What your work is actually for — an extract from The Freelancer’s Path

The following is an extract from The Freelancer’s Path, published by Greenfields Press.

There is a version of this book that would begin with tactics: the formation of a limited company, the management of tax, the writing of the first proposal, the negotiation of the first rate. Those things matter and this book addresses them. But they are not where the path begins.

The path begins with the more fundamental question of what kind of practitioner you want to be.

Not what kind of work you want to do, though that is part of it. Not what kind of clients you want to serve, though that is also part of it. The question is more foundational: what is your work for? What does it mean for it to be good? What relationship do you want to have with the people who pay for it, and with the version of yourself who sits down to do it each morning?

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These questions may sound abstract. In practice, they are entirely concrete. They determine the prices you charge and the ones you refuse. They determine the clients you accept and the ones you decline. They determine what you do when the work is not going well, and what you do in the long, ordinary middle ground where most professional life is actually lived.

They are the questions that employed life largely answered for you — through the culture of the organisation, the standards of the profession, the manager’s expectations — and that freelance life requires you to answer for yourself.

The person who has not thought carefully about these questions will still make decisions about them. Everyone does. But those decisions will be made reactively, under pressure, shaped by whatever the situation seems to demand rather than by a prior understanding of what one actually values. The result is a freelance career that is a sequence of responses rather than a considered project — functional, perhaps, but not fully one’s own.

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Pricing is the place where the philosophical question becomes most immediately practical. The freelancer who has thought carefully about what their work is for will find that pricing follows from that thinking, with more clarity than from any analysis of market rates or competitor comparisons.

If your work is for the clients who will value it most fully, the price is not a barrier to entry but a form of selection. If your work is for the accumulation of a particular kind of reputation, the price reflects the level at which that reputation is built. If your work is for your own development as a practitioner, the price reflects what that development requires you to be able to afford to do.

None of this is to say that market reality is irrelevant — it is not. But the freelancer who begins from the market and works backwards to their own values will find the journey more disorienting than the one who begins from their own values and works outwards to an honest engagement with the market.

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