By Brett Derricott. Brett is the founder and CEO of Agency Fusion, a web development company built especially for agencies and designers. Brett blogs about technology as it relates to design and advertising at agencybyte.com.

When I began freelancing I thought it was important to make my fledgling business appear bigger and more established than it really was. My website used phrases like “our designers” and “our programmers” in an effort to make a one-man show look like a full team of professionals. No matter what a potential client wanted I felt the need to make them believe I had all of the resources to do it.

You’re probably a lot smarter than I was at that point, but I eventually learned two important lessons that changed my approach.

Clients liked that i was a freelancer. Contrary to my assumptions, clients actually liked that I was an independent freelancer who could respond quickly and help them avoid the costs often associated with engaging a fully-staffed firm. In most cases my clients were considering hiring me precisely because I was a freelancer!

My clients weren’t stupid. They were rarely fooled by my attempts to appear bigger than I was or to appear to offer every possible service under the sun. Once I stopped worrying about looking small, I started figuring out that forming strategic partnerships with other freelancers and companies was a better way to help my clients get everything they needed. And it allowed me to focus on what I did best (and enjoyed most).

When done correctly, partnering with someone who provides a product or service that you don’t provide can be a great business tactic. There are a few important things to consider, though, before engaging a strategic partner to work on your client’s project.
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By Brett Derricott. Brett is the founder and CEO of Agency Fusion, a web development company built especially for agencies and designers. Brett blogs about technology as it relates to design and advertising at agencybyte.com.

They say that all is fair in love and war. I’m confident there are also some who would add that all is fair in business too. Defining what is “ethical” in business is difficult at best, especially such that everyone else will agree, but creating a code of ethics to define what you will and will not do in the name of business is a more manageable task.

Establishing your own code of ethics and adhering to it strictly has at least 5 benefits.

1. Customers Will Respect You
If you plan on being a freelancer for the long haul, establishing long-term relationships with key customers is critical to your success and happiness. Fostering these relationships requires that you make decisions with a long-term perspective rather than a project-specific or short-run perspective.

Being honest and upfront with your customers is an absolute requirement in establishing these types of relationships. There are at least three common subjects that are easier to avoid than to discuss upfront:
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By Brett Derricott

Image from iStockPhoto

For the freelance developer, project management can be one of those tough problems that almost make you wish there was someone else around to whom you could pass the buck. Cracking the project management nut however will make you both a better developer and a better freelancer. In this article we’ll discuss how breaking a project down can help you manage the job.

My company recently began releasing updates to our content management system on a weekly basis. Previously our approach was to determine which features should be included in the next release, compute a timeline appropriate for the requirements, and then get to work. Most of our timelines were at least a month long, while some approached 2 or 3 months.

Our new approach, inspired in part by the open source community’s “release early, release often” mantra, involves setting a regular release schedule (weekly in our case) and then prioritizing the features into these weekly buckets. Our goal is to deliver “business value” each week in some way. If a desired feature can’t be built in one week, we find a way to break it into smaller portions that can each be done within one week.

We also apply this approach to the websites that designers hire us to program. Breaking down projects into smaller, more-manageable increments is a discipline we’ve adopted with great benefit.

We certainly didn’t invent this approach. You’ve heard it said in other ways like “eat the elephant one bite at a time.” In the development world there are methodologies like Agile and XP that espouse similar ideas. As a freelancer looking to manage time, make customers happy, and keep motivated, the benefits of breaking a project into smaller pieces are definitely worth another look.
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