Contracts and Compliance: Mastering Boundaries and Relationships in the Freelance World

Welcome to the Future is Freelance podcast for solopreneurs, digital nomads, slowmads, consultants, remote workers, e-residents and people living a life without traditional boundaries. We're here for everyone who defies categorisation and makes a living in a life their own way. Every other Freelance Friday, we're serving up an audio cocktail of expert tips, inspired insights and stories from the frontiers of freelancing To help you achieve success with your borderless business, whatever success means to you as you live life on your own terms. Thanks for listening to the Future is Freelance and for being part of the Future of Work Revolution. So quick show of hands, please. my fellow freelancers, what's the one aspect of your business which might not be the most glamorous, but which can really trip you up if things go wrong? Nope, i'm not talking about taxes and finances, though those are important too. I'm talking about the agreements that we have with the people we do work for, where often we are the much smaller player in the relationship. as a solopreneur, getting the right agreements and contracts in place is a thing that can really protect you, and you might not even realise how important it is until something goes wrong. Most of the time, hopefully, it doesn't go wrong, but of course, we need to make sure, as responsible business owners, that we are fully compliant and protected. That's what today's guest specialises in helping people with, and I'll let her explain it in more detail than I can. Over to Annabelle. Annabelle, thank you so much for joining us here at. the Future is Freelance. It's great to have you with us.

Thank you for inviting me. I really do believe the Future is Freelance, so it's a great title. Is it coincident with what?

I think Excellent. Well, i know that you do a great deal to help freelancers through your brand coffee clutch, so tell us about exactly what you do there and why it's so important.

I'm just trying to think of a short way to tell you that won't bore everybody, as the answer is I think that freelancers enjoy the freedom of being freelance but are often very much exploited in the marketplace because we don't know how to set boundaries with our clients. So you often see in freelance forums and I'm a member of dozens, you know my client hasn't paid me for 90 days. my clients ghosted me. what do I do about this, that and the other? We're all kind of enthusiastic amateurs in our own career when it comes to freelancing. I know if you ever did careers advice at school, no one ever said go and be a freelance graphic designer or freelance VA, did they? They always wanted you to be employed in some way or another.

Definitely Yeah. in Spain, they want you to be a civil servant.

Yeah, whatever it is, but it's always part of a bigger structure where you have a boss and you have employment and, to a degree unless you're a very active union member your deal is what you're told it is. And we take that mentality sometimes into freelancing, forgetting that we're business owners. And I'm deeply aware of the fact that in these particularly disruptive times, for good and ill, a significant number of freelancers are women trying to work around family responsibilities because childcare is too expensive. Household expenses have gone up And I was really shocked 15 years ago when I realized that we all know about the pay gap between men and women in employment, but freelance women tend to earn exactly the same amount less than self-employed men, and that's partly because we go into less well paid niches note yourself, go into high paid niche, if you haven't done it already And it's partly because we don't set boundaries and we do too much for too little.

Yes, 100%.

Yeah, i got into coffee cratch really. First of all, to help people who are paying. Freelancers gets clear boundaries about who's doing what and almost instantly like about six weeks later, with freelancers going, can I have that contract round the other way, because I need clarity with my client about who's doing what is paying what. And ever since then I've been on a mission really, and it's a massive mission. I don't know if I'll make it in my lifetime, but I'd like to see a million freelance successful businesses earning enough money and it's going to cut the digital nomads to pay significant amounts of tax, because for the digital nomads, when we earn more money, we send our kids to school, we put shoes on their feet, we buy in the local shops. We are the economy, not these big global sending all their tax dollars to the Cayman Islands, you know. And we need profitable freelancers and contracts and compliance How big is it sounds are a key element of that.

Yes, 100%, and I'm fascinating what you said about the gender pay gap 15 years ago in freelancing. I know this was also borne out by research done by Zolo, who are the business platform provider that used to sponsor this podcast. They've got the data because they operate freelance accounts from around the world and it's exactly the same. Today It's women are not asking for the same rates as men for the same work. So having these documents in place, as you said, it protects both sides. It protects the employer and the boundaries. But thinking from the freelancer perspective, then why does it matter so much? What kind of things, apart from getting the deal right in the first place and asking for what you're worth, if you don't have the right contract in place, then what kind of things have you seen go wrong for freelancers?

Doing more and more for the same amount of money. It's also a gendered issue. I'm not saying men aren't helpful, don't get me wrong. But generally speaking, if you go to your IT guy and it's often a guy and you go, I'm paying you $100 a month for maintenance, but I want you to take on 28 more machines, they will go oh, that's lovely, That will be extra, That will be however much it is. I see loads of freelancers in web design, in VAs, social media, where the client comes to them and says could you do this, could you do this, could you do this? And they just go, yes, And they roll all the extra work in for no more money.

And then you'll start.

Well, you'll really start, because once you start to do twice as much work for the same money, the client feels aggrieved if later on you say no. But also we all know the statistics on burnouts in early stage businesses And although there are real issues about not getting paid, that we can talk about separately and not getting funded. The next biggest issue in my direct observation of 43 years of running my own business is exhaustion, and the principal reason for getting exhausted is doing too much work for too little money, so you can't afford to pay anyone to help you and you get really, really tired because business is, if it works out, a marathon, not a sprint. It's not about how much sleep can you do without between now and next Sunday, it's about how many decades can you keep this up.

Yes, i think hopefully that's one thing that's come out of this awful COVID time is we've got rid of that stupid hustle culture of we must do more and sleep when we're dead and in the meantime burn ourselves out to achieve our goals. Business shouldn't be like that And with the right agreements in place, you can protect yourself before it gets like that. hopefully right.

Yes, because you're setting expectations. Now I'll give you an example of two perfectly reasonable businesses whose expectations weren't met. In the finance sector, I had a friend who was a very successful networking host before COVID, obviously, because things changed a lot And he took on a virtual assistant who I happened to know, who was a very responsible and reliable VA, And he started complaining all the time. Every time my guests are on the way to this event, she's not around to give directions or pick up their calls or what's happened to their tickets. And I said what time's the event And he said it's six in the evening. Now I knew that that VA had become a VA express these so she could do the school run.

There's no use to her then, is it? That's sure? surely she wasn't in any agreement to be available at that time?

No, but neither of them had discussed that. So they had a pair of conflicted expectations that each of them thought the deal gave them what they wanted. So one of the many things you deal with at Coffee Clatch is availability. When can you reasonably expect me to be around? Nobody's after you in different time zones to your client, by the way, because we see people weeping, because their client always rings them at 3 AM, because for them it's 8 in the morning. Yeah, yeah, that's all these things out.

Really need to have that conversation? Yes, and it's. You know, we have the tools now to operate very asynchronously and communicate extremely effectively across boundaries of time and location and everything else. Obviously, that's not the same as dealing with calls when people are lost on the way to a physical event, But most things. There is absolutely no excuse for calls at 3 o'clock in the morning not for anybody.

No, I did deal with someone who said to me why does everyone have their own time? I think he was from Orange County, somewhere in America. He said why don't they all just have one time? And I said to him because the world is round. and I realized with the sinking feeling that he didn't agree about that either.

Oh right, okay, The customer is always right, except when they're a flat earth.

Well, yes, you know, we're not only not all on the same page, we're not all in the same century, And that's very interesting when it comes to digital freelancing, because a lot of clients are used to the idea of having someone in an office over there that they can see, and they quite like the flexible side of freelancing from the point of view of not paying you if they don't need you, of not having the overheads that go with the employment. But they haven't changed their brain to. You're not sitting outside waiting for me to tell you what to do. Most freelancers, in order to succeed, have multiple clients and you can't drop everything. If one client says to you right now, i want you to stop what you're doing and do this. You can't let the other clients down because that's got a problem.

Yeah, and that's as you said, that's they're not paying for that, they're not paying to retain you for 40 hours.

If they are, then that's employment, then Well, even within a service level agreement for a freelancer, you could say and we do with this a lot in Coffcletch my normal term and times are. my normal availability is, if you want me to respond within that period, if you have an emergency and if I can, the extra that I will charge you for this is this, and the reason why we recommend charging extra is you know that maybe your failure to plan is not my emergency.

Right And your clients. emergencies can dominate your whole life, if you let it.

So what I discovered years ago with my own clients by the way, who is used to get holding me Friday at four and go I need this Monday at nine and I would do it And I would email it out and then I'd get I'm out of the office till Wednesday. So I very quickly learned to go OK, this is urgent. You are aware that our urgent work search are just X And if I do this between now and then it's going to cost you X more money. What I discovered was all more than half about 60 to 65% of the request for urgent work than I had Well demand. They weren't really framed as requests When I went it's extra. They went oh no, it's not that urgent, it can wait.

Actually, yeah, we can slot that into our normal time allowance after all.

It's funny that it started a theory that I'll follow through with our coffee patch contracts that you have to look at who's experiencing the pain that results from behavior And if it's more experiencing the pain and you don't like the behavior, it's not going to stop Unless you walk away. But you don't want to leave every client that irritates you because then you'll be doing nothing but onboarding new clients And clients will do stuff that you don't like. And obviously you'll be supportive from time to time with clients who have genuine emergencies, but you have to move the pain point to them And in business money is a very effective measure. But the other thing I discovered when I did work all weekend and I was on in my business 60% extra. I was counting the money when I did it, thinking oh well, fair enough, i'm missing the family barbecue, but look how much money I made. I wasn't making the same money as if I'd done it on a Wednesday.

Yes, yeah, so sometimes you do want to. It's in everybody's interest that you take an emergency rate and you go the extra mile and you save the client from whatever Mistake led to their emergency in some cases, or you help them secure a great contract themselves or and satisfy their clients. Everybody wins. It's worth it, it's not important.

You're definitely supportive, but at the same time you're not there to work yourself to the bone for whatever $20 an hour so that they can secure a five million pound contract. You're not on that deal, are you No? So no contracts like judo. You know that you don't actually go in and smack someone on the nose, but you allow little step back so that if they're coming at you much too strong, you can flip them.

Right Use their own weight against them?

Well, you need to, because some people look at coming till you stop them. Yep, now that makes sense, and you've been a freelancer that long to figure that one out.

No, i know that my agreement with clients as a writer has definitely evolved over time and it's almost. You don't want to put another clause in every time someone messes you around or there's a misunderstanding, but you do have to kind of iterate towards the perfect arrangement sometimes, especially if, in my case, i'm working with deliverables rather than ours. So just trying to help them understand that one example of this was I've had a clause for years that states my rates include one detailed editing round when everybody's had a go at it And got their comments in, followed by a second final proof read once I've worked through those edits and they've approved them And this blew up in my face. I think it was last year I had somebody I did a horrible, stinky tech white paper that was contributed by several different people, not all first language English. The comments took me and ages and they just to go through and respond to consistently. They said they'd like that. That's fine, we'll get it back to you for a final proof read. And when I went back in it wasn't a final proof read. They added thousands more words, new chunks, moved bits around and completely messed up the entire document And that was. I had to go back to them and say look, this is completely out of scope now. This is not a final proof read. This is going to take it's actually a complete reworking. You've got different tones of voice. You've got different chunks in the wrong place. You know this. This no longer flows as a document And we had to completely renegotiate and they wanted it done within 48 hours. So actually it was one of my biggest jobs that month and we did get it done, but you know, it made me go back and look at the wording of my agreement. You know what's so unclear about a final proof read. I need to rephrase that?

Obviously not to a writer, you know. But that's the other thing about contracts, because we write contracts for niches And, by the way, i was talking about the fact we're ready to launch a copywriter one but we need real people with real businesses to test it on, which is what we do, by the way. We don't just sit in an ivory town, write stuff where we're ready to go find six key people and go how would this work in your business? Does it work for you? But one of the things that we found really helpful is to put in a contract definitions, not just the way lawyers do. You know all the Latin stuff, but what do I mean by final proof? And also, what can be helpful is to put in if it's more than whatever 10% word change or find some way to measure it. There isn't an opinion, right, because 10% is measurable. Lots of changes, different voices to you mean something, but to the end user it doesn't mean anything because they don't even know there's more than one voice in the document. You know they're on a different page. I like things you can measure, so it might have to be percentages. Then you go. Then the quote for doing this will be whatever, based 10% of the original quote And if you want it done urgently, there's the uplift. So when they come back with you on that, you go. You do realize paragraph nine and five apply. This is we've already agreed that because you knew from the off, because one of the things that clients don't seem to recognize with freelancers is how much time and effort freelancers put into their end of the bargain Right, and there's a kind of psychology of this. I used to work with pharmacists years ago doing employment law advice with one of my older companies. I've still got today And it used to amaze me because I used to go down and we have complicated situation, people with three languages, four sets of workers, right, sometimes different rights to work in the country, and I would sort of go what you need to do is this, and I'd go away and come back again and they've done something completely different. And I'd go why did you amend the letter or do something completely different? and they went well, i just thought this would be better. So and I would say to them if you use, the pharmacist gave me a medical prescription to take this for this condition And I went oh no, i'm going to take a completely different drug. What would you say to me? But they knew what it took to be an expert pharmacist, but they had no idea what it took me to be an expert in what I do. The respect is in mutual.

Correct.

Yes, that's what it is.

You need a white coat or something to impress them.

No, but it's not specific to techie people. For a long time it was a work through pharmacist and people with technical professions, and the doctors. They were concerned because they were qualifying, they knew everything about everything. And you see that don't you online? you know, as a qualified physicist, my recipe for growing tomatoes is, and it's like really What's they got to do then? But we all have this thing that we don't understand how much time other people take to learn a master thing and indeed How much time it takes to do something. In our concept group, because we support contract disputes where people are using our contract Well, a common one is the client saying I can't believe you charge me an hour for that. That was just a five-minute job. And that five-minute job might be relaying out an entire document to completely different specifications and it's like, yeah, well, for me, by the way, that'd be a ten-hour job. That's why I don't do stuff like that. But everybody's idea of how long things take Is completely different. So it's, if you're not charging for deliverables, which is one thing, if you're charging for time, which I think is a big trap for freelancers, by the way, because then people go well, why is your value rate so high?

Yeah, there's nobody's business your hourly rate. if you make a Point of charging by what you actually offer them in terms of value, it's a far better model, absolutely but it's very hard for new freelancers to get their brain on that.

They don't know how much to charge, they don't know what value they add, they just know what they do. Yes, they tend to go I'm so much an hour and then people go well, jane, down the mode is cheaper, so I'll have her, you know. But they also don't know how to Cut the input to those deliverables in the way we've just discussed. So they're terrified of fixed fee or deliverables, because they could end up with an unlimited commitment to work For a finite amount of money and it can go wrong. If you don't think it's, yeah.

Oh, we've all miscosted jobs, haven't? I mean, i have a, an hourly rate in mind when I quote on something and That's on me. If it takes Four times as long to do it, then I have to suck it up. Do it other times It might go more quickly and yeah great, everybody's happy, but it is definitely. There's a risk on the freelancer when you move to value-based pricing, even though I'm sure it works out better in the long run.

Absolutely, and that is also part being in business, because I think there are two Streams in finance work that both bear the same label, and so it's rather confusing. One is you are a business owner Like you. Whether you make a profit or a loss on a given assignment is up to your smarts on how you priced it, how you did it and How you control the client in the most possible way to not let them get out of hand. Another thing that freelancer can mean is I'm out in the world on my own, i charge by the hour, people pick me up and put me down and I'm just out there as Comparison on any rates. You know that second sort of freelancer exists in the world. I see them a lot, very often treated as if they were employees, in terms of how dare you send a substitute? How dare you not be available on Monday? Did I give you permission to have the day off? And I've very much exploited because they don't have whatever benefits and whatever jurisdiction or employment. They have all the uncertainty of being a business, but they don't have the benefits of I'm. I'm designing a life that I want.

Yeah, that's so important. You see, i thought we were going to talk about contracts or throughout this conversation, but actually it's a far more Mindset issue, isn't it? it's about transitioning your value and then underpinning it with the contract, absolutely.

Contracts are your mindset, not just made manifest, but made in the nicest possible way, something you can sue on if it all goes wrong. Right right, it's lovely having a mindset, but you can't pay the rent with that. I love that quote.

Yeah, that's going to be a nice pull out tweet from this episode. You're full of the man about. This is fantastic. So okay, now we've established why we need to have the contracts. There are lots of model agreements around, and I know that you you provide this as a service and so this is your business model. But I mean, what's to stop a freelancer just googling agreement for VA services or writing services, pulling something off the shelf, relying on a template or even, dare I say it, using an AI to create their documents?

Well, i had a little go the other day and I asked chat GPT to create me a, a freelancer agreement. It completely ignored anything about data privacy, which in the whole of the EU, in the UK is a problem. Because if you, if you as a freelancer, accessing your clients data about their prospects, their team, they're like you have to have an agreement about how that works, even in the States, for everyone goes. Oh, it doesn't play to me. State after state is passing data privacy acts. There's a possibility of a new federal replacement for the data privacy shield or privacy, depending on where you are and what your pronunciation is. You can't go, it's nothing to do with me. In an online world where I can be working with people in the Philippines this morning, people in America tonight, i can't go. Nothing to do with me. You have to have appropriate agreements. You have to be aware of what is appropriate for where your client is in relation to you. So Texas to Delaware is an entirely different set of data privacy issues to Canada to Spain And vice versa. You need to know what you're doing now. Freelancers tend to go. They can't find me. I'm only little, i can't get busted, you know, and quite often that's true, but equally, when things go wrong, they tend to want to blame the lit list guy. Have you noticed this? Oh, 100%. And that works just the same the other way, as in.

You know that little freelancer over there has no leverage to make me actually pay them For the work that I've done.

Absolutely well, they kind of do if you get your contracts right and similarly with the data privacy part of it, because There's no reason for you to do a ton of work On credit. Right when I go to a restaurant, i might be able to order dinner and sit down at the bar on credit, but I, when I walk out and, by the way, i do a restaurant client who wanted to pay me slowly, so I had this argument with them I said to my client I'm going to go to a restaurant and I'm going to go to a restaurant and I'm going to go to a restaurant and I'm going to go to a restaurant, so to my country or restaurants, and I bring all my friends, really, and when it's time to leave, i'll tell them, i'll pay the bill when you pay me mine. And they went, we'll call the police and I went right.

Okay, I'll invoice you 60 net.

Like no, we're not having this. So there is a feeling that bigger companies basically use the credit of Micropreneurs to fund their enterprises. It's not accidental, no. So things you can do in that is have contracts that give you money up front, or even stage payments So that you can, and also that say you can stop work, really not pay, without consequential damages or loss or whatever. Um, you can also sort yourself out with packages like that. That. I mean coffee clatch, think about it. People pay for our contracts online And they don't hit the go to cart button. There is no contract. No, i mean no disrespect, but at the price we sell as that we can't possibly invoice you beg for the money for nine months and Hope you might pay us Monday. It's not a practical business model, but a lot of freelancers are doing that, yeah, and it will break you financially, give you a really dodgy, and it drives a lot of particularly women back into employment Because they just can't cope with all that comes with all this uncertainty.

Yeah, but it is. It's that having that, that mindset of the assertiveness, to make that clear in the first place. I've had loads of clients. I've lost work before people who will not pay. I only ask for 50 up front for a new client for the first project, and that first project can be as small as they like To de-risk it on their part. But if they don't, if they, you know, if they can't pay that 50% up front, it's a huge red flag and I would rather walk away now than risk doing the work and not getting paid.

And that's the voice of experience. Now again, i don't know what it is globally, but when I started coffee clatch I found some data that really shocked me, which was the average micropranar did over 6 000 pounds of Work a year and obviously average includes big micropranars and 20 months that they never got paid for.

That's terrible. That's an absolute disgrace.

Yeah, and that's obviously. That's not just invoices not ever paid, it's invoices disputed that you've had to back down on. Some of that is the micropranar's fault that they're not being clear, you know it's. It's not a good idea to issue an invoice that a client's not expecting and randomly expect that to be paid. True, but if the client can also be a bit disingenuous and say I wasn't expecting that, so if the contract and the The billing is clear and aligned, they've got no legitimate reason to say they weren't expecting it, you can, if you need, to move to enforcement of that contract. Yeah, and this is where women entrepreneurs, with respect, are terrible when they're new. I wouldn't want to upset them. I really wouldn't want to upset them by making them pay my bill. They won't like me anymore, unless I've already gone off to clients I've got they don't pay me. I don't care if they don't like you.

You don't like them if they don't pay you. So it really doesn't matter what they think of you. You're not likely to be working together again.

Surely you wouldn't continue to work for a client that didn't pay you. But you'd be surprised how many do.

Yeah.

They will go 90 days. I've worked for these people. They never sent me any money And I went what I paid the terms Yeah.

Why are you still doing work for them after 90 days if they haven't paid you? They sort of.

There's a helpfulness syndrome that a disproportionate number of women freelancers suffer from. They're there to solve problems. They're there to be useful. They're not there to be paid And to be brutal. I always say to them you're thinking like a wife. You know that there's a long-term benefit to this Being a freelancer. Please don't be offended. Anyone who thinks this is too wild is that being a hooker. Don't take anything off till there's some cash in the rental piece. You're not a wife, right? This is your opportunity. When they want you most, it's when you move in for the money. Make them back. There is a long-term, sunny retirement with this person in 50 years time if you're lucky. You're not a wife, you're a hooker. And when you understand that, you understand that you've got moments when you're highly desirable, which is when you get paid. Nobody has ever paid last month's hooker.

Wow, okay. Well, to extend this metaphor of a power imbalance in relationships a little bit further, i'd like to get your opinion on the tiny-freelancer huge corporation interface. What happens when they won't sign your contract? they insist you have to go with their supplier agreement. they have their terms of 60 net or whatever that they say they can't budge on. How would you navigate that relationship?

I wouldn't be starting from exactly there. What I tell people with our coffee clutch contracts is when you're pitching, when you're doing your discovery hour, everything you send to anyone from emails to invoices you go all quotes and all business is done on our terms. Right, when you put in your proposal with a big corporate because they very rarely just ring you up and hire you they're running money around the block and make you do a lot of work before you get there. You put in that proposal. This quote is on the basis that we're using our terms and this is how the money works. So when they come back to you about, oh, it's always got to be their terms, which they never do pre-money. What you need to do is you need to decide two things. One is is it just extra payment terms, in which case you go, that's great, the rate for the job is this, and because I told you, if you were on our terms, you do it. The other thing you really need to do is to read those terms. Now again, it's something we do in the coffee clutch group with people who are going the client once their terms done. We have a look at them, because some of those agreements are beyond unfair. We see every month everything that you create during the six months of your contract belongs to us. It doesn't say under the contract, everything you create. So basically you are selling your entire IP and copyright for that period. No way. Some of the ones I saw recently was unlimited liability for any confidentiality breaches. Well, that's a big problem because you can't insure, in the UK at least, for unlimited liability. All insurance has a number on it And it didn't even say if it was your fault. Facebook just got to find out much. So if you were the unlucky sod who was on that project and you'd signed a contract that was wrongly worded, that could be yours. So one of the reasons this is. The problem is not so much that big corporates are trying to stitch up micro-boners deliberately, but they've gone to a centralized system of. This is what we do. That is basically lawyer to lawyer. They're expecting their lawyer to talk to your lawyer, not to you. But of course we're talking $200 an hour. People, not 50, crid in our people And if you're pitching for a contract under 2,500, you can't afford that kind of support. So we see all the time and we have a quick look and we go look headline. Even if I have a blog called Coffee Clutch I'll give you a link to it. It says what to do if your client wants you to sign their contract. These are dangerous words. They mean something. Indemnity means you're paying. Warranty means a promise you could be sued on.

They're not just legal jargon, they're stuff that Right, that's really good to know to look out for.

And, of course, most people. And the other thing that's terrible with corporate contracts is they often say things like you know, you can't sign any variation, no variation, is this contract a binding? so nothing agreed by email, by phone, whatever. And then your client's going could you do this? and you go, that's extra. But it isn't binding because the contract you signed said get them. So they're doing it because they're sign in Minimum Hand contracts. But they don't have a small contracting system And it can be evil. You can accidentally hand over your entire business, an unlimited liability, and a lot of them, if you're dealing with global corporates, will want the contract enforceable in America, which for anyone who's not in America and it could be a specific state, obviously not the whole of America is the problem because your professional liability insurance will go through the roof if you let your insurer know that you're letting your contracts be sued on in America and if you don't let them know, you may invalidate it if there's a claim.

Right. So it's a minefield really that whole tiny freelancer big corporate interface and I think the danger is us as freelancers. We tend to look at the payment terms only and you know we're trying to figure out how we're going to deal with that net 90 or whatever and renegotiate that and we don't look at the small print in all the rest of it.

Absolutely. There was a guy negotiating from buy CD and tape in the 80s I don't know if he's even still in business called Victor Carras and if he's still in business, if he's got a YouTube channel to go there right, because he taught me so much, right. I never met the guy but you know his programs taught me so much and he used to say there are three things in the contract. There's the time, and we've talked about the time, haven't we the money? and we've talked about the money. But the thing freelancers forget is what he calls the shape in the envelope, all the other things around the deal, not just warranties and indemnities. It could be, you know, all sorts of things and as freelancers tend to get focused, very understanding on the first two. But according to him, even corporate negotiators focus on that and a number of times I've supported the client. I haven't got the front line, but I've said and go back and say this is wholly disproportionate for a microprner and I suggest we put in this and quite often they get it, not always.

It just depends on how much sense is going down yeah, i suppose how much power your contact actually has in the corporate environment as well how much the corporate need to get going now, because one would time as well as money.

It's not just how much time you spend, but when does this need to be done. So if you agree to do this, six months ago and two weeks ago they sent you 400 pages of contract you've never seen before. Chances are they're expecting you just to sign it and get going next Monday. You have got a massive time leverage because, yes, they could get someone else, but they've already been happy with you. They're expecting you to start. They've lined up a team.

Time is your power right now, but it won't be after you've started so you can use that as a agile, nimble freelancer actually compared to this juggernaut of a huge corporate which has so much momentum to make changes, and to start dealing with another freelancer at this point would be extremely costly to them.

So you can use your agility to negotiate absolutely, and you just have to remember that the corporate system isn't personal. They're not interested in whether you can pay them in. They're not really interested in whether you have sleepless nights about whether they're going to get signed 20 million dollars and it's going to be on you. They don't care. They just have a process, issue, contract, do this thing. And the worst thing freelancers do is they freak out and they contact and go. I can't believe you're doing this to me. We had to deal da-da-da. Your contacts is your allies.

They didn't want this, otherwise they'd have come to you with that in the first place and they've probably got no idea actually what the freelancer agreement looks like when you're dealing with somebody in marketing or IT or whatever, and they've no control over it either well, they might do it as a big project.

You'd be surprised. We have reasonable success rates. We get people to highlight look, this is what this means. And when. Say to your contact would you sign it?

great question.

Yeah, turn it around by the way, one of the coffee clutch, if you like, mantras when we're writing contracts on the editorial board is would you sign this contract? brilliant and, by the way, preceding that is do you understand it? because one of the things we see freelancers do all the time is generate contracts that they themselves don't understand by counting and pasting random things from random websites. Sometimes in contract them into jurisdictions they're not even in and their clients aren't in, but because they don't understand what they're doing, they just cut and paste, you know.

It looks good, doesn't?

it Sounds quite legal and sounds quite Sounds legal, yeah, and the worst example that I've ever seen, but that was on the franchise side of things. We had a client who we used to do a lot of work for on contracts who ran franchises, and he had a franchisee that was behaving appallingly and they wanted to terminate the agreement. So my co-director then called in the agreement and said well, before we terminate it, let's have a look at how it gets terminated, and for what? Good question, when are you going to end an agreement? And he said to them this is a pizza restaurant franchise. How many shoes have you provided your franchisee with? And they said what are you talking about? And he said well, this agreement says you'll provide them with a thousand shoes a month to sell And if you don't, the agreement is void. And they said well, that's ridiculous, we don't sell shoes. And they said well, why did you sign this agreement? And they said we didn't read it because we have lawyers who do stuff like that. But ultimately it's your job to read and understand your own contract. You're in business. It's not like consumer rights. Yeah, in the world of consumer laws, thanks to people like Ralph Nader and the consumers association in the UK and the equivalents in Europe. There's a lot of legal protection for consumers who sign contracts they don't understand or will be guarded as unfair. You see stuff about that in the newspapers all the time, but you need to be aware of the fact that the vast majority of that does not extend to business, to business contracts. You need to go on the basis that if you sign it, that's what it is. There are some exceptions, but this is not a podcast on the ins and outs of enforceability of contracts. If you don't want it to happen to you, don't sign it. Put it in there yeah. Yeah, and we've got a lot of freelancers who say I know we had a little new VA the other day and she said I want to take out of your contract all this stuff about late payment. And I said why? And she said because they won't pay me late.

Then it's not a problem, is it to leave it in?

Yes, well done you. But she said it just sounds so unfriendly. I'll do this and I'll do that for an.

I didn't know it was going to be paid And then everybody will be professional and be happy And everyone knows where the boundaries are.

So Well again, i think it was the same guy on his CD said and it's been with me for decades right, greet your clients like a friend, take their money like a friend. right, we get paid like a business. Yeah, that's such good. It's not unfriendly to be paid for what you did. It's unfriendly not to pay you Absolutely.

That's extremely bad manners And we're all professionals. We can all be extremely courteous and polite and we can deal with integrity. You know we're holding up our side of the bargain by providing excellence as a service provider. We expect nothing but the same courtesy and friendship back from the people that we're doing that excellent job for. So you know it's completely reasonable expectation. Maybe that's the final mindset shift.

Yeah, be in your contract, because that expectation is not always shared. Some people confuse virtual support freelancers with AI. You know they think you can just go And I'll see you server the other day about how many people say thank you to Alexa, mine's actually that saying you're welcome which cracks my husband up. I say thank you Alexa And she says you're welcome. But you know people do tend to treat freelancers as consumable, not people with a lie.

Well, that's one thing we've got to change, isn't it? And that's one thing we've got to make sure everybody keeps in mind, particularly in this age of automation. You're dealing with other humans. Treat them with some dignity and professionalism, And that way you'll get the best service from them in the long run.

Yes, Absolutely. You can't get quality support, freelance or employed, from being a narcissist Or otherwise. I'm not going to put on your podcast.

Well, on that note, we've actually talked for longer than I was planning about this, but I think it's important just to look. We've looked over your 15 years of experience with Coffee Clutch and you've talked about how important it is, the wisdom that still applies that you've learned back in the day from CDs and things like that. None of the fundamentals have changed. But just looking briefly to the future, do you have any predictions or expectations or trends that freelancers need to be aware of on the compliance and contracting front?

I think the whole data privacy thing is growing by the minute. When you're starting with GDPR, a lot of people across the world thought that was wild, but there's over 138 countries that now have data privacy, but it was including China, which might surprise you. So if you're collecting data on Chinese citizens, you all need to do some things. You know you can't, and so I always think of China. Think people have got data privacy rights. We've come a long way, as you're like saying, no, you went to a Chinese friend. But it is a trend, and it's a conflicted trend, because the big corporates like Facebook and Google's started with the idea that they had the rights to our data. When they talk about rights, they're thinking theirs, and Europe went against the trend. And when the person whose data it is has the rights And most people are a bit in the middle We quite like having a free Facebook, don't we? We kind of accept a certain amount of trading of our data because we don't have to pay for it. Most of us are a bit in the glaze, but I think it's going to accelerate with AI, with children's data protection, all these trends coming through And at the same time, i think sooner or later we're going to have to get to grips with the fact that tiny people in their back bedrooms can run successful global businesses and have a structure for that that isn't as staffed as the one we've got. I wouldn't and no offense meant to Spain like to be trying to run a business in Spain with a Spanish equivalent of an limited company. I'd rather be tilting at windmills, if the truth be known. I think we need to look at it. We have the technology to all do our thing, but we have a global micro-puner climate, don't we? But we have national legislation, or not even national in America. You have state by state. It's all very bitty And loads of people passionately, for all sorts of legitimate reasons, against a kind of global federal government that regulates everything in one way. So we are literally tiptoeing through the tulips. Revising the Philippines an hour ago. I'm going to be on its main review. I'm going to be dealing in the UK now this afternoon I'm going to be Every set of laws is different.

Yeah, so there'll be work for us to do on the compliance front for a long time before that regulation ever converges or becomes in any way consistent.

And the tragedy is good compliance support, generally speaking, is very expensive. You know, if I pick up the phone's date to a Spanish law and say fill me in what's happened next last year on the, what did it call? your freelance companies or the tiny ones?

Well, we're autonomous freelancers.

That's it. Autonomous right? It wouldn't come to my mind. Tell me what's happened with autonomous tax and that about this year. How much did that conversation cost me? Yeah Well, not everybody makes that kind of money And the tragedy is you're not making enough money to afford it. But because you can't afford it, you're at risk of being wiped out just when you start making money because they think, oh, we've noticed you, i'll have a bit of that, you really need to. Yeah, so that's what Kafka she's about trying as far as humanly possible to get people sorted out. So when you make money, it's for that holiday or pay an event or whatever it is you wanted it for. It doesn't go straight into a fine on the government.

Because you've earned it. We work hard as freelancers and it's great for us that organisations like Coffee Clouch are there to protect us and protect our hard-won funds that we've earned from providing great service to our clients. So we're going to put all the links to Annabelle's services into our show notes so that you can check out what she's doing and her communities. Any final words? you'd like to leave our listeners with Annabelle before they head off into another week of freelancing, don't?

be disheartened. It's a journey, not a destination. Every week you're given inch you shouldn't have given, and every week you'll gain an inch that quite unexpectedly somewhere else. You know It's just ongoing.

Thank you for listening to the Future Is Freelance podcast. We appreciate your time and attention in a busy world and your busy life. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a fellow freelancer. Help us grow this movement of independent entrepreneurs If you rate and review the future. If you rate and review the Future Is Freelance in whatever app you're listening to this right now or over at FutureIsFreelancexyz, then that will help spread the word and help us reach more people who need to hear this message and join the conversation. Together, we can change the world and make sure the future is freelance. This is my middle miss, wishing you success and happiness in your enterprise until our next episode. Almost 100.