Disaster Recovery for Freelance Writers: Production
November 14, 2009 by Bob Younce
Filed under Thoughtful Stuff
One of the trickiest areas to handle when disaster recovery strikes your freelance writing business is the area of production. You have clients that rely on your product in order for their businesses to function and grow. If you have a client who intends to launch a website using your copy and you can’t complete the copy because of a disaster, the client may be in a world of hurt. She has to go back through the search process to try to find a writer who can do what you were going to do, and do it quick.
Fortunately, there are some ways you can help your clients out and demonstrate to them that, even in a time of crisis, you will meet their needs.
It all starts with communications, of course. As soon as is reasonably possible after a disaster, you need to assess the status of open projects and begin communicating with your clients. Let them know what’s going on, and what business impact it could have in terms of delivery.
Subcontractors
Beyond that, however, you have several options for providing your product to a customer even during a disaster. If you’re a growing freelance writing business and part of your business model includes subcontracting with other writers, you may be able to subcontract the job out. You might break even if you do it this way, or you might even lose a couple of bucks. All worth it to keep clients, I promise you.
Make sure, of course, that you let the client know about the change. Many clients want your writing, and not a close imitation. However, as long as you’re confident in your subcontractor, your client may be as well. What you don’t want to do is have the writing bounced back on complaints that the work is not the same as previous work.
Also, a disaster isn’t the time to choose a subcontractor, by the way. If you don’t have one when the disaster strikes, you need to go another route.
Referral
Another route you can go is referral. Rather than subcontracting the work to another writer, you can connect the client with another freelance writing business. This is a viable option if you don’t have an established relationship with other writers already.
The danger, of course, is that the client will like the new writer better, or that the new writer will offer to cut her rate in order to steal your client. It’s a risk, to be sure, but no riskier than not providing the product to your client.
Delay
I’ve saved the most obvious option for last, because I don’t think it’s always the best. It’s the one most freelance writers go for during a disaster. I’d suggest to you that this is, in the long run, often as detrimental as hiring out the work.
Asking a client to push back his deadline isn’t uncommon. If you don’t make a habit of doing it and the client’s business process won’t be severely impacted, you may be able to easily get the client to push back a deadline. However, if you frequently push deadlines back, you don’t want to be forced to during a crisis.
Next time, we’ll take a step back again, look at the whole disaster recovery process, and recommend some specific resources you can use to get ready for when disaster does strike.
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Let’s hear it for subcontractors. I work as one quite a bit and use my own when there is too much work for me to handle or if there are personal issues that need attention before deadlines.
I don’t use a lot of subcontractors, though, because it doesn’t work out if one has to spend too much time on their content to bring it in line with the client’s desires. Other writing doesn’t really work on a contractor-subcontractor basis, like bylined work for a journalistic publication (executives can have ghost-writers, not me), or the writing doesn’t pay enough to outsource it.