15 Minute Freelancer

32. What's your freelancer love language?

August 20, 2021 Louise Shanahan Season 1 Episode 32
15 Minute Freelancer
32. What's your freelancer love language?
Show Notes Transcript

What's your freelancer love language? Do you thrive on positive feedback and glowing testimonials, or is a timely invoice payment enough to make you feel appreciated? Do you prefer lots of face-to-face contact with clients, or just wanna get on with the work in peace? When you know what makes you tick, you can build processes that allow you to thrive, do your best work, and build great relationships with your clients so you love what you do.

Louise Shanahan is a freelance health copywriter and content marketer. She's on a mission to help others build a freelance business that feels easy and works for them – in weekly snack-sized bites.

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Intro

Welcome to 15 Minute Freelancer, your snack-sized guide to being your own boss and building a business and life you love. I'm your host Louise Shanahan. My LinkedIn bio says I'm a freelance health copywriter. But for the next 15 minutes I'll be tickling your ears with practical strategies behind the scenes stories and nuggets of wisdom so you can create freelance business that works for you. Whether you're just starting out or you've been self-employed for a while, I'll be right here with you to help me navigate the ups and downs of freelancing life. So grab a coffee relax and join me for 15 minutes of freelancing fun. Don't forget to hit subscribe. 

Hello friends! How are you today? I’ve got a little fun one for you today. The last few weeks have just felt so relentlessly relentless. I dunno if it’s because there’s one depressing story after another on the news, or I’ve spent too much time going down bleak rabbit holes on Twitter, or I just need a holiday, but I thought that rather than getting all tactical today, I’d do something a bit more fun. And maybe there will be some tactics in it too, who knows.

So, in self-help and personal development circles, there’s a well-known book that you might have heard of by Dr Gary Chapman, called the 5 Love Languages. It’s a book about relationships. Bear with me, this will get to freelancing in a minute. The idea is that there are different ways of expressing love for the people in your life, and everyone has a preferred way of showing or wanting to be shown love and appreciation, and when you understand that, relationships are generally a whole lot easier. 

There are five love languages in the book – the first is words of affirmation, which would simply involve telling the person how you feel about them or praising them or complimenting them or whatever. 

Then there’s acts of service, which would be when someone shows they love someone by doing things for them, like cooking dinner for them or taking their car to be fixed without being asked.

Next, there’s receiving gifts, which is pretty self-explanatory. Same for quality time, and finally, physical touch.

Anyway, why am I telling you this? I figured the love languages framework applies in all relationships. With our friends and family – and maybe as freelancers too? So today, I’m thinking about what the 5 freelancer love languages might be!

This is not scientific in any way whatsoever, but maybe it’ll give you some food for thought on how you like to feel appreciated by clients, how you like to express your appreciation for them, and maybe some things you might want to tweak in your processes to create the best possible working relationships and to thrive as a freelancer. And I’m not going to stick to the freelancer-client relationship angle either – let’s just see what themes and ideas pop up for each one. It’s just a bit of fun.

OK! Freelancer love language number 1. Words of affirmation. Well clearly this has to be testimonials right? Do you have a process for collecting testimonials after each project? Do you save them somewhere to look at when you need a little pep talk. On the episode I did with Sarah Townsend, she talked about having a boost bank or smile file, which is a file where you save all the nice things your clients or peers say about you. As freelancers, working alone, we don’t always get the positive feedback or shout-outs or pats on the back that you get when you work in a team. And some people won’t feel the need for this at all, but others might miss having these compliments and that or you’ll really feel buoyed up when you get great feedback from someone. Others might find themselves feeling disheartened at not getting much positive feedback. So if words of affirmation is your love language, in inverted commas, this might be something to make sure you factor in, through getting testimonials, or considering how you can work with more of the kind of clients who are inclined to want to engage quite a lot throughout a project and have more of a friendly working relationship, or joining a freelancer Slack group so you have some buddies to cheer you on, and of course starting to build a smile file. 

And if you think of it in terms of how your clients or team members might want to receive this, if this is their love language, maybe think about how you can drop them a wee note with some positive feedback now and then. Shout-out to Steve Folland of Being Freelance who does this every week in the Being Freelance Facebook Group with the Non-Employee of The Week Award. Another one might be simply telling folk when you like something they created. Everyone likes that.

And don’t forget to give yourself some words of affirmation too! Give yourself a pat on the back for all your hard work and achievements too.

Freelancer love language number 2. Acts of service. OK, so usually it’s us delivering the service, so I’ll focus on this from the giving perspective. This is probably one of mine. Hence doing this podcast every week, ha. It’s my gift to you. But seriously, I really enjoy providing a high level of customer service for clients, you know, always being very clear about what the process is going to be, making sure they know what’s happening, always checking in with progress updates, sending postcards, making little videos, all that kind of stuff. And honestly, I’ve been really busy lately and not able to do this to standard I usually like, which stresses me out, even though probably no one else has noticed. 

But if this is a love language for you, and you pride yourself in delivering a really outstanding service, maybe you can think about other ways you can take that up a notch and really take care of your clients. In the reverse, as the recipient, maybe think about what you need other people to do in order for you to thrive and do your best work? Do you need people to communicate in a certain way? Send docs in a certain format? Pay invoices in a certain way? If you’re clear about what these things are in your contracts and in those early project set up meetings and onboarding emails, hopefully, people will act in a way that serves the project and allows you to do your best work.

Freelancer love language number 3. Receiving gifts. This one has to be getting paid on time, right? Who doesn’t love that? How do we set up our systems to make sure that happens? I think I’ve talked before about getting deposits up front, and the whole amount if you can. Maybe you offer a small discount for people who pay 100% up front. If pre-payment isn’t possible, have clear instructions in your contract about when invoices are to be paid, and send reminders. You can do all this automagically through accounting software like FreeAgent and FreshBooks. Or you could have your VA do it. And the easier you can make it for clients to pay, the more likely they are to do so. So that might mean offering different payment methods or if they’re a big company, finding out if they only process payments once a month or whatever so you can get your invoices in just in time for that.

Now, this might be actual gifts too. I have to say that when I’m on the client side of things and I receive a surprise in the post, I love it. When I first started working with my business coach, Kirsty Waite, she sent a beautiful notebook with my name on it and it was such a lovely touch. Or when you’ve referred another freelancer for a project and they send you biscuits in the post. I love that. I’m all about the gifts. So yeah, that’s another idea to consider. Could also be sharing other people’s work, sharing their latest blog post, or youtube video, or podcast. Hint hint!

Freelancer love language number 4. Quality time. Ok I have a few ideas for this one. Maybe this one is about having detailed conversations with clients to kick off projects. Some people are happy with a few emails and back and forth and then getting stuck into the work, but others like to spend more face-to-face time on calls or even in real life! If this is something you enjoy, or you work with clients who appreciate this, then that’s something to highlight in your onboarding bumf and website. Equally, if it’s something you don’t want to do, make sure it’s clear that you prefer to engage by email or you charge X amount for in-person meetings or whatever. 

This might also be about having enough time to do a quality job. No one likes to feel rushed. Sometimes it’s not possible, but building in some buffer time to your projects means you’ll be able to take your time, allow your creative juices to flow, not panic if something else that’s urgent pops up or if you get sick or whatever, and do your best work. And again, if you think of this in terms of being a client or teammate’s love language, maybe you’ll make sure you give them enough time to complete their tasks too.

Another one might be scheduling time with other freelancers to connect and catch up, go for a walk, have a coffee etc. Or you might think about making sure you have quality time for other parts of your business – the marketing, finance, strategy, all the non-client facing stuff.

And finally, freelancer love language number 5. Physical Touch. Ehhh, so this is not going to go where you think it is because that would be extremely inappropriate of course. Don’t touch your clients. But maybe we can interpret this one slightly more broadly, picking up on the physical aspect, maybe this could be about your physical wellbeing. Are you making time to exercise, sleeping enough, eating well, all of that. Personally, I am someone who needs to exercise every day to feel like I have the energy to work, and when I get really busy and I’ve overbooked myself, this is often one thing that gets chopped out of my day, and I really notice. My energy and creativity and motivation starts to slip. Especially when you work from home, as many people have discovered over the last 18 months, you end up moving less during the day, so it’s important to make the effort to get up and about. So, are you moving enough? Resting enough? Making time for a proper lunch? What about booking a massage for a treat when you’ve finished a big project?

So those are the five freelancer love languages. I hope you enjoyed that. Just a silly fun one for a change, but I think and hope there are some useful points in there that might give you some ideas for how to set your business up to allow you to thrive and do your best work, and build great relationships with your clients, so you love what you do. As always, if you enjoyed this, please take 7 seconds to leave a review, subscribe, share it with a friend – whatever your podcast listening love language is. And if you want to leave me a message, remember you can go to memo.fm/15. 

There won’t be an episode for the next couple of weeks because I’m going on leave, but I will see you in September with some more amazing guests and new episodes.

Thanks for listening, bye!

Outro

You've been listening to 15 Minute Freelancer with me, Louise Shanahan, freelance health copywriter and content marketer at thecopyprescription.com. If you enjoyed this, please hit subscribe, leave a review or share it with a freelance friend. And if you've got a freelancing question you want answered on the podcast find me and say hi on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. Thanks, and until next time, happy freelancing!