There’s a telling scene in the TV show Scrubs where deranged Janitor shares his business cards—a ridiculous stew of ridiculous occupations he claims to do outside his real job.

Freelancers can relate. Despite all efforts and a scary attachment to color coding, your to-do list is eating your life. When the day’s actual make-money work is finished, your other 50 jobs await: internet marketer, bookkeeper, invoice-chaser, SEO, R&D, publicist, researcher…all-out superman?

It’s a frenetic, demanding lifestyle. Where our real work fills normal (normal-ish) working hours, running our businesses can become a panicked, haphazard afterthought at the end of a long day.

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It’s a fact of freelance life that some clients just don’t really seem to understand the sort of schedule that is necessary to complete a project. Keeping to a schedule when you’re waiting for approval, content or something else from a client can take a lot of patience and a little skill. While not every client is the same — some are absolutely wonderful when it comes to scheduling — having a few tricks up your sleeve can be useful.

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Photo by frischmilch.

Recently, one of my friends asked me how I handle scheduling, getting content first and getting it on-time. I’ve been working in graphic/web design for six years professionally, primarily with non-disclosure (ND) clients.

The most important insight I gained during six years of working with different agencies is that each company has a different way of dealing with things. The most successful agencies had a few things in common.

Here’s what I learned from the big guns:

1. To schedule effectively, build a base of clients that will need on-going work.
2. To get the content up front, ask for it.
3. Place the client at the center of the universe, but with limits. Explain to them the benefits of these limits.
4. Understand that they want to be loved by you. Stay in touch!

Schedule

As referenced in this article and many more on the site, the 80/20 marketing rule should be your best friend. You need to massage your existing client base and ensure that it’s actually made up of companies that can give you business.

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