Take control of your freelance career

Hi, I’m Eleanor Steele and I’m the MedComms Mentor. My last couple of videos have focused on people who work in MedComms agencies, Medical Writers, and their line managers or team leaders. But today I want to talk to all you lovely MedComms freelancers.

Going freelance after a few years in agency is almost a bit of a cliche. So many people do this and it is a great career option.

Depending on the agencies you’ve worked for, you may well have experienced way more workload peaks than troughs, demanding clients who expect you to be at their beck and call without any regard for time zones or working patterns, getting pigeonholed into churning out the same content year after year, maybe very little time for learning and development.

It sounds like a recipe for burnout, doesn’t it?

In contrast, the freelance life with the flexibility to choose your own hours, have a better work-life balance, pick the clients and projects that you find interesting, plus rather nice rates.

Well, that sounds like heaven, doesn’t it?

The problem is a lot of people go freelance and end up taking all the problems that they’ve experienced within an agency and repeating them in their freelance work.

Simply going freelance isn’t a magic bullet that will transform your career into the heavenly scenario I described.

This is compounded by the fact that running a freelance business involves quite a lot more than simply doing the work you used to do in an agency, but for a higher rate.

There’s business development to find clients, invoicing and financial planning, dealing with your own taxes, no paid holiday or sick leave, and suddenly you are without your line manager and your team. There’s no support structure.

Also, the projects that you are working on may suddenly seem a lot tougher if you’re not embedded in the account team.

As a freelancer, we rarely get the full context of a project that we are briefed on. We are unlikely to be client-facing or directly in touch with authors or speakers, and things inevitably get lost in translation when briefed over.

I don’t want to be all doom and gloom.

It genuinely is possible to have a fulfilling freelance career that fits in with your life. I’ve been freelance since 2018 and it hasn’t always been straightforward, but I want to share what I’ve learned along the way.

There’s a lot I want to cover, so definitely subscribe to catch the other videos that I’ll be releasing.

But today I want to share four really practical microtips that you can use to help you take control of your freelance career to make it work for you.

1. Position yourself with intention

My first microtip is to position yourself as a freelancer with intention.

Being freelance doesn’t mean that you have to accept every job you’re offered.

This can be really tricky to come to terms with when we first go freelance. It feels so precarious in comparison with getting a nice regular salary, even if that salary came with toxic expectations. But getting into a habit where you always say, ‘Yes!’ to any work you’re offered can need to burn out, or just working on a lot of things you don’t enjoy or find interesting.

Specialising, or positioning yourself with intention, puts you more in control.

What are the project types or therapy areas that you have a lot of experience in or find particularly interesting? When you’re talking to potential clients or putting together your CV or bio, maybe your LinkedIn page, highlight these things.

That way when people are thinking about work they could offer you, or looking for someone to pick up that type of work, you are more likely to get something that ticks your boxes as well as theirs.

You can also downplay or leave out things that you are less interested in or don’t really want to do.

Specifying what you want to do will help make sure you are heading in a direction that you have chosen rather than just being pushed by market forces.

But here I want to stress that earlier I said that being freelance doesn’t mean you have to accept everything you offered. In certain circumstances though, it can be useful to decide that’s what you are going to do.

It’s important to know you are doing it for the right reasons though, and define some boundaries or conditions for this, otherwise you may well be heading for burnout.

Obviously, a great reason to accept anything you offered is to make money. We all need to pay the bills!

But knowing how much money you need to make, and then using that as an intentional cutoff point for accepting work, is much more sustainable than just working yourself into the ground because you never feel like you are earning enough, but haven’t defined what “enough” is. And I’ll be talking about this more later on.

Accepting everything you’ve offered can also be particularly useful when you’re getting started. As a new freelancer, it’s important to build your network and accepting work from new contacts, or from people you already know but want to build a new type of working relationship with, is a no-brainer.

It’s also useful to say, ‘Yes!’ to anything you offered to get to know the range of things that you could do. Having a go at new types of projects or working in different ways than you’re used to is a really exciting part of building your new career as a freelancer. It can also help you get a feel for your preferences and strengths now you’re working for yourself, not an agency.

But defining a time period, maybe the first month, six months, even a year, for this experimentation phase, and then taking stock and seeing what you’ve learned will help you make sure that you build your career in a sustainable way.

You can always update that defined time period or the criteria that you are using to decide whether you are accepting work or not, as things develop for you. A sustainable career will definitely involve evolution.

And that brings me onto my next microtip.

2. Ask for feedback

As freelancers, we will often submit a project and then never hear anything more about it. It’s like sending work into a black hole, and the only way to tell if the client thought we did a good job is if they offer us more work in the future.

That’s clearly not ideal, and it can be a real shock to the system after working in an agency where review feedback is such an integral part of on-the-job training and most projects are a real team effort.

Getting feedback is such a valuable way of developing our skills. But what do we do if we never receive any?

I would recommend proactively asking for it. A lot.

Because realistically, it’s unlikely that agencies are suddenly going to start consistently providing a lot of feedback for freelancers. From their perspective, it’s not a good use of time.

I’ve worked on both sides of this little dilemma, and I’ve come to the conclusion that giving no feedback at all is a very short term approach for agencies to take.

I will hold my hands up and confess that there have definitely been times when I have taken what a freelancer has given me, and barely had a moment to say, ‘Thanks for sending that through!’ let alone provide extensive comments.

But putting myself in the position of an agency person working with a freelancer, giving some feedback, maybe not the level of comments that I’d give to an internal team member, but more than nothing, means that the freelancer gets something that they can use to develop their skills, and the next time I work with them, they’re more likely to do what I need them to.

Now, agencies are unlikely to magically start doing this just because I’ve mentioned it here, although that would be cool…

Anyway, we need to proactively ask for that feedback, and make it as easy as possible for agencies to give it to us.

I was lucky enough to be selected as a Squiggly Careers Advocate by Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis at Amazing If, and they introduced me to a great feedback framework.

What Worked Well and Even Better If.

Whenever you send off a piece of work, include a request for really quick feedback, on something that worked well, and a suggestion of what you could do to make your work better next time.

Just a five minute call or a really short email can give you valuable insights into what you should keep doing next time, and where you might need to rethink things slightly.

Making that request for feedback part of every communication you have with your agency clients will help train them to actually give you some feedback occasionally, though, I can’t guarantee it will work every time.

3. Set boundaries… and stick to them

Something else we have to train our clients on, and often ourselves too, is our boundaries.

A lot of people go freelance so that they can have a more flexible lifestyle, but end up working harder and more hours than they ever did for someone else’s company.

It happens so easily, a boiling the frog kind of situation. You agree to squeeze something in, something else comes in late, and another project was briefed as 10 slides, but it’s coming out closer to 40.

Before you know it, you are eating three meals a day “al desko” and you haven’t seen daylight since the weekend.

Not cool freelancers, not cool. And we do it to ourselves!

We don’t have a line manager watching over resource allocation or watching over our timesheets to make sure we are not overstretched.

And to be fair, we may not have had that in an agency either, but we need to take responsibility for our own hours as freelancers.

There might be times when we make a conscious decision to burn the candle at both ends, but it shouldn’t be necessary to do this all the time, and it’s not good for us if we slip into it by mistake.

So how can we avoid this? Well, I did give you a bit of a spoiler earlier.

We need to set boundaries. And stick to them.

Planning out the income that you need per month or per year, and then calculating how that breaks down into the hours you need to work per week or per month is a great start.

And when we are planning our working time, we need to remember that it’s not realistic to assume that every hour we spend at our desks will be client chargeable.

Invoicing, business development, training, ordering a new printer cartridge, sorting out an IT problem – all of these things are work and will take some of our working hours.

Factoring this time into our planning means that they won’t get squeezed out into our own time, and we won’t resent doing them quite so much.

Also, once you know how many hours you have available, you can use that boundary and stop booking work that goes beyond it unless you have a good reason to.

We all have other personal boundaries too. So I finish early on a Tuesday because I have a choir rehearsal, one of my favourite boundaries, and I also have kids, so I often take time off during school holidays.

I don’t necessarily go through all of my personal boundaries with each potential client, but if there are boundaries that might affect how we work together, I’ll state them upfront.

Setting boundaries like this with each new client at the start of your working relationship will help make sure that you can both factor them into how you work together and helps stop either of you accidentally overstepping those lines.

In fact, some clients may be more rigid about them than you are, which is rather sweet.

But if they do keep having a go at making you work outside your normal hours, or to work more hours than you have available for them, it’s much easier to push back if this is something that you told them about right at the beginning.

There might be some wiggle room in some of those boundaries.

For example, I might agree to a meeting on a Tuesday afternoon, but suggest a start time half an hour earlier than the client suggested so that I can still get to choir.

But if they don’t know what your boundaries are, they won’t see a problem with their request and might even get the impression that you enjoy working every hour of the day and night.

4. Ring-fence time for learning

Another boundary I would recommend setting is ring-fencing some time for learning and development.

Going freelance shouldn’t mean that we have to give up on career specific personal development, and as training has become so much more of a focus within MedComms agencies over the last few years, I think it’s important that freelancers take this seriously too.

That being said, it doesn’t have to be a huge investment of time or money. I’m not suggesting that you set aside a day a week for training or anything like that, but there are simple things that you can do to proactively include time for learning in your working life.

The first thing I would suggest relates back to my earlier micro tip about asking for feedback.

If you get some feedback, make use of it.

Think about the feedback in broader terms than just for that specific project. How can you use it to do similar projects more effectively or efficiently in the future? Does it have implications for other types of work? Do you need to update your processes?

Or has it actually identified a broader training need? If so, what kind of training would help and how will you access it?

I’m a firm believer in finding ways to learn that don’t necessarily involve just doing a course.

I’m a big fan of mentoring, which is probably obvious from the name that I use, but that doesn’t have to be a long-term formal arrangement. It could simply be a chat with someone you know who knows about something you want to learn about.

Maybe there’s a podcast on it, or a book you could read on the topic.

There are also literally bajillions of online courses out there now, with providers like Coursera and FutureLearn offering open access courses on a huge range of topics. I’ve done a few and the content is often available for free, although you may have to pay if you want a certificate.

If you want something a bit more tailored to medical writing, I have several courses available and there’s a link to these in the video description.

And there might be something relevant on YouTube, maybe even on this very channel.

If not, you could always get in touch with me as I’m really happy to hear suggestions about future video topics.

Download the PDF summary

Building a sustainable and fulfilling freelance career can be a challenge, but if you follow these microtips and:

1. Position yourself with intention
2. Ask for feedback
3. Set boundaries and stick to them, unless you’ve made a conscious decision not to and have good reasons for this
4. Ringfence a realistic amount of time for learning and development

…you’ll be able to build a flourishing career that fits in with your life.

You can download a PDF summary of all of these microtips from a link in the video description below.

If this has been useful, I’d be really grateful if you could give the video a like.

If you have any questions or any suggestions of topics for future videos, I’d love to hear from you. Just pop me a comment and I’ll do what I can to help.