Why FREELANCE?

What you are about to read is a forwarded message i recieved on mail. It is not my work.

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I received this email from a friend of mine in lisbon and forwarding the same to the group... whats your say on this?____________

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It’s Thursday, early evening, and I am sitting on adock in cottage country with my laptop while othersare just getting home from work. I have been asked towrite about what it’s like to be a freelance creative.I spoke to the staff at the magazine and I asked, whatpart of it do you want me to cover? They replied…themoney, the difference between working in an agency andon your own, how you get clients, etc. It was decidedthat I would write several articles because there isno way to cover everything in one unless you thereader, have an hour or so to kill.So here I am, with the screen open in front of me, andI think the only logical way to begin is to explainwhy I became a freelancer in the first place. It wasreally quite simple. Security and freedom.Security. You are most likely asking yourself howsomeone without a full-time job can consider theirlife secure? After working for nearly a decade as anart director and copywriter in several advertisingagencies, I can honestly tell you that I never feltlike my job was secure. How many of you in thisindustry actually do? Look around your agency…how many40 year old creatives are you working with?It was only when I bumped into a senior mentor from mypast that my potential future hit me like a load ofbricks. You see, he had won awards during his longcareer employed in different agencies, and here hewas, working in a big box superstore, complete with a“Hello my name is” nametag pinned to his shirt,directing me to aisle 36. I came home and had asleepless night wondering if I was doomed to the samefate.Where do all the creatives go when they reach middleage? We all know of somebody that suddenly disappearedfrom the industry one day never to be heard fromagain. The question remained in my head…what am Igoing to do to ensure that this doesn’t happen to me?Do I want to be a middle-aged creative peddling myportfolio around town, competing with 20 years oldsfresh out of school that will work for beer money?I decided that morning to go off on my own and startbuilding my clientele. My thought was that with myexperience, maybe in 5-10 years I’d be establishedenough to have several large clients giving meconsistent work so that I’d have a career doing what Ilove to do, and make the money I had always dreamedof. I started hustling. It took me one year.Freedom. One only has to read my first sentence tounderstand what I am referring to. It is a great timeto be in this business; the internet has changedeverything. You can work from anywhere and everywhere.I can leave the city whenever I want. Gone are bigboardrooms and presentations. Everything can happentoday with three letters. Let me explain. The clientchecks out my WWW. The brief comes via FAX. My specsare sent to them as JPGs. The final files get uploadedto an FTP site and finally, the invoice is sent as aprintable PDF. All this and I never had to meet withthe client. It’s a beautiful thing.My schedule is mine. I work when I want during the dayor the evening. Have you ever been in a supermarket at10:30 in the morning on a Thursday? How about playinggolf at 9:00 on a Tuesday morning? Everything is emptybecause everyone’s at work.Here are a few more questions I asked myself: Did Iactually want to become a creative director for anagency? What were my chances of getting there? Did Iwant the hectic schedule that goes along with theposition? If I didn’t become a CD then what?I recently spoke with Heidi Ehlers of “Black Bag”, anexecutive recruitment company in Toronto, and I askedher what happened to a few senior creatives I used toknow that dropped out of sight. She replied “they’regone…they didn’t have a plan. I don’t care whatindustry you are in or what you do, you must have aplan”. Extremely wise words indeed. Words I will neverforget.So thank you Heidi and here’s my plan. I plan to getmore clients. I plan to do great work for them. I planto still be around when others are gone. I plan towatch my daughter grow up, to enjoy life, to playenough golf this year that I break 80, to stop andsmell the roses, and finally, at the end of thissentence, I plan to take one more slow paddle aroundthe lake and listen to the loons before the sun goesdown.

by Ronnie Lebow

"Technical Skill is the mastery of complexity, while Creativity is the mastery of simplicity....."