Approaching Clueless Clients with Sara Gates

SEASON 7, EPISODE 9

As freelancers, we’ve probably all worked with clients who couldn’t pin down exactly what they wanted. Maybe they never had a clear vision for the project, or maybe they constantly changed their mind—and your scope of work. The experience can be incredibly frustrating. Yet, even these clueless clients need (and deserve) help from freelancers.

In this episode, Wudan talks to content marketer and strategist Sara Gates.

Before Sara started her freelance business, she did a bit of everything at a high-growth startup. She was hired for marketing and did it all: SEO, social media, email, content strategy, messaging development, and so much more. You can follow Sara on LinkedIn.

Wudan and Sara dive into how to approach clueless clients without costing yourself too much money, emotional energy or sleep.

Full Transcript Below:

Wudan Yan- Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Writers' Co-op. I am your host and executive producer, Wudan Yan. When I reflect on my freelance career and think about some of the best projects I've worked on, there's one thing in common: My clients were easy to work with. They set clear expectations for what the project ought to be. And they also had really clear expectations of me. The scope of work was clear, established in writing, and I didn't have to try and read anyone's mind. On the flip side, some of my most painful freelance assignments were with clients who constantly changed the scope of work. I'd be assigned one project from the get-go, but after the first round of revisions, my client suddenly would have a different vision for what the project should be. And after I addressed that edit, they'd still want something different. Suffice to say, I wasted a lot of money, time, and emotional energy on those type of projects. And it's been really hard for me to walk away from those without feeling some type of resentment. Other instances may feel just as frustrating. Like, a client might solicit you for content writing work, but after a while, you might realize that they don't need content, they need strategy. They needed to hire a content strategist. Or maybe you're producing journalism for a client and your editor seems to have the mindset of this, like, I'll know what I want when I see it, but until then, I don't know what I want mentality. And will send you to rewrite a draft without, you know, further comments. However, I genuinely believe that even the clueless clients need and deserve freelancers to help them—be it related to content, graphic design strategy, or anything else. But how do you approach them without losing money, sleep and also help specify what it is that they need? After all, the work between a freelancer and his or her client is a collaboration. To help us come up with a game plan on approaching clients who don't know what they want, I asked Sara Gates to be my co-host for this episode. Sarah is a content marketer and strategist based in Portland, Oregon. Before she came to freelancing, Sarah did a bit of everything at a high-growth startup. She was hired for marketing and then, well, did a lot: SEO, social media, email content, strategy, messaging, development, and so much more. And in a way, having done lots of things helped her pinpoint a client's needs when she went freelance. When at first, especially, these clients may appear clueless. So throughout this conversation, Sara helps us come up with a roadmap on how to approach these clients. Before we dive into my conversation with Sara, I wanted to talk about how important it is at this, or any time, to be in community with others, not just ending community, one that is psychologically safe, which allows you to ask questions free of judgment. If you love the ethos of the show, and you're self-employed, you'll probably want to be a part of our community as well. And, you know, folks there are really eager to learn and help others approach the types of clients we are going to talk about today. We are organized on Slack. And when you join as an All-Access Patreon for just $9 a month, you will be able to get in on all that. Okay, back to the main program. Here's Sara. Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the Writer's Co-op. It's so great to have you here.

Sara Gates- Hey, Wudan. So great to be here.

Wudan- Well, amazing. So today we're going to talk about something that you are, I feel like, very uniquely an expert in. But before that, why don't you tell us your career story and what brought you to freelancing?

Sara- Yeah, you know, long story short, like a lot of freelancers, I came to it after a layoff. I worked in marketing for eight years at a really high growth startup in the vacation rental management space, which is an interesting industry. I did a lot of generalist marketing there, SEO, content, social as the company grew. And then after eight years, I was sort of ready to move on and take on a new challenge. And so I went to a B2B tech company, which was really different. I was there for about six months, and worked with some really great marketing leaders. And then when COVID hit, unfortunately, was casualty of a layoff. So I was a little bit unmoored, I would say, I didn't want to go start another full time job right away. And I was collecting unemployment and thought, let's try freelancing for a little bit and see how it goes. Three years later, I haven't looked back. It turned out to be just the best fit for me and has been a really successful business.

Wudan- And what do you do now as a freelancer?

Sara- Yeah, I do content marketing freelancing for companies, mostly for B2B tech companies, some marketing tech and some in the data engineering space, of all things ,is a niche I found myself in. So a lot of blog posts, a lot of email, some social here and there, but I try to avoid it, some content strategy and consulting too, on a more limited basis these days.

Wudan- Cool, interesting to hear the diversity. Sara, when you were in house, what was your understanding of your role in marketing? Because I feel like it's from these jobs where you kind of got a 360 view of what these different services are, which has been helpful when it comes to running your own business.

Sara- Yeah, totally. When I was at Vacasa, at my first company, you know, they grew really fast as a startup, and I was their first full-time marketing employee. So over eight years, I went from doing everything because there was no one else to do anything, to working with specialists who were really skilled in areas like SEO, and PR, and social media marketing, and sales collateral, all kinds of different facets, even UX writing, for, you know, apps, things like that. So I really got a sense of all those different specialties from doing them myself, and then working with people that were really skilled in them. Throughout that whole time, I managed a team of writers that did all kinds of different work as well, writing home descriptions, writing emails, customer facing, sort of homeowner facing, what we sort of thought of as B2B of getting other homeowners to come sign on with the company to have us manage their properties. So it really did, like you said, a 360 view from the inside at a really high growth startup of all the different facets that marketing teams have to tackle in their work. And especially when I went on to my second company, which was a B2B tech company, there I worked with freelancers directly. And so I was on the inside, hiring people, trying to get them up to speed, having to sort of navigate between what freelancers were working on, and what my marketing CMO and my CEO wanted. It was a very interesting and educational experience for me.

Wudan- So today, we're going to talk about working with clients who don't really know what they want. And, like I said, I think that 360 view helps you pinpoint what they need, like from a conversation. But I have so many questions about this. I think the first question I want to ask you is: How many of these, say, clueless clients have you worked with?

Sara- I think, at least a dozen or so over the last three years that I've been freelancing, if not more, depending on how you define clueless. You know, I do think my, my perspective gives me the ability to kind of spot those red flags early on, when someone says they want one thing, but really, I know, they might need five other things in order to make the blog post happen, for instance. But it also gives me a lot of empathy, because I know the pressure that marketers are under, and all the different stakeholders they're trying to make happy on the inside. So I think that that helps, but it's definitely balanced.

Wudan- There's like two classes of clueless clients, right? Like one where the client explicitly is like, I don't know, what I need. But let's have a conversation. And the other is a client who thinks they need one thing, but really need something else and may not have that awareness. Is there like a third category? Or how do you think about that?

Sara- No, that's I think that's really it. You know, the the clients who know that they don't know exactly what they need, maybe they hear, Oh, I need I know, I need to be producing, you know, four blog posts every month. But I don't really know what my topic should be. I don't know anything about SEO. I don't have buyer personas to give you. They sort of know that they don't have all the pieces in place. And those are great clients to work with, because they're essentially going to hire you on to be a strategist and a consultant, possibly, as well as a content writer. And they're usually willing to pay for that extra help as well. The clueless clients that don't know, they're clueless, they may have no idea that they need buyer personas, they might not know that they need SEO, they might not think about the fact oh, once I publish this blog post, I'm also going to want an email to go out promoting it. I'm going to want social copy to go along with it. And they might just think that that's all part and parcel of a blog post that a writer will give them which, you know, those of us who work with clients, no, it's not. That's extra. So that's not necessarily included in content creation for most writers, I would say.

Wudan- Yeah. Sara, really quickly, can you just define what buyers persona is, that feels like jargon to me, and I want to make sure our listeners also know what that is.

Sara- Good call, thanks. Buyer personas are sort of like a biography or description of who a customer might be. And they're used really heavily in especially like B2B companies, like businesses that are selling to other businesses, where they might know you know, we're selling marketing project management software. And so our buyer persona is going to describe the kind of project manager at a company that handles a lot of tasks and needs to assign people work on a day-to-day basis. And a buyer persona will tell you a little bit about them, what their, you know, likely needs are, what their concerns are, so that when you're writing content, you can really speak to their need and make it relevant to them.

Wudan- Okay, so, like, the customer basically, in a way.

Sara- Yes, yep. Jargon, jargon, jargon, sorrry, it's the world I live in.

Wudan- Totally. So what do you gain and what do you lose from working with that second bucket of clients who do not have the awareness around what they want?

Sara- Yeah, you know, I think if it goes well, you really gain the chance to branch into strategy, a little bit. If you haven't done it before, it can be a good way for a writer to, yes, I will do this writing for you, and I think you need, you know, some SEO research to backup your blog plan. I think you need some additional assets to go along with this, you know, ebook that you want me to write, because you haven't thought about promotion and distribution yet, and I can help you with that. So it can be a good way to kind of stretch your muscles if you don't necessarily feel comfortable going out and pitching yourself as a strategist to someone who's looking for a strategist. So it's a little bit of a way to sneak some stretch skills into your work, I would say, which can be really valuable for a writer who wants to expand their services.

Wudan- And on the flip side--

Sara- Yeah, what do you have to lose? Your time, your sanity, like health and well-being. And I think just because if you can't tell ahead of time that this client doesn't really know what they want, and so you agree to execute a project for a set dollar amount, think it'll take you, you know, eight to 10 hours to work on this, you know, piece of content. And then once you get in there, you figure out there are way more questions that you need to get answered. And no one at the company seems to have the answers for you, you can end up spending, you know, two to three times what the hours you thought you were going to spend on a project. Or you get to a place where you're going back and forth with a lot of revisions, because they changed direction partway through. Or you do a draft and they say, hey, this doesn't actually match what we're looking for, because they didn't have the materials or the vocabulary to tell you what they're looking for in the first place, which you know, is not fun. And it's not good for your business, either. It's not good for your bottom line.

Wudan- Definitely. So of the dozen or so clueless clients who you've worked with, how have they come to you?

Sara- Yeah, most of come through, I would say, LinkedIn and referrals. That's where I got the vast majority of my clients. Since I worked at one company for such a long time, I built up a really good network there, of people I worked with who went on to other places. And so when I started freelancing, most of my business came in from referrals. I was really lucky in that way. And I think that's just how a lot of your cluless clients will go about it, is they might talk to someone they know at another company, or they might post on their LinkedIn and say, hey, I need someone to do X, Y, or Z for me. And then they'll get some references from people they work with. They're not, to me--and maybe it's because I'm not out on job boards looking, maybe they're out posting on job boards, too--but I think referrals seem to be a pretty strong way that these clients come into being where they might have a an idea that they need someone, and so they ask around for somebody to help them out.

Wudan- And how do you onboard them? I'm also curious how it differs from clients who know exactly what they want?

Sara- Yeah, definitely. I try and do it really slowly. So my typical onboarding process for all clients, you know, if they reach out to me, or maybe I'll reach out to them, you know, someone in a Slack community that says they need a writer, and I'm interested in their company, I'll send them a message. Right up front, I talk pricing, I do it quickly. I sort of give like, hey, here's my ballpark estimate for you know, a thousand word blog post, just to make sure we're on the same page and not wasting each other's time.

Wudan- By email?

Sara- Yeah, usually by email or by LinkedIn DM, depending on how I get in touch with them.

Wudan- Oh, sure. Sure, sure.

Sara- I try to move it to email right away, because that's way easier to keep track of. Yeah. And then I'll do typically like a 30 minute discovery call with a new client, where all ask them questions about what they're looking for. And that's when I start to suss out the red flags that come up, if they are a client who doesn't know that they're clueless. And when those start to come up, then my onboarding process changes. If it's a client who knows exactly what they need, they've got great briefs, they've got personas, they've got everything in place for me to hit the ground running, then we'll just move forward with usually a test project. If I get the sense that they're not really ready to move into the content creation phase, that they need a little bit more groundwork laid first, or we need to really figure out what exactly, they do need to meet their ultimate goals, I'll try and onboard them with more of a discovery phase first. And this, to me, is really important, where I'm being paid for my time to work with them to uncover their big goals, what they're trying to accomplish with content that they're reaching out to me about. And then all the supplemental pieces that we might want to put in place first.

Wudan- What are those red flags? Like what phrasing do you notice keep coming up?

Sara- I think one big one is if they've never worked with freelancers before. That's not always indicating that they don't know what they need to. But it does mean they don't have processes in place. And so they might not have gone through this experience yet. I think when they have writers in-house working for them, and again, this is something I saw with a lot of experience, you know, those people can skip a bunch of steps because they already know the business. They already know the content and they're not paid by the project. So if they do a bunch of revisions back and forth to figure out what they really want, it doesn't cost the business any more money. They're already paying that salary. And for the writer, they're getting paid to same anyway if they're an in-house employee. So no previous freelancing experience is one that I look for. Also some, just some language around--if they say copywriting and content writing interchangeably, like those are not the same thing. And so that's a little bit of a signal to me that they might be a little confused on what they're looking for. You know, whereas a copywriter will do like ad copy, landing page copy, really sales-focused, usually for a business, a content writers writing long-form materials, educational content, blog posts, ebooks. And so if they don't know the difference between those two skill sets, that's a bit of a red flag that we might want to dive a little deeper before agreeing to a project rate. And then I think the other one, and this is kind of funny. Again, it's just language. But if they say like, we need someone to do content, we need someone to do social media, we need someone to do email for us, that verb just glosses over all the different disciplines that go into content marketing. Like strategy, research, analytics, and then production and writing. And so I think that's a little bit of a red flag for me, too, when I hear that.

Wudan- Mhm. The lack of specificity.

Sara- Mhm yep.

Wudan- So what do you say, like, when you start coming up with these red--say, like a client has come to you, they want you to do content for their new product to reach like, maybe a customer base that they know, but like, you are tripped up by this red flag that you have heard? Do you have a conversation during that call that veers towards like maybe, can we have a conversation about strategy? Like, how do you navigate that?

Sara- Yeah, you know, I'm not going to come out and say like, "you don't know what you want, it seems." So I'll sort of usually use language like, "I think it would be best if we can take a step back and look at your goals, and figure out all the pieces that you're going to need to achieve those goals." And I'll be really honest and upfront with a client. If it turns out that they want video scripts and video production, I'm going to tell them, like, I'm probably not your your writer for that, that's not something I do often, that's a really specialized skill set. You know, I can, but I don't always want to. So I will sort of be upfront with them about "I can help you figure out all the pieces that you're going to need. And I might be able to produce some of those for you. And some of them, you might need to work with someone else. I can hopefully help you find that person." But really like trying to, yeah, frame it in that context of like, let's take a step back. Let's look at your goals. And let's build a plan to get you the results that you ultimately want, versus focusing on one blog post, one press release, you know, one campaign.

Wudan- How do clients respond to that? I'm really curious, because basically, like this is your first in-person over-the-phone interaction with them. And you're kind of taking a higher level approach that maybe they hadn't thought about before.

Sara- I think nine times out of 10, they're going to be really excited, honestly. Because they are usually a content marketer or a marketing employee that's being tasked from someone above them to like, hey, get this done. They're usually working in a little bit of a rush. And they need some--if they're in this place where they don't have all the pieces put together yet, when they, you know, encounter somebody that is there to help them, that says, "hey, you might need a few extra things. Let's take the time to do it and get you set up for success and help you like achieve your ultimate goal." They're happy about it. Because that's, it's kind of like, a "oh, this is what I need. Perfect." And I think it's, yeah, nine times out of 10 like a little bit of relief and a little bit of excitement, that they found somebody that can help them.

Wudan- Yeah, I was gonna say, I think putting things in that frame also shows your expertise.

Sara- Yeah, it can. I mean, it's a thing, I think, for me and my background and having been there, I can empathize with them. I can relate to them. I can, you know, pretty quickly get them to feel like I'm on their side, and I'm going to work with them. But I will say that if I want to work with them. There are times I'll have those conversations, the red flags will pop up, and to me, it just seems like a hot mess that I don't want to deal with. And I will gracefully bow out of the project. I don't always, you know, align myself as the partner. It's when it makes sense for me and my business and what my bandwidth looks like at the time.

Wudan- Definitely. So you talked about how sometimes clients can confound content marketing with copywriting. Content marketing being long-form content, copywriting, meaning, the words on the page that sell things. Do you see any other typical mistakes that these clients are making?

Sara- I think one is, a lot of times they'll already be working sometimes with an agency that is doing a piece of the process but doesn't fit into a full sort of picture. So a lot of times, you know, to be quite honest, I'll encounter clients that are working with an SEO agency that is producing pretty bad briefs for them that are really focused on generating the most traffic to their website they can. Because they're targeting really, you know, popular keywords, but they don't actually publish content that is going to help their buyers like reach their product and ultimately become customers. So I think that's a mistake I see sometimes is a really shallow focus on SEO, without necessarily thinking about what content is going to be most useful for their actual customer. And so that might be a case where it's a little bit of a smaller conversation ,where I'm just working with that. I'm thinking of one client in particular I've worked with on this where it's: Let's take this SEO brief that your agency gave you, that sure, might produce a piece of content that's going to rank well and drive traffic, but who is it actually for? What do they actually care about?" Like, let's bring that customer-first lens, to this content project so that we can make it as impactful as possible. And that's a good way too, if you don't have, you know, expertise in email marketing, or social media, and that's not something you're interested in, even just applying that kind of customer-first lens to SEO content can really help you deliver a lot more value for your client and become more of that partner versus just a hired hand.

Wudan- This all makes sense. So to kind of recap, these conversations usually are happening over the phone, like over a discovery call, or quickly getting into what you call the discovery phase. None of this is really over email. I feel like that would just drag out.

Sara- Yeah, yep, that's too much. It might be something where you might get a brief or a project you agree to do, you look at it, and then you kind of see some red flags pop up. And so you have questions you might ask over email. But yeah, typically, for me, I try and suss it out in that first conversation as quickly as possible, so that we're having it face to face.

Wudan- Yeah, I think one thing I hear from freelancers a lot is that the discovery call can drag on, there can be many discovery calls before they are actually compensated for the work. But it also sounds like your discovery phase get you paid to do more.

Sara- Yes. That is--

Wudan- Yeah

Sara- That to me is key. And that is the difference if I'll usually work with a client that doesn't know what they want or not. If I have that 30 minute call, I get the sense, they don't know what they need, I will usually follow up via email with a proposal. And my proposal will be hey, I think we need to get these pieces in order. Let's plan on spending, you know, X number of hours, have another conversation to really dig into your goals--we just scratched the surface last time--I'll usually do that on an hourly rate with a cap. So I might say, let's spend no more than five hours or 10 hours, depending on the size of the company, and really do a deep dive into what you're looking for and how I can help you. And then we'll come up with a plan for the assets that you need. And so that might be me helping them with brand guidelines, or buyer personas, if it's a really big project. Might be my suggestion at the end. And then I scope those out as per project deliverables, so that I'm getting paid for the time to help them figure out what they need. But I'm not locked into an hourly rate, which, you know, I think the Writers Co-op listeners know is not not always recommended.

Wudan- Yeah. My next question was about pricing. It sounds like you're usually like a project rate gal.

Sara- Oh, yeah. I'm fast. I'm fast at what I do. And if I charge hourly, I get punished for being fast. So I don't want to do that.

Wudan- But it sounds like your approach in the discovery proposal to pricing differs.

Sara- Yes. Yeah, discover proposal is the time when I will say an hourly rate makes sense. Because you don't necessarily know what kind of rabbit holes you're going to find and need to go down. So a good hourly rate kind of protects your time a bit to where you are being paid for the energy and effort you're putting forth into helping these folks figure out what they need. So that I will price this hourly. And I'll say upfront: This first phase, let's do this hourly, let's put a cap on it. So that you have--they're not signing up, you know, they're not writing you a blank check,

Wudan- Right

Sara- To go, you know, uncover all the ways they don't know what they're doing. But at the same time, then you're sort of setting the stage for: And once we move into producing actual content, we'll do that on a per project basis.

Wudan- Yes.

Sara- So it's a little bit of the best of both worlds, you know, for me as a freelancer, while giving them a lot of clarity into how much money they're actually going to spend.

Wudan- What is your approach to setting up a hourly rate, kind of acknowledging that the lift might be greater? On the Writers' Co-op Slack group, people ask about rush rates. I hear that question commonly. But what about, like, scoping rates? How do you think about that?

Sara- Yeah, I think about hourly rates for this kind of discovery work as what I would think of as like a consulting rate or a strategic consulting, right? So it's going to be high. It's still not as high as what I make for an effective hourly rate when I'm writing content, because that is an efficient process for me. But yeah, I'll usually charge anywhere between 120, 175 an hour for this work. That's why I put a ceiling on it, so that they know what they're getting into. And I could probably honestly charge more for some clients, but it's the intro conversation. And I know I'm really going to make my money with these clients in the long term as we get to that deliverable phase, so I try and keep it respectable for me and worth my time, while making it not, you know, out pricing them to where they're going to have sticker shock right away and just, you know, discount working with me. So it's a balance.

Wudan- Yeah. I had a great conversation with Kat Boogaard a while back this season about pricing and hitting ceilings. And one point that I think is not to be missed is that pricing doesn't mean that you're working at the maximum of your client's budget all the time. It means you're not selling yourself short. And it's also making sure that the client, you know, feels good about the interaction, like you're not trying to eke all the money out of them. And I hear you saying something similar here as well.

Sara- Yeah, absolutely. I think you want them to feel like they're getting a good value for what you're doing. And at this point, in a conversation with this discovery phase, it's a little bit of a leap of faith for them, because they came looking for a blog post. And now here I am proposing consultinging and strategy that they didn't know they needed. So I don't want to make it--I'm not going to price $250 an hour or like another full-time consultant might. I want it to be reasonable for them and not to scare them away.

Wudan- Definitely. How do you navigate for uncertainty in this process, if any?

Sara- Yeah, I think keeping projects, especially the discovery phases, in like short chunks. So let's agree to X amount of work at first, and we'll do that work together. And we'll see how it goes. And then we'll move on to the next chunk of work, which might be okay, now, I'm going to do some keyword research for you. Now, I'm going to do some content strategy work for you. And keeping it chunked out helps me constantly be able to sort of evaluate the amount of time that I'm spending on this client. Honestly, if I want to keep working with them in the long term. I'm not going to jump in and sign a retainer rate with somebody that doesn't have a good strategy in place. Because where they end up, what they end up needing might not be something I'm the best person to deliver for them or something I want to do. You know, I think it's the flip side of when you work with clients that don't know what they want, you get to stretch your skills and learn new things. But you can also end up losing your focus and spending your time doing work that you don't actually want to do, that doesn't fit in with your business, because they might need a bunch of random stuff. And while you can do it, it doesn't mean that you want to do it or that you should be doing it for the long-term. So chunking work in little phases makes it easy for you to, honestly, exit gracefully if you need to, or to refer them to someone else for elements of the work that you don't want to do in the long-term.

Wudan- When you talk about working in chunks, I can see it being as like a phase of work. But is it also time bound and constrained in that way as well?

Sara- Yeah, it might be we're going to spend two weeks, and here's what we're going to try to get done in two weeks. And if they're really slow to get back to you, if they--a lot of times, you know, you might be working with a wonderful marketer, who has a really hard time getting their sales team or their executive team to weigh in or sign off and buy in on strategy. And so it can drag on for you know, three months at a time. I've had projects like this that have fizzled out, just because they could never get internal alignment or approval for the work that, you know, that marketer really wanted to do. So yeah. Timeboxing sometimes can help protect you from feeling like your time is committed to a client without actually having formal agreements in place, which obviously no good freelancer wants to do.

Wudan- Yeah, I can totally envision a situation of scoping something out for a client just taking so many months, and then it not ending.

Sara- Mhm. Yep. And so I think that's the other thing, too is, you know, you can be upfront and have honest conversations about like, we're going to take this a phase at a time. My time isn't necessarily guaranteed beyond this space. So let's move as quickly as we can so that I can keep availability open for you. Or so we can keep moving on to the next phases. Again, I think in in situations like this, where they don't know what they want, so much of the positive experience is going to be about trust and honesty and communication. And so just being honest with your clients and having them really see you as a partner is super important.

Wudan- Yeah, the building of the relationship, which makes me curious of like, when you say a dozen clueless clients who you've worked with since you began freelancing, are those clients who you continued with beyond the discovery phase? Like what is the ratio of let's keep this client versus goodbye?

Sara- Yeah, I con-- I think all but one I continued working with beyond the discovery phase, to some extent.

Wudan- Oh, wow, that's awesome.

Sara- Yeah, you know, for different levels of time. For one, I helped them build out an SEO plan, a content calendar, I build out even an example brief template for them. And then they took that and ran with it with other writers, which was totally fine by me because their budget per piece wasn't quite what I was looking for. And so that's an example where like, we worked together for a period of time. Handoff, you know, the tools that then they needed to go out and build like an amazing blog. So that was really rewarding work. So it went on beyond discovery, but not into the full long-term execution I'm writing you know, two blog posts for them a month kind of situation.

Wudan- What other boundaries have you set for yourself to stay sane with clueless clients?

Sara- Oh, that's a tough one, right? Setting boundaries with yourself. It's easier to set boundaries with clients than with yourself. One I really tried to stick by is to only work with one of these kinds of clients at a time. They are an energy suck, even if they're wonderful, even if their product is great, even if you love their business and their brand, and their tone of voice and everything, they will eat up a lot of your mental bandwidth. So for me, one at a time is all I can do. And I usually try to take a break between them. You know, ideally, a clueless client will sort of segue into a more low-maintenance, ongoing anchor client for me. But if they don't, and that engagement comes to an end, I usually try and give myself a little bit of a buffer before taking on another one. In some ways, it's like time to forget how stressful it can be--becuase it can be stressful--before I agree to do it again. My husband laughs at me, because I'll talk to him about it. And like, "oh, I just want to be doing content writing, like the strategy parts are so draining," and he said, "yeah, but as soon as you're done with it, you say you want another strategy client. You get bored of just the content writing." So it's a balance, like everything.

Wudan- I love that. I mean, it is a different part of your brain, right? And I think it kind of ties into the diversity puzzle that we're talking about too. Of like, it actually is good--I guess good is relative--but it's a useful tool in your arsenal of all freelance skills to offer different services, right? When you're constantly growing, problem-solving for different clients, and so on and so forth.

Sara- Yeah, it gives you a different lens, I think, so that you're not just doing the same thing over and over again. It's mentally stimulating. It's mentally draining, but it's mentally stimulating in a different way. Oh, I do think the other boundary I will put in place that's just super practical, is I try not to say, "let's have a weekly meeting, let's have a bi-weekly meeting." Because these clients will just eat up your time and like ask you questions and talk about things. And that's great. But I hate meetings. I don't want to have them all the time. So I'm not always good about following this boundary. I can think of one client in particular. But I try not to do just a standing recurring meeting, because then you don't get actionable purposeful, like work done always during that time.

Wudan- Yes. Make sense. Asynchronous work is definitely where it's at for me, too. What other lessons Sara, have you learned from working with cluless clients that we haven't talked about yet?

Sara- I think one lesson, I would say, is that it's an opportunity to always push yourself. And you know, I think I've been freelancing for three years.I've been in marketing for over a decade now. I'm efficient at what I do. I have a good client base. Things have gone well, for me. I've been fortunate in that way. But working with some clueless clients is where I stretch. It's where I learn new things. It's where I push myself, it's where I step outside that comfort zone, and where I keep myself from getting bored, honestly, because writing blog posts about marketing software, or data engineering software is not always the most stimulating thing in the world. So it keeps my job interesting. So I think it can be an opportunity if you're feeling a little bit stuck in your freelance career, and you want to do something beyond that sort of churning out copy production. Like I said, it's a way to step into strategy, if that's an area that you've been interested in getting into. But you're not necessarily pitching yourself as a strategist to someone who's planning to hire a strategist. It's a stealth, stealth entry into strategy in a way that can help keep the rest of your work more interesting. I think,

Wudan- Well, I love a stealthy entree into any service. That's very in line with how I've gotten into this entire profession. Sara, thank you so much. This has been really useful.

Sara- Oh wonderful, thanks so much, Wudan. This podcast has meant so much to me, so it's exciting to be a part of it now this in this way.

Wudan- Thanks so much to Sara for coming on the show. Sara is on LinkedIn. Her handle is SKgates, and you can learn more about her work at SKgates.com. Patreon subscribers get a resource on how to approach these kinds of clients we discussed today. You can sign up anytime at the All-Access level on patreon.com/TWCpod It also gets you into our safe and inclusive online Slack community. And I will talk to all you next time. Thanks so much for listening to the Writer's Co-op. If you've enjoyed our episodes, please rate, review and subscribe on the listening platform of your choice. These reviews help more listeners discover us. You can join us on Patreon at an All-Access member level at patreon.com/ TWCpod. This gets you access to discount codes for events, for other objects online, and our safe and inclusive online Slack community. The show is hosted by me, Wudan Yan. Our producer is Margaret Osborne and our editor is Susan Valot.