Writer Nick Parker
About this episode…
writer nick parker
The small agency Nick had joined had become a big agency. He’d become part of the leadership team. HR. Management. Meetings. He missed doing the ‘work’.
He did know how much big clients were willing to pay for that work though.
So Nick set out as a high-billing tone-of-voice specialist. A company of one.
With various side projects, Nick embraces the freedom of freelance life - allowing moments of ‘high performing procrastination’ to explore his creativity.
Read the highlights in the next tab.
A COMPANY OF ONE
We’re constantly being told to prioritise stuff, but Nick found that rebelling against his to-do list could lead him to finding more enjoyment.
“I don't think of myself as freelance. Even though it is just me... An unlocking moment for me was Paul Jarvis's book ‘Company of One’. And I suddenly thought, oh, that is what I am. I'm a company of one.
So very early on, I set myself these targets of when I'm turning over this much money a month, I'm going to hire a bookkeeper. When I'm turning over this much money, I'm going to hire an assistant. And so I structured it from the start, like I was running a business and it just so happened that I was playing all of the employee roles.”
Side note: Paul Jarvis who wrote ‘Company Of One’ has been a guest on the Being Freelance podcast: here.
And did a brilliant Live Q&A which you can watch the replay of in the BF Community or hear highlights in this podcast here.
Choosing what to prioritise
We’re constantly being told to prioritise stuff, but Nick found that rebelling against his to-do list could lead him to finding more enjoyment.
“When you sit down at your desk at nine o'clock in the morning, the thing you wrote down on the top of your to-do list might not be the thing you fancy doing. And I've learned over the years that I should give into that. And if something else takes my fancy, to follow it, because that might be time better spent.”
SCALING WITHOUT BEING AN AGENCY
After leaving agency life, Nick didn’t want to start one himself. But creating products gave him a way to scale beyond the hours he could work alone…
“When I left and started working for myself, I knew I didn't want to grow an agency. I didn't want to scale. I'd had enough of being in HR meetings and managing large teams of people. And I wanted it largely just to be me and the work.
But at the same time, just because I didn't want to scale in terms of people, didn't mean to say, I didn't want to make more money. So I made this product...”
It’s okay to change things up
It’s natural that businesses will morph over time, but Nick’s not afraid to make those bigger changes so he can incorporate his side projects as well as his client work.
“I'm sure there must be lots of freelancers listening to this who are constantly going through that thing of, do I call my business by my name or do I have a brand name? And there are pros and cons to both of those. And I'm constantly swinging. Last year I shifted from the website being That Explains Things to the website, being nickparker.co.uk and a big part of that was because I realised I was having more of these side projects. I've written this book and made these cards and I write a couple of newsletters and then there's this product, Voicebox that I make.”
Knowing Your worth
When it came to pricing, Nick had the experience of knowing how much an agency would charge for the same work he was doing, and he wasn’t afraid to use this to his advantage.
“I had a very basic starting point. I knew what the agency was charging for writing, so I knew that I could charge the same. Basically, you're coming direct to me, so on the one hand it's cheaper because you don't have layers of project management and you're not paying agency prices, but also, you're getting me. You're essentially getting the former Creative Director Strategy Partner for the price that you would get a Junior Writer at an agency.”
Playing games
Nick doesn’t shy away from playing games when it comes to pricing up his client work. Not only does it make him feel better about quoting clients, but he also makes it work!
“The game I played when I very first started with myself and I made it a game because it made me feel better about it, is every new client I got, I just put my price up and I didn't allow myself to have any opinion about that. And it was astonishing that it worked.”
CREATIVE FREEDOMS
Nick has a range of side projects that sit alongside his client work. He loves the ability to follow creative sparks when they come…
“One of the brilliant freedoms of working for yourself is, right, I'm gonna spend a couple of weeks focusing on that (side project) for a bit and then I'm going to make it, I'm going to put it out in the world. And I have a newsletter of people, so some people will buy it. It's not exactly going to be a best seller, but it's a very satisfying way to move through the world I think.”
UnOFFICE HOURS
Random conversations keep weekly life interesting…
“UnOffice Hours - Every Friday between 1 and 2, I have two half-hour slots where literally anyone can book a meeting and just talk to me about anything. Which is a nice way of inviting randomness into this life of sitting by yourself in front of a computer.”
More from nick parker
Transcript of the Being Freelance podcast with Steve Folland and Writer Nick Parker
Steve Folland:
As ever, how about we get started hearing how you got started being freelance.
Nick Parker:
Gosh, so the potted version is I worked in magazines and magazine publishing for a long time. To my great astonishment, I'm now 49 years old. <Laugh> I can't quite work out how that's happened. Obviously, I know how it's happened. So I spent about a decade working in publishing and then I moved from publishing to a creative agency. That was a big shift for me from a literary and publishing world to that idea of, there are clients and there are agencies and working with big corporates, and then about six or seven years ago, the little agency I joined had become a big agency, that I was one of the leadership team and responsible for running, and I sort of realised that wasn't my thing. I was a practitioner. I wanted to get back to writing and doing the work. So I left and set on my own thing. And it's just pretty much been me for about the past six or seven years.
Steve Folland:
So before you decided to leave and go out on your own, did you prepare in any way? How did you get your first clients?
Nick Parker:
That is a really good question. No, I didn't prepare at all. I'd always had this desire to work for myself. It was one of those vague bucket list ideas, but I'd got two little kids and we were just about to move house. And so I wasn't specifically thinking now is going be the time, and this opportunity just came up. There was a bit of a restructure at work and I was like, ah, I sort of don't wanna do that next thing. And then I found myself going, so I think I'm leaving. So I had no preparation for it. I hadn't really thought about what was going to happen. It wasn't really a good time to be doing it. And within the space of a week, I'd gone from having a full-time, really senior position in this agency to standing there thinking, right, what should I do?
Nick Parker:
<Laugh> Obviously I'd left this agency. I couldn't take any client contacts with me or anything. I'd literally nothing. So found myself, which was at the time Readings only co-working space, which is this horrible corporate floor of this office block in some out-of-town business park, thinking what on earth am I doing here? And so I had to start pretty much from scratch. In fact, I got my first job from a friend who was also a freelance writer who had too much work on and passed me this job. And that job turned into a client I had for several years. I've got a friend of mine who has worked for himself for a long time, who's sort of my 'working for yourself' mentor when I started <laugh> I remember him saying to me, you think now that your big worry is where the work is gonna come from? He said you'll have hundreds of worries in the years to come. One thing you will never worry about is where the work comes from, the work always comes and he's been absolutely right.
Steve Folland:
Nice. But beyond that first referral, I guess, how did that work find you if you weren't finding it?
Nick Parker:
So working at an agency, although I couldn't take any clients with me, over the years, I'd got contacts, a number of people who had worked at that agency and set up their own things. And so there was a network of people I could call and go, so I'm around if you have anything. And that interesting thing of the work rarely comes from the people you think it's gonna come from. It comes from friends of friends or the weak tyres, connections of connections. So that put the word out there. It didn't really get me any direct work, but it did start to get things trickling in, and it's all sort of patched together. So that thing of working for taking on a job that a friend couldn't do, then I remember I did some work for an Israeli tech startup over Christmas. Obviously, they weren't stopping for Christmas. Nobody else wanted to do it because everyone else that they'd contacted wanted to have Christmas off. So I was like, fine, I'll do that. <Laugh>. And so just sort of hustled it together like that. Then started writing blogs and just trying to get the word out there. And just a bit of a hotchpotch to get going I think.
Steve Folland:
You said when you went self-employed that you wanted to get back to doing the actual work, but what was the work or what is the work?
Nick Parker:
I specialise in what's called tone of voice, so, writing for brands and businesses, helping them find the right voice and the right style of writing for their brand. So there's a bit of consultancy and a bit of strategy around that. And then there's some, okay, so now we've decided what we're gonna sound like, let's just write some stuff, websites or marketing or whatever it is. And then there's usually a chunk of my work, which is also running workshops, taking what we've developed together and teaching other people to do it. So tone of voice I like because it moves up into a more strategic, more senior people. And then from that comes writing and naming and all the other bits of stuff, but it makes it more about brand and more about strategy and less about being a pen for hire.
Steve Folland:
So did you call yourself a freelance tone of voice expert, because I noticed it today, you have a company as in That Explains Things, that's what it's called, right?
Nick Parker:
Yeah. It's a constantly evolving thing. In fact, when I started, my accountant advised me to set up as a partnership and I was called Three Pencil because I thought that sounded nice. Then I went off it, then it transpired that my accountant had only recommended me working as a partnership because she wasn't qualified to do limited companies <laugh> so you know, you live and learn don't you? <Laugh>
Nick Parker:
So then I became a limited company and called myself That Explains Things, and a bit of that was to give it the status of not just me, it's a slightly bigger thing. And the name came because I'd think of explaining things as being a bit of an art form. I think more businesses would be better served if they stopped thinking about selling and persuading and just really committed to explaining themselves really clearly. So that again was giving me a slightly different positioning and that draws people who are interested in that and puts off people who think it's ridiculous.
Steve Folland:
So you're obviously pitching yourself as a more strategic type part in this businesses mind. Obviously you had a lot of experience, but did you do anything to build that 'authority' in people's minds?
Nick Parker:
I wrote a bunch of blogs, which I put on my website and then out on LinkedIn. I mean, not loads, probably like 10 in the early days and was quite strategic about what subjects I picked off. In the back of my mind was, it doesn't really matter if not many people read these as long as the right people read them. And then one of the things I wrote on LinkedIn, which was about, brands and tone of voice, the brand that everyone always thinks of first is innocent drinks. You know, they have a really chatty quirky voice. They were one of the very first brands to do it and they're brilliant at it. But what it did create was a load of copycat brands. This whole wackaging, all your crisp packets talking to you like they're your best friend.
Nick Parker:
And everything is sort of chirpy and making gags and it can be incredibly tiresome, and loads of brands used to copy that. And then there was this point just as I was setting up by myself, where I realised that the default voice had stopped being Innocent drinks had become like the artisan voice, the small batched hand, foraged, sunlight, filtered, all of that stuff. And some companies that's genuinely what they do. You know, they're small batch, regenerative, olive farmers. So you know of course you're going to talk about that stuff. I remember there was this moment, I was in Costa coffee and there was a sign on the wall in Costa coffee that said, 'Our baristas don't just make your coffee. They handcraft it'. I thought bollocks, do they!
Steve Folland:
<Laugh>
Nick Parker:
That's just not true, is it? And that's like a big brand not really knowing what it's about and just copying this voice. And so I wrote about that and that went viral on LinkedIn. There was a particularly satisfying day where about four or five people just said, I've read your thing. And somebody said I was in an office and somebody mentioned it in a meeting. And then when we went out of the meeting, somebody else was reading on a computer in the lobby. I was like, this is amazing. And from that one blog came a big bit of work that then recommended me to someone else and I can probably trace it all back. This is a very long-winded answer to your question. I trace a lot of it back to that one blog.
Steve Folland:
No, that's great though.
Nick Parker:
Which is also a diss to the whole productivity movement, because the only reason I wrote that blog is because I was putting off doing another bit of work that I didn't want to do.
Steve Folland:
<Laugh> That's funny, because I did read on your website, that you refer to yourself as a high performing procrastinator.
Nick Parker:
That's very true. Yes.
Steve Folland:
So do you struggle to stay on top of what the hell you are actually meant to be doing?
Nick Parker:
Steve, if any of my clients are listening, I'm a consummate professional, I never miss a deadline. I'm always on top of that stuff, all of that. But at the same time, when you sit down at your desk at nine o'clock in the morning, the thing you wrote down on the top of your to-do list might not be the thing you fancy doing. And I've learned over the years that I should give into that. And if something else takes my fancy, to follow it, because that might be time better spent, and indeed like that, it really was. And the other thing you've seen on my website, I make these cards called the, 'Get The Fuck On With It' cards.
Steve Folland:
Yes!
Nick Parker:
That's my productivity system. If you ever feel like you're stuck or not knuckling down to something, draw a card out of the pack and it'll tell you what to do. Because every card says, get the fuck on with it.
Steve Folland:
<Laugh> It is brilliant. I think I'm going to have to add, that I always do this freelance gift guide and I think that's gonna have to be added to that website.
Nick Parker:
Amazing.
Steve Folland:
That's true, because you do have this shop on your website that, that is in it, there's also a book, right?
Nick Parker:
Yes. Yes. I wrote a book probably about 18 months ago called 'On Reading', it's an interesting sort of universe of things and I'm sure, there must be lots of freelancers listening to this who are constantly going through that thing of, do I call my business by my name or do I have a brand name, you know? And there are pros and cons to both of those. And I'm constantly swinging and I've just last year I shifted from the website being That Explains Things to the website, being nickparker.co.uk and a big part of that was because I realised I was having more of these side projects. I've written this book and made these cards and I write a couple of newsletters and then there's this product, Voicebox that I make.
Nick Parker:
And how do they all fit together? Really the only common denominator is me. I'm getting to a point now where I like it when people come to the site to find out about my copywriting and tone of voice work, that they also see On Reading and they also see the stupid cards and they see the whole batch of stuff. And I wanted somewhere where if I start a new project, I can stick it up and it comes part of that ping. I'm not answering the question you asked, which is about the book, isn't it? <Laugh> That came from one of the newsletters that somebody had tweeted, I'm feeling stuck with my reading. How do I get myself unstuck? And by the time I'd hit reply for the seventh or eighth time, I realised I had lots of thoughts on this.
Nick Parker:
I mentioned this in one of my newsletters and then loads of people wrote back with either their own thoughts about how you get unstuck from reading or admitting, lots of fascinating things about there are loads of people in the world, you might be one of them, who once you start reading a book, you feel like you have to finish it. You can't start a new book until you finish the one you're reading. Which is a fascinating self-limiting belief, isn't it? Because we don't do that with any other media. Like, I've started watching Netflix, I better watch all of it or we don't listen to albums like we used to, we just have playlists and we listen to individual songs. There's something about books.
Nick Parker:
We have a different attitude to books. So I suddenly realised I had loads of really, really interesting things to say, and there was a book in it, so I wrote it and self-published it, stuck it on the website and I just really like that. One of the brilliant freedoms of working for yourself is, right, I'm gonna spend a couple of weeks focusing on that for a bit and then I'm going to make it, I'm going to put it out in the world. And I have a newsletter of people, so some people will buy it. It's not exactly going to be a best seller, but it's a very satisfying way to move through the world I think.
Steve Folland:
So what are these newsletters?
Nick Parker:
I do two, I do one called The Notices, which is just a random bag of things that I have noticed, <laugh> there's a sort of bias towards creativity and language and living well and that stuff, but it's really just random. And I've been writing that for years and years and that has a fairly steady readership because only people who are interested in what might be inside my head are interested in that. And then the second one is called Tone Knob and it is about tone of voice. And I've been writing that for about nine months and in every issue of that, I take one brand who does something really interesting with their language and dissect it, like talk about what it is, why it works, why I think it's interesting, share examples and it's like a sort of close reading would be the academic way of putting it. Like a written down reaction video would be the YouTube vibe <laugh> and that's been much to my great pleasure and surprise that is going really well. And it's on Substack and it became a Substack featured title a few months ago. And like the readership is steadily ticking up around sort 3000 now I think, which is just fantastic. I mean, because you know, tone of voice is a pretty niche subject. And that's been really lovely to have all these outlets for doing stuff. And again, just that well I'm gonna spend today, writing a newsletter.
Steve Folland:
Yeah. It's a niche subject, but crucially it's your subject that you're specialising in.
Nick Parker:
Yeah.
Steve Folland:
So have you noticed that it has brought you any work or maybe just attention? Like how's it playing out for you?
Nick Parker:
It brings both actually. It brings a steady stream of enquiries that aren't quite right for me. Because suddenly people go, oh, that's what I want, I want tone of voice and they'll send me an email and they might not have any budget or they might have a really tight deadline, but then I can pass those on to other copywriters or other people. And then it has brought me a couple of interesting jobs in clients. The two most rewarding things it brings me is I do this thing called UnOffice Hours every Friday between 1 and 2, I have two2 half-hour slots where literally anyone can book a meeting and just talk to me about anything, which is a nice way of inviting randomness into this life of sitting by yourself in front of a computer.
Nick Parker:
And quite a few of those people come from the newsletter. They've read something which interests them and they want to talk about it. So it's been brilliant for that. And the thing that is most satisfying is it really pushes my thinking. I almost started it thinking, well, I've been doing this tone of voice malarkey for a few years now and let's just get it all out of my head, give it all away. And of course the exact opposite has happened, in that every time I sit down to write, I end up thinking new things <laugh> and having new opinions and thoughts which is just brilliant, to push my craft and push my thinking about tone of voice more. Yeah. Honestly, just talking about it, its been a great joy actually, because it's enriching in loads of ways. Obviously I would sort of cringe at the idea in the sort of LinkedIn language, I am a thought leader, but that's basically what it is. I've become known as the guy who has things to say about tone of voice, which is just hugely satisfying.
Steve Folland:
Yeah. And then another one of your products that you mentioned earlier was Voicebox. Can you explain what that is and how it came about? And for that matter, whether it works, I don't mean for the clients. I mean for you as a business.
Nick Parker:
Yeah, so that's a really interesting bit of the business. Where that came from, my thing when I left and started working for myself was that I didn't want to grow an agency. I didn't want to scale. I'd had enough of being in HR meetings and managing large teams of people. And I wanted it largely just to be me and the work. But at the same time, just because I didn't want to scale in terms of people, didn't mean to say, I didn't want to make more money. So I made this product called Voicebox, which is essentially a method for working with a brand to define their tone of voice. And it's the whole life cycle of that, of how do you plan for that? How do you run the workshops? How do you think about tone of voice, then how to write in the different voices and the different styles, how to create guidelines.
Nick Parker:
So literally, basically here's how to do my job, but do it for yourself. And I created that thinking that the main people who would buy it would be startups, small brands or businesses who wanted to do their tone of voice project in-house. In practice, the main audience for it has been other freelance copywriters or small agencies who want another tool in their toolbox, which has been great. So again, it's been brilliant. It gives me a sort of credibility and a great calling card that works brilliantly as marketing. And it's quite a punchy price, it's £700. And then if you buy it, with me holding your hand through the process, it's now £2,500, which is fantastic and I've not sold any of those since I put the price up <laugh> and that's probably 15-20% of my revenue.
Nick Parker:
Now writing Tone Knob, I now have an audience of people who are interested in tone of voice. So one of the things I'll be doing in the coming months is refreshing it all again. I deliberately designed it very analogue. It comes in a box, it's got games, you play with cards, there's little leaflets and handouts and it's very tactile and it's deliberately about getting a group of people around a table to talk this out and write things on the walls because that, for me, is part of the process of figuring out writing and I've put a lot of effort into the design of it to make it a quality object, which is all part of this vibe of just taking the writing more seriously, which has been great. I partly realised I've modelled it on my teenage Dungeons and Dragons years. The only thing it doesn't have is weird-shaped dice, but you know, that thing of you get the box, so you get all the bits out and it's really satisfying, but obviously through lockdown and the pandemic loads of people wanted to use it online. So I sort of cobbled together a set of digital assets and tools. And I think it's probably about time I made those much slicker and made the whole thing much more digital.
Steve Folland:
You mentioned the price point, which does also, I think give a clue as to, if I'm looking at your site, I think, okay, well if that's how much that costs, maybe that's telling me something about what it might cost to hire Nick. Do you find that kind of works to your benefit?
Nick Parker:
Yeah, very much so. Beause you're exactly right. People look at it and they go, okay, so if I'm going to pay that much to do it for myself, it's probably going be more to get Nick to do it for me
Steve Folland:
Have you had situations where people have come to want to work with you then can't afford you, but then bought the product?
Nick Parker:
Yes, that's happened a couple of times, less often than I thought it would. And now I also have a network of Voicebox customers. And so it's quite often if people come to me and they only have a couple of grand to spend but they want a full project, I can also pass them onto other Voicebox users. I can't endorse them, but that's a pretty good recommendation that they're using my method. So I'm sure if I was more commercially savvy, I'd have turned that into a whole model of affiliates <laugh> but I haven't <laugh>.
Steve Folland:
Maybe that's a good point then to talk about how you've found the business side of things? For a start off, in terms of pricing and things, did your time at the agency give you a good starting point?
Nick Parker:
Yeah. So I had a very basic starting point of, I knew what the agency was charging for writing. So I knew that I could charge the same, basically. You're coming direct to me, so on the one hand it's cheaper because you don't have layers of project management and you're not paying agency prices. so you'd expect it to be cheaper, but also, you're getting me. You're getting essentially the former Creative Director Strategy Partner for the price that you would get a Junior Writer at an agency. So to talk about the numbers, we were charging then seven or eight years ago £800 a day for a junior writer, which is a fairly standard corporate fee. So I sort of knew I could start by charging £800 a day and that being entirely fair and reasonable for everybody. Which is like a massive confidence boost. If I'd have started freelancing a few years before that, there's no way I would've been starting at that point. I've been much lower down.
Steve Folland:
That said though, do you charge by the day or do you charge by a project sort of thing?
Nick Parker:
It's the ongoing debate, isn't it? Yeah. Project for your day rate. I still use day rate, but it's more because where all the work is strategic it's sort of a proxy. I round it up to a rough amount of days. There's just something about talking about it in days, seems to work better for the clients that I have. But in my head, it's always projects. I'm always thinking in terms of projects, but I also need to roughly map out how long they might take. And then also, a day becomes a unit of thought, and the clients aren't going to ask for time sheets and I'm always going to be respectful about, it took some thinking and you know, a flash of inspiration might take half an hour, it didn't really take a day, but sometimes it goes the other way, doesn't it? And you know, you have to grind it out for days. I thought this would take no time at all. But yeah, so I still talk and charge in terms of days, but it's a sort of mishmash of thinking in terms of projects and days.
Steve Folland:
Yeah. How do you manage your time? Because it sounds like you have quite a bit of stuff going on.
Nick Parker:
Yeah. How do I manage the time? The interesting thing about being on the Being Freelance podcast is I don't think of myself as freelance. Even though it is just me and what I really am is just me working independently. So I could call that freelance. An unlocking moment for me was Paul Jarvis's book Company of One. And I suddenly thought, oh, that is what I am. I'm a company of one. So very early on, I set myself these targets of when I'm turning over this much money a month, I'm going to hire a bookkeeper. When I'm turning over this much money, I'm going to hire an assistant. And so I thought about it, I structured it from the start, like I was running a business and it just so happened that I was playing all of the employee roles.
Nick Parker:
So I outsourced a lot of things. So to answer your question, I make that part of it. So my assistant will track things by days. She'll organise my diary and treat me like the resource. I have this process of working things out, planning everything into the calendar. I know the time I'm going to take every week to write the newsletter. It's very structured and organised given also the aforementioned comment about me being a terrible procrastinator <laugh> so I filled in a lot of margin for error.
Steve Folland:
So your assistant is planning out your diary?
Nick Parker:
So she's a virtual assistant. She books all the client meetings, so that gives a shape to the week. And there are slots where it's like every Monday and every Wednesday morning I try and group as many meetings into there as possible. So I always see the enquiries come in and you know, inevitably she'll ask me, we'll have a bit of a conversation about it, but it stops me just going yes to a client, sticking it in the diary, and screwing up my own schedule. <Laugh> It's brilliant having somebody else going, I notice you haven't got anything else on Tuesday, Nick, so I'm going to keep Tuesday free for you for other stuff. And I'm like, this is brilliant. Whereas if a client had asked me, can you do it Tuesday? I'd have gone Oh yeah, that's fine. So it's like the sort of checks and balances in a way of...
Steve Folland:
Saving you from yourself?
Nick Parker:
Yeah. That is the whole structure actually like, God don't get me to do the VAT return. That would be an absolute nightmare. You know, <laugh> somebody else needs to do that. Somebody else needs to book the meetings. Somebody else needs to chase the invoices because otherwise, I commit too much time to it and I wouldn't take the creative time seriously. That is always the challenge of a creative business, isn't it? It's like if I need to do a bit of thinking about a job or I'm naming a product or something, the temptation to go, oh, well that will only take half an hour. So I'll only give it half an hour, whereas what it needs is it will only take half an hour, but you're gonna need a half day run up at it. <Laugh> so yeah. So having somebody else saving me from myself, that is a very good way of putting it.
Steve Folland:
But I love that whole seeing yourself as a company of one was quite a moment.
Nick Parker:
Yeah. That's just really helped me. I'm constantly going, so what would a company have? How would a company deal with this? You know, and I might not need the whole policy or procedure, but how do I make it slightly outside of me.
Steve Folland:
Part of that book as well is about creating your own level of what success is, and how you'll choose to spend the time perhaps when you're not working. How have you figured that bit out for yourself?
Nick Parker:
So I'm aware, as we've been talking, it sounds like I've got a load of things sorted. It's been quite a shit storm <laugh> along the way. I've learned some of these things through trial and error. So that really ebbs and flows. Like there have been times where I've been massively too busy and I've just been working all hours. And there's been times where I've got that better. Like broadly speaking the vibe for me is that the stuff I just really like doing outside of work is often remarkably close to my work, you know, making stupid cards, writing books. So there's a sort of artist and illustration bit of what I do as well, which isn't on the website but is a constant bit of my life. So sitting at a desk, mucking around in my shed is how I love to spend my time anyway.
Nick Parker:
A part of over the last couple of years has just been, has been taking that seriously and bringing more of that into what I do day to day. So to treat a day writing a book as seriously as a day doing paid client work, and it's all just my work in my studio. I've started calling it a studio, not an agency. Because again, that feels like the studio is a place. I'm going into the studio. I'm going to write today. It just so happens that what I'm writing is my book. It's not a paid piece of client work. And I try and keep the healthy habits now of no email on my personal phone, try and log off at six, no work at the weekends. That takes constant shoring up, doesn't it? You know, and I'm in a lucky position of charging higher rates. So I don't have to work nine to five, Monday to Friday on paid client work just to make enough money to survive. Which is huge weight off, to break that cycle of constantly needing to be doing paid work all the time.
Steve Folland:
Mm. But some of that time is spent firming up the fact that you are worth that high rate in the first place.
Nick Parker:
Yeah. And in fact, <laugh> when you asked about the money, the thing I meant to say was, so the game I played when I very first started with myself and I made it a game because it made me feel better about it, is every new client I got, I just put my price up <laugh> and I didn't allow myself to have any opinion about that. It's just, that's what I did. And it was astonishing that it worked <laugh> Now I find it really interesting when I talk to other freelancers and they say, well, my usual day rate is £300 a day. I'm like, why have you got a day rate? Like every new client is an opportunity to start from scratch. You know, you might have some clients you have doubled the day rate of the ones you have with other clients. Like it can be, it's just whatever you want it to be. <Laugh> I met a guy who said, unless I'm getting turned down by two thirds of my enquiries for being too expensive. I know I haven't got my pricing right. Which is pretty ballsy.
Steve Folland:
<Laugh>.
Nick Parker:
And there is no way I ever get near that. I found that quite, okay so, it's fine, if people go, no that's too expensive, I don't need to feel bad about that. Which is not my normal personality at all. I'm not a sort of hard-nosed negotiator in anything I do, but it did give me some freedom to go, okay, don't be embarrassed about the money.
Steve Folland:
Nick, if you could tell your younger self, one thing about being freelance, what would that be?
Nick Parker:
Well, obviously my younger self wouldn't listen to a word that I have to say and quite right to, but I would tell him it is everything he imagines it to be and more, but at the same time, I'm not saying you should do it straight away. I think part of the joy of it for me has been when I started being able to work for myself, being slightly older, working at a slightly more senior level has been a huge part of the pleasure. So it's going to be amazing when it comes, is what I'll say to my younger self.
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