Sink or swim - Designer Evan MacDonald
Ready for a change, Seattle-based Evan and his wife bought one-way tickets to Argentina, and Evan went freelance full-time.
That’s a sizeable change. Especially with 4 daughters under 10 in tow.
Evan had never been to Argentina, but he did have some experience being freelance. He’d done it on the side of permanent jobs for years, always with the idea that he’d freelance full-time one day.
Evan chats to Steve about relocating his family, going freelance full-time in a new country without a financial safety net, and finding his way with the tough stuff, like accounting and work-life balance.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE BEING FREELANCE PODCAST WITH DESIGNER EVAN MACDONALD AND STEVE FOLLAND
Steve Folland: How did you get started being freelance?
Evan MacDonald: I studied graphic design in the university, graduated about 12 years ago, 10, 12 years ago. I always wanted to work freelance. I had been working in the world of design as a student for the last two years.
Evan MacDonald: I worked remotely with an independent designer who was in a different state and he would send me work. And so that's how I put myself through school was through working as a designer and I love that flexibility.
Evan MacDonald: I knew I wanted to work freelance, but I applied to a bunch of jobs and I got a job in Seattle, which is where I'm from at a design studio called Tether, and did some really great work there. Learned a lot, made a lot of really important connections.
Evan MacDonald: Some of the people that I was in school with went off to do freelancing right away, but I actually, I'm really glad that I didn't do that. Not that it can't work for some people, but I'm really glad that I went and got a rank and file design job.
Evan MacDonald: And then after that, after about four years there, I got recruited to be the design director for another company in Seattle but to work in house at a company called Freefly Systems, and Freefly makes heavy lift drones for the cinema industry and camera gimbals.
Evan MacDonald: Some people may have heard of the movie.
Steve Folland: Cool.
Evan MacDonald: And so I got to work with them, is a really great job. Worked with them for about four years. And then I decided that it was about time for me to do the thing that I wanted to do when I first graduated, which is to go full time freelance, and I should say this whole time I was working a little bit of freelance on the side, which I think is always a really good move if you can make it work.
Evan MacDonald: And then looking at things, my wife had always wanted to live abroad, and so in October of 2017, we bought six one way plane tickets to Argentina, and I'd put in my notice and we rented out our house, and boxed everything up, and put what we could in suitcases and flew to Argentina.
Evan MacDonald: And when I landed in Argentina is basically when I hung up my shingle and said, time to go full time freelance.
Steve Folland: Wow. Two significant changes at once. By the way, you said you bought six one way tickets, I'm presuming that's because you've got kids, or do you just like a lot of leg room?
Evan MacDonald: I like to lay down across the entire row. No, my wife and I have four daughters,
Steve Folland: Wow.
Evan MacDonald: ... so we got to got a family.
Steve Folland: How old are they?
Evan MacDonald: My oldest is 10 and the youngest is two, and the other two fall somewhere in between.
Steve Folland: And what year was this where you bought that ticket, bought six tickets?
Evan MacDonald: This was October 2017. We landed in Argentina, January... I think January 10th of 2018, so we're going on two years now.
Steve Folland: So you land and obviously start this new life, but literally career-wise as well. You had a few freelance jobs as you said on the side. Did those then continue? Where were you getting your first full time freelance clients from?
Evan MacDonald: This goes back... I mentioned that I was really glad that I worked at a design studio and worked in the industry not as a freelancer first off. And the reason why is because of the connections that I made.
Evan MacDonald: This has to do with my feelings and my methodology behind networking, which is that networking can be this thing where you practice and you'd go to a mixer, and you talk with people, and I find that those things really don't produce much. And maybe they do for some, but for me, I don't know.
Evan MacDonald: The thing that I have found that works really well is just having deep, genuine relationships with people that are in my industry. And the majority of those relationships were made sitting alongside people at a design studio or collaborating with another... a partner company when I was working in-house.
Evan MacDonald: We would partner up with another company for a giveaway or something, so those kinds of connections really led to everything, all the work that I've had since. Every time someone would leave the company that I was working at eight years ago, 10 years ago, I would always be sad, but I always knew they're now going to go make connections elsewhere.
Evan MacDonald: As their career grows and they become more successful in their career, the value of our relationship, not that I see these relationships just as being a monetary value. I value these friendships, but I knew that these relationships would also potentially turn into valuable relationships for my career.
Evan MacDonald: I've really come to find that having friendships, genuine friendships with people in your industry is the best way to ensure that people think of you when they have a need for creative service.
Steve Folland: That's so cool. The way you say that makes it feel like you didn't so much have to send out a load of emails saying, "Hey, have now done this." But because they were friendships, they knew what you were doing and you were going with that, would that be right?
Evan MacDonald: Yeah, that's definitely a big part of it. Now it's interesting because if I had just done that, I don't think... That wouldn't have been enough. I did need to reach out to a couple of key people and say, "Hey, I just letting you know, I'm looking for some work."
Evan MacDonald: And because I'd been doing some freelance, I had a few clients that I was already working with a little bit and I said, "Okay, hey, guess what? You get more than me." Or some of them didn't know that I was working full time, and so I just continued to work with them and said, "Hey, my availability is opening up."
Evan MacDonald: And so in just telling people, my availabilities opening up, that seemed to work right away pretty well.
Steve Folland: You decided to reinvent your family life, your career life?
Evan MacDonald: Yeah.
Steve Folland: Did you think that over as to what you wanted to look like? Like where you would work from, what work you would do, or did you just go with the flow?
Evan MacDonald: It was a little bit of both. It is two big changes going expat and going freelance. And I will say, and I think this is a really important thing to consider, that the move to Argentina, almost all my clients that I'd worked with to that point, none of them had I ever met in person. And so it didn't matter where I lived.
Evan MacDonald: Now I did have connections in Seattle, I did have relationships there, and a lot of those relationships have turned into more and more work, but at the time, majority of my freelance work came from people that I'd never met in person. So location didn't matter.
Evan MacDonald: And I didn't have a big amount of savings saved up. I've heard people say, "You need three months of income as a buffer." We figured, why don't we just move some places that isn't so expensive? The cost of living in Argentina is way less. The cost of healthcare in the United States for a lot of people, it's a deal breaker to leave a company to go out on your own.
Evan MacDonald: And so looking at all those things, we thought this is a good way to hedge our risk a little bit. So we made that move, and I feel like I've lost the train of your question.
Steve Folland: It was making that move and thinking about what your life would become-
Evan MacDonald: Oh, right.
Steve Folland: ... like.
Evan MacDonald: We really didn't know. A lot of people say, if you're going to move to another country, you should do an exploration trip, and we didn't do that. We just said, "Let's just go. We'll figure it out and see if we like it."
Evan MacDonald: I feel like everything that I've done was stupid, but it's all worked out.
Steve Folland: Had you ever been to Argentina before by the way?
Evan MacDonald: Never. No, and I don't-
Steve Folland: Amazing.
Evan MacDonald: ... I speak Spanish, or I didn't speak Spanish. My wife spoke Spanish, she'd learned it years before. And we threw our kids into Spanish speaking school. They had had a little bit of training, but not much at all, and everyone stepped into that. We threw ourselves into the deep end, sink or swim, we'll see what happens, which I feel like really is not good advice that anyone else do that.
Evan MacDonald: But we figured, we'll find a place to live. We'll get a place big enough that I can have a little home office. The part of town that we moved to doesn't really have big spaces, and so I found a coworking space about seven blocks from our apartment, and that was one of the best business decisions I made was renting a desk at a coworking space.
Evan MacDonald: There's a lot of people from other countries, a lot of other expats, so a lot of people that I could speak English with. I made friends there and that helped with the transition to a new country to start building a social circle through that coworking space.
Evan MacDonald: That's where I am right now, I met my coworking space and I've got good relationships. Some have even turned into some client relationships, and I have a good separation between home life and work life.
Steve Folland: Do you have a routine? As in you head off the same time each day to the office or?
Evan MacDonald: Yeah. Generally, I help the kids get ready for school and drop them off at school. And then it's just another two blocks walk to my office, to my coworking space. Sometimes I will pick up the kids from school and bring them home or sometimes the other nice thing about living in Argentina is it's really affordable to have a little help around the house, so sometimes our help will pick up the kids.
Evan MacDonald: We have these great relationships with the people that help us in our home, and so sometimes they'll pick up the kids, or my wife will or we'll grab lunch together or whatever. So everything is all in a really close radius, and so we just walk everywhere and...
Evan MacDonald: For jumping blind into the deep end of an unknown pool, I feel like I'm on a lounger with a cool drink in my hand. It's turned out really, really good. We just spent six weeks visiting the United States, and after about a week I was home sick, desperately homesick to return to Argentina.
Evan MacDonald: The kids since we've been back have said, "We don't ever want to leave Argentina."
Steve Folland: Wow.
Evan MacDonald: Things have really worked out pretty well for us.
Steve Folland: You have some pretty big name clients on your website. Do they come through connections or are they through agencies when it comes to sharing that work?
Evan MacDonald: There's a couple of places I get my clients. One of my favorite types of clients is actually other design studios. A lot of those connections are people that I've worked with, and now they either have their own agency or they work with an agency and they're in like a creative director or a partner role at a big agency.
Evan MacDonald: And so those people, I let them know I'm available, and so they've brought me in on projects. And then some of those, I do work with a company called Contently, and they're based out of New York city and they work with a lot of freelance writers and a lot of folks like designers, and animators, and video producers and stuff like that.
Evan MacDonald: And I'm actually a member of the Freelance Advisory Board through them, which is a huge honor that... They just launched that a couple of weeks ago, maybe two months, three months ago. And so through them, they work with a lot of big clients, a lot of big brands, and it's nice I get to interface directly with those clients.
Evan MacDonald: But Contently helps manage the payments and the income, and they assign a project manager to each project, which makes my life way easier. I have a handful that I have hunted out and earned myself, and a bunch from other agencies, and then a lot through this company called Contently.
Steve Folland: I have heard of them. That's so cool. It's nice that you still have a link to the client, but equally, there's also somebody there to oversee it and deal with any issues.
Steve Folland: And also you've not go out there and win that work, I guess?
Evan MacDonald: Yeah. A lot of times I just get an email saying, "Hey, this client that you've worked with a bunch before has a new project, are you available?" And sometimes I get an email saying, "Hey, this new customer of ours is looking for some design work. Would you like to join their creative team?"
Evan MacDonald: It makes the life and the stress involved with balancing a freelance career a lot easier, so I'm really, really happy with the work I've been able to do through Contently.
Steve Folland: Do you find that you have a pretty constant stream of work?
Evan MacDonald: It's interesting, my first six months doing this was just gangbusters. I could hardly breathe, I had so much work. I started to live like I was going to always have that much work, which was a mistake because when summer hit, 4th of July in the United States, that span of time hit, everything standstill, everything stopped.
Evan MacDonald: Through that experience, luckily it had been a really busy six months, but yeah. Once July hit and the summertime slow down hit, I started to be able to draw on some of those prosperity months and rethink how I was going to juggle my time and handle slow downs.
Evan MacDonald: And so I've come to realize that it's not so much that month to month it's stable, but so far year to year I find that I'm seeing growth, that I'm seeing... So as long as I can be smart, and as long as I'm really flexible.
Evan MacDonald: And luckily that's been the biggest slow down I've had since doing this. I don't have a huge amount of experience doing this full time, it's less than two years, but... I don't have a huge data set to pull from, a huge track record, but so far that's been my busiest time followed by my slowest time.
Evan MacDonald: And now things have... I figured out a little bit of how to keep things a little more level.
Steve Folland: Did you start to worry when it slowed down for that first time?
Evan MacDonald: Worry is probably an understatement. I called around to a bunch of people, I said, "What am I supposed to do?" And it turns out a lot of people were experiencing the same thing, and that about that time of year, it's pretty normal. And so I got some good advice, that's a good time to work on things like online courses and side projects that help generate more work in the future.
Evan MacDonald: So I've tried to make a habit of doing that sort of thing and that's made a big difference.
Steve Folland: What side projects do you work on?
Evan MacDonald: The biggest one has been this podcast that I started called One Thing Real Quick . So far, the biggest side project, and it's the most rewarding side project I think I've ever done.
Steve Folland: What's the gist of your podcast?
Evan MacDonald: The podcast is all about creativity and the idea starting with this podcast, there's two ideas. One is, it's just a single question, which has evolved into a really focused conversation. So a single topic based around each guest's experience.
Evan MacDonald: And then the other thing that really drives the content of the show is that everyone is creative and everyone who uses creativity in a professional capacity has really valuable things to say on the subject.
Evan MacDonald: You go to design conferences or creative conferences and you have a pool of the same 20 people that make up the keynote speaker roster. And after going to design conferences every year, so I started to get tired of hearing the same voices and I really wanted to hear from the people sitting next to me in the audience.
Evan MacDonald: And so that's why I created the podcast is because I wanted to hear those voices of people that are dealing with creativity in practical ways every day.
Steve Folland: That's such a nice idea. And so actually that's, I guess also expanding your network?
Evan MacDonald: It is. That was the idea behind it was that it would give me a good excuse to call up someone and have a conversation that I probably wouldn't have done otherwise, but more so it's just been great to connect with people, both the audience and the guests and just the whole process.
Evan MacDonald: The creative process of putting stories together is extremely rewarding, it's a nice change of mental muscle to create a podcast rather than to create an InDesign layout or a logo or whatever it is.
Steve Folland: You mentioned conferences, so have you been to quite a lot them?
Evan MacDonald: The first company I worked for gave us an allowance to go to conferences, and so each year we had an allowance. So I would go to something at least once a year. When I became I... created a creative team for this other company, I tried to carry that forward.
Evan MacDonald: I would go to workshops and conferences, spend every year, but as the first 10 years of my career, those slowed down as I got a little bit jaded with the whole experience. For that same reason I just mentioned that you get the same 20 voices gracing the stage at every conference.
Evan MacDonald: I found it much more rewarding to have conversations between the sessions with other creatives than to sit in a room and listen to someone who has given 45 talks on the same subject.
Steve Folland: But from the socializing point of view, they sound good then?
Evan MacDonald: Oh, they're great. Yeah. And I've made a lot of friends and a lot of connections through that process as well. I will say this, I had the honor and the opportunity to speak at a design conference in I think it was August of 2017, so just before leaving the United States.
Evan MacDonald: I spoke at a design conference for the IDSA, which is the Industrial Designers Society of America. I think I've got the acronym right. And being a speaker is about a thousand times better than just sitting in the audience because people are much more willing to come talk to you, and you make really great connections with people if you get to speak at a conference.
Evan MacDonald: So that's my favorite other than the nerves when you're on stage. I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to do that again, but yeah.
Steve Folland: Oh yeah. Put yourself out there. Maybe somebody will pay for your trip back to the State.
Evan MacDonald: Yeah. If I can make that work, yeah, please.
Steve Folland: And there can be-
Evan MacDonald: If you're listening, conference organizers.
Steve Folland: Yeah, bring me over too, I'll come. And then you've got 22 voices that you can have on your circuit instead of 20 that you mentioned.
Evan MacDonald: That's right. Yeah.
Steve Folland: I must say, I've only spoken at a few, but I have found that same thing. Even like being on a panel or something like that, smaller meetup where it just breaks down the barrier, people come up to you a lot easier.
Evan MacDonald: You basically start the conversation on stage and then when you're in the lunch area or whatever, people come and finish it with you, which is great.
Steve Folland: That's a nice way of looking at it.
Steve Folland: Your name is very much part... You trade as Evanmade, don't you? Is that right? Evanmade Studio?
Evan MacDonald: Yeah. That was a domain name availability issue. Evan MacDonald is a dance instructor in New Jersey, and he does great work. He has the same name, and he's got the website. He's got a lot of flair, more flair than I do. And so I went with Evanmade and I've just made that my business name.
Steve Folland: I like that. But that doesn't... So that whole... what made you go under a business name, but your name is still very much a part of it.
Evan MacDonald: Absolutely. I've vacillated back and forth between creating a unique name for my studio. I really do emphasize just Evan MacDonald, that's who I am. I think it's important not to be scalable.
Evan MacDonald: And I think a lot of creative people think about, when you go freelance, let's make a name for our studio so that we feel like we're a business and we'll use the term we in all our emails so that we can then feel like we're a company. But you limit your supply of who you are, that you're just one person.
Evan MacDonald: I think my experience so far is that it increases your demand. You're one of a kind and your creative approach is one of a kind, and if you don't dilute that, there's a big benefit to just being your own individual creative. And from that you can control the supply-demand aspect of things.
Steve Folland: How have you found the business side of being freelance?
Evan MacDonald: It definitely helps that our cost of living in Argentina are a lot lower. That's given us a lot of flexibility and has allowed me to take bigger risks with projects and with clients.
Evan MacDonald: The other thing that I've learned after doing my taxes this last year, at the end of my first year and realizing that I owed a huge amount of money and was not prepared for that. I was prepared to pay something but wasn't prepared for what they were asking for. They being our wonderful government in the United States.
Evan MacDonald: I reached out and got a little help, found an accountant bookkeeping, an agency that could help me with that. And that's made a big difference. They've taught me some things and helped me get set up. I'm really upset about this. Helped me get set up with some tools to help me keep track of my finances.
Evan MacDonald: And so that's made a big difference and it's taught me a lot about outsourcing those things that you don't want to do. There's a lot of ways to do that, to outsource the parts of being a freelancer that they frankly suck.
Evan MacDonald: And so doing that has made a big difference for me.
Steve Folland: What are the other bits of being a freelancer that you find challenging?
Evan MacDonald: I think the balance is probably the hardest thing. It's so hard to not make hay when the sun's out, and I think I ruined the expression there, but when clients are saying, "Can you do this?" I really have a hard time saying no.
Evan MacDonald: And I find myself saying yes to a lot of things that end up costing me in terms of balance, and family time, and things like that. But I feel like I'm getting a little bit better at that.
Evan MacDonald: I just took six weeks in the States with my family, visiting family and friends and I think I worked about 10 hours a week while I was there, which was really nice, and I was able to keep things moving.
Evan MacDonald: I think that really comes down to learning how to set expectations with your clients and learning how to not over promise.
Steve Folland: Now if you could tell your younger self one thing about being freelance, what would that be?
Evan MacDonald: I think I would tell myself something that I had expected or I expected would be true, which is to not be in a hurry. I'm really, really glad that I waited until I had matured in my career.
Evan MacDonald: And I still have a long way to go, 10 years is not a lot of experience. When you hit 10 years, you think that, but then you look around and realize that, I'm still a green horn here, but just be patient and wait as long as you can to develop your skill, develop your relationships with other people and to prepare to make that move.
Steve Folland: How important do you think was the move to a new place in terms of also going full time freelance for you?
Evan MacDonald: I had a conversation on my podcast with Mary Kate McDevitt. She's a really amazing illustrator based out of Philadelphia, and turns out she did the same thing. She moved to Portland, Oregon from, I don't remember exactly where, but somewhere on the East coast. She moved to Portland, Oregon when she went freelance.
Evan MacDonald: Oh, and I have another friend, a guy named Brad Woodard, who is another great illustrator, and he moved to Austin, Texas when he went freelance.
Evan MacDonald: I think it's actually really helpful to start new somewhere when you're making a change like this. I can imagine that that might be a little overwhelming for some people, but especially for me, it really helped me create new pathways in every aspect of my life, and create new habits, and routines for my freelance work that also needed to be made anyways because I was in a new place.