The No-Cry Freelancing Solution

For Christmas, my daughter got me a book called The No-Cry Sleep Solution. Really, her daddy got it for me, but he softened the blow by telling me it was from my eleven-month old. You see, she has some pretty serious trouble falling asleep. She positively hates it, and the result is a lot of late night rocking and nursing on my part. Quite honestly, it doesn’t bother me a whole lot, but it drives my husband batty for some reason.

For me, the alternative is much worse. I will freely admit that I’m just not a “cry it out” mom. Both Tamara and I are pretty sensitive to our babies’ needs and desires. We both also have spines of jelly when it comes to hearing our little ones cry. Tamara’s recently started letting Evil Mommy out to play, but we both prefer to keep our babies’ discomfort to a minimum. In some ways, it may be self preservation, as the piteous cries of the fruit of our loins is enough to drive either one of us to tears ourselves.

I’ve mentioned before that our freelance business is a lot like a child to us. We’ve nurtured it and guided it and watched it grow over the last year and a half. Because of our need to keep our little baby freelance company from suffering any undue discomfort, we’ve been patient and moved pretty slowly. You could say that we’ve been rather cautious moving forward in an effort to protect our toddling company and to minimize our own discomfort as well.

You know what? I think that being so wary and guarded has made a huge difference in what we have been able to achieve. While it may have cost us a few dollars in the short term, I think it has really laid a much more stable foundation on which to build some long-term success. We haven’t raced forward with the business, yet it has been steadily growing since the agency was started in 2007.
They say that slow and steady wins the race, and we’ve found it to be an approach that fits our temperaments.

Some of the choices we’ve made that illustrate this approach include:

• During the first year, we raised our rates in accordance with our own self confidence. Rather than coming out of the chute asking for something that we didn’t really feel we deserved (even if we did deserve it), we started with what we could stomach and grew from there. The key, of course, is that we did raise our rates so that we are now able to earn a freelance income that is much more in line with what we probably should have been asking in the first place. Still, we rocked and nursed our business and avoided a lot of the fluttery frightened sensation that would have signaled that we were pushing harder than our baby was ready.