This week delivered me a few steep learning curves as I tentatively begin trying out the world of freelance, and one of the most interesting was navigating the delivery of a final product when there\u2019s a range of stakeholders involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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My second ever client contracted me to facilitate an all-staff team-building session. They recognised their move to hybrid working over the pandemic has impacted the cohesion of the team. There have been role changes and new members starting and, overall, the opportunities for the whole staff team to get quality time together have been limited. They wanted to utilise their all-staff session to focus on fun, team building, improving well-being as well as improving everyone\u2019s understanding of the range of work done across the organisation. As an advice charity, their work is close to my heart and I was thrilled to be chosen to lead the session.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I research them – and its familiar territory. They look like they do great work and are really similar to an organisation I used to be part of. In the initial phone call the main contact and I bond over the challenges of community development and advice work, and there’s a good personal connection that I think will serve us well if we work together. We explore their intended outcomes and outputs from the session, as well as what’s been covered before and crucially anything that’s worked well or not previously and I take this away to devise a proposal. We have a few meeting rounds to explore the proposal as there a few internal stakeholders involved and we’re keen to get a consensus on all the elements. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Even as an experienced facilitator, it feels like a whole different ball game to be paid directly for the work. Rather than being recognised as an internal (organisational or partnership-level) colleague, you start from zero. And you have to earn that credibility (and that fee). Thankfully, I think the voluntary and community generally always start from a welcoming place but I recognise how aware I am that I have to be the driving force behind this work, because it\u2019ll be me, and my reputation alone, up there on the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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There\u2019s some negotiation to be had on exercises. In my effort to show range and options, I perhaps included too many options. It may also be a reflection on the broad range of the brief to cover fun, social, wellbeing and learn more about all aspects of the charity\u2019s work in just three hours. Particularly because once you\u2019ve got the housekeeping, welcomes, warms ups, break, and recap\/closing included, it leaves you with surprisingly little time to deliver the core of the session.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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So, I knew starting out I wouldn\u2019t be efficient with my time. Rather than overthink it, and beat myself up about it, I decided early on just to accept the slow start. With each new project, I start from scratch at this point \u2013 whether its equipment and resources I need, plans and budgets or exercises and events, all of it starts from the beginning. But what I am gaining is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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I\u2019d definitely clocked that my preparation time alone with client meetings will now be greater than the event itself (4 hours of client meetings versus 3hours of event), and naturally on top of this I\u2019ve spent time researching and writing the initial proposal for submission, two sets of revisions, as well as preparing all the materials I\u2019ll be using on the day, which takes my total prep time to well over a day. The night before the event, the timings need to change because a guest speaker\u2019s schedule changes and on the morning of the event, there\u2019s another tweak. It definitely brings home the need to be able to adapt quickly to situations!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Now as a freelance newbie, I don\u2019t have a benchmark for whether this level of prep standard or excessive (and the number of changes requested by the organisation), although it certainly felt more prep-heavy than I was expecting. I\u2019ll definitely be adding to my \u201cask others list\u201d if and how they cap their prep time \u2013 by creating one proposal, and say limiting to one set of revisions, or one review meeting? Whether they have more confidence and ability to hold to what they know will make a good event, or whether this is always likely to be a careful balancing act of merging your vision and theirs to create a final product that works for all? Or whether any are so well established that they get commissioned for a day, and organisations simply accept what they\u2019ll get without ever seeing any detail beforehand, presumably because they\u2019re so established and fabulous. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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I also recognise that the number of prep conversations and revisions is also likely to be a result of not knowing me, we’re starting from zero and need to build that trust. Also, because it\u2019s a world I know well, they\u2019re a small charity on a tight budget, and naturally they\u2019re keen to maximise the value for money and maybe that alone means they\u2019re absolutely entitled to interrogate the event down to the last detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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For this work, the financial outlay will be around \u00a3100, once my travel and the initial stationary expenses are included (although arguably I could potentially also spread those across future projects). What makes for really interesting reading though is where I\u2019ve logged my hours in preparation time, and whether, once I\u2019ve added my time in for the delivery and follow-up report, my shiny new spreadsheet votes it \u201cprofitable\u201d or not. Spoiler alert \u2013 it\u2019s definitely not. \u00a0But as my second ever project, I\u2019m fine with that. I\u2019ll chalk up those lessons, admire my new stationary (I own flipcharts now!), and set this as the baseline for the rest of my freelance time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week delivered me a few steep learning curves as I tentatively begin trying out the world of freelance, and one of the most interesting was navigating the delivery of a final product when there\u2019s a range of stakeholders involved. So what was the event? My second ever client contracted me to facilitate…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":111,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17,9],"tags":[13,11,20,18,15,21,10],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-facilitation","category-start-up","tag-charity","tag-consultant","tag-event","tag-facilitation","tag-founder","tag-non-profit","tag-start-up-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t