is true for any business, not only for freelancing. There are many costs that go into making goods or providing services, and we often overlook them when we are the clients.

As it often happens with experiments, ours was set in a perfect and unrealistic environment. As a freelancer, you don’t work in calendar time, you work in project time. Every year is different and every project is different. Sometimes you get paid in advance and you go for months without other income, other times you get a paycheck for something delivered half a year ago. This is why I get stuck when filling out the “How much do you earn in a year?” question. Can you explain all this in a “Please use only numbers” form?

Here’s something to open at lunch break: I’ll leave you with this Clafoutis recipe, perfect for the summer, and go back to my kitchen to cook up some more delicious visuals and animations for my clients.

Look beyond the pie!
Irina