Freelancing by the hour - Billing for canceled sessions, etc

[jdk90042]

When possible I bill by project or day rate, but one particular corner of the market - VO recording for corporate jobs (audiobooks, museum tours, etc)- pays strictly hourly. (Ironically, the clients with the most revenue- maybe not so ironic, it's how they KEEP it...)

The clock starts not when you arrive to set up (work) but when the client begins. Bookings are routinely canceled or run considerably shorter than originally planned, and you are paid for the session hours as clocked only. I've put up with it because of the economic climate, but it isn't feeling worth it. Considering saying I won't work unless I'm going to be paid for the BOOKED hours, which includes cancellations of less that 24 hours, but I realize this will just get me off the call list. I'm at the point of not giving a shit, and that'll start affecting the quality of the work.

Anybody else want to weigh in on this?

[hank alrich]

Your time is your time, and also your money, and theirs, too. No need to tell you some of those "corpo" folks have an exploitative approach to your time. If you can survive without their crap and are ready to tell them you work for the time that has been booked, I can only offer you two thumbs up.

[Gentleman Jim]

This actually touches on a few different experiences I've had recently.

The first, and most obviously analogous, was a live mixing gig that I was told was going to be relatively steady. The venue where I was working, (as an outside contractor), is a very non rock room attached to a restaurant. The company that owns the place also owns other restaurants, some of which have live music. Basically, the place is pretty dysfunctional when it comes to the live performance end of things, and the money wasn't worth the aggravation of the repeated double booking of sound techs, or flakiness about whether a particular shift needed a sound tech at all. My approach with them was to raise my rate substantially and call for a 50% cancellation fee if they cancel within 72 hours of when a shift is supposed to start. I also put a $50 last minute booking charge in effect if they call to book me within 24 hours of a shift. I'm pretty sure the net result will be that they won't call me unless every other mixer they work with isn't available. C'est la vie. My sanity is worth more than that.

I also do corporate VO work, and I produce audio for business to business marketing. Yes, there are times when I feel like clients are acting like jerks, but in my previous life I was in their position; they're getting caught up in whatever pressure they're being fed from the other end. Whether I have a freakout on them or I just smile and assure them that the project will be delivered on time is my choice. Over time, I've proven myself reliable enough that at least one of my clients now has a good sense of humor about her worrying. This makes my life easier.

Would you feel better if you were paid more? If so, raise your rate. Of course clients will moan a bit, but if you can honestly show them that it's better for them to pay you a bit more and get your quality of work than it is for them to search out new VO talent just because they want to save a nominal amount of money, then it shouldn't be a huge problem. Hey, the reason those sessions end so quickly is because you're so good and efficient. If they can't meet you part way with a reasonable rate increase, then you're just going to get more bitter over time, which will work against you. Better to fire them as clients.

[jdk90042]

I agree with you Jim, I see where the corpos are coming from, I guess I just think they have to be more accountable with time estimates. I'd like to take credit for sessions going quick, but it's usually inexperienced producers or celebrity talent wanting to knock off early to make a pilates class or whatever.

I went up in rates a couple years ago, which worked, but things are pretty bad in NYC these days, and I had to agree to old rates, putting me on bad footing as far as negotiations... I barely have any work right now, but it feels sort of worth firing them just to not feel like a tool. Averaged over the year, I'd do better in retail, for 08-09 anyway...

[Snarl 12/8]

What if you put into your contract a bonus for yourself for ending early. Ending early has got to have benefits for them, project comes in under budget, but you could make it win-win. I've seen this in construction projects, makes sense to me.

[@?,*???&?]

Hang on, are you proposing billing extra for 'under-time' and not 'over-time'?

I think I've heard it all now.

Totally ridiculous.

[Gentleman Jim]

Think of it as locking out a room, Jeff, but instead of booking the room the client is booking a VO talent. When someone books your studio for a week to record five songs - but then bangs them out in two days and calls it done - how do you handle that? Now imagine that happens on a regular basis. That's what jdkeith is dealing with.

Anything constructive to add?

[Gentleman Jim]

jdkeith wrote:

I see where the corpos are coming from, I guess I just think they have to be more accountable with time estimates. I'd like to take credit for sessions going quick, but it's usually inexperienced producers or celebrity talent wanting to knock off early to make a pilates class or whatever.

Maybe I've been lucky with the few clients I personally do VO work for, but my system goes like this: They call, ask if I'm available, and give a rough idea of how much work it is; I confirm and give an estimated delivery date, pending the actual amount of work to do and timely receipt of the work; I get the work as a .doc, .pdf, Flash file, or PowerPoint file; I send a formal estimate and get final approval; I do the work, (VO talent, self-direct, 'engineer,' and editor), deliver files via internet; do any revisions; invoice; wait about 45 days for a check.

Is there a way you can see the work prior to the session? At least that way you can get a better estimate of the time required. Not sure if that's an option with the sort of work you're doing, but it's an idea.

The work I'm doing isn't by any means top shelf stuff. Much of it is horribly written, and the subject matter is often boring as hell. On a scale of 1-10 I'd call myself maybe a 6.5. But I'm responsive and reasonably priced, and the work fits in nicely as a piece of my current 'income jigsaw puzzle.'

I'm also self-contained, which makes things easy to manage from the clients' perspective. I know that one of my clients used to have problems with a studio they worked with being unavailable for last minute stuff because they had other bookings. I once turned around a 9 hour emergency project that they sent me at 6pm before they got in to work the next day. The project manager called me and apologized for asking for a one or two day rush turnaround, and she took full responsibility for screwing up. I've always made it a habit to go out of my way to help anyone in a position where they don't need to confess a mistake but they do it anyway. So to take some of the stress off her I did it overnight. Needless to say she's remembered that ever since.

[cgarges]

Maybe you just need to start asking them for sure how much time they think they're going to need because you have some other stuff pending. If, after explaining to them that you can be using that time for something else, they still manage to book a bunch of time and not use it, tell them that that's hurting your business, because it is. At some point, you may have to make the decision about whether or not they're worth your time and figure out if you want to keep dealing with it.

I did the same thing recently with a guy who was hiring me for a lot of playing gigs. The gigs paid great and he got a fair amount of work, but at one point, I managed to lose eight gigs in one month because he had all this out of town stuff that bagged and he didn't get contracts or deposits. When I quit working with him, I hated losing all that work, but it was getting to a point where I was really losing out by turning down other stuff and then having his stuff fall through, too.

That's part of the reason why the deposit scenario works so well, but I know that the ad agency folks are used to terms and whatnot, which sucks for the people getting paid (or not getting paid). I have a lot of respect for people who do what you do because it's just about the worst possible scenario for somebody who's into low-stress recording.

Where's dwlb?

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[@?,*???&?]

Think of it as locking out a room, Jeff, but instead of booking the room the client is booking a VO talent. When someone books your studio for a week to record five songs - but then bangs them out in two days and calls it done - how do you handle that? Now imagine that happens on a regular basis. That's what jdkeith is dealing with.

Anything constructive to add?

Then they are done early! Congrats to everyone! On-time and under-budget!

[Jay Reynolds]

Think of it as locking out a room, Jeff, but instead of booking the room the client is booking a VO talent. When someone books your studio for a week to record five songs - but then bangs them out in two days and calls it done - how do you handle that? Now imagine that happens on a regular basis. That's what jdkeith is dealing with.

Anything constructive to add?

Then they are done early! Congrats to everyone! On-time and under-budget!

If you get booked for three hours and only get paid for one, are you going to be that chipper?

[Gentleman Jim]

@?,*???&? wrote:

Then they are done early! Congrats to everyone! On-time and under-budget!

It's actually more like:

Then they are done early! Congrats to everyone but me! I'm twiddling my thumbs and underpaid!

Maybe that "Percent of Annual Income" graph would look different if clients were held accountable for time they block out but don't use.

[@?,*???&?]

Think of it as locking out a room, Jeff, but instead of booking the room the client is booking a VO talent. When someone books your studio for a week to record five songs - but then bangs them out in two days and calls it done - how do you handle that? Now imagine that happens on a regular basis. That's what jdkeith is dealing with.

Anything constructive to add?

Then they are done early! Congrats to everyone! On-time and under-budget!

If you get booked for three hours and only get paid for one, are you going to be that chipper?

Remember when you could get a better deal through booking 12-hour lock-outs at studios? Remember how that meant your session/mix set-up wouldn't be disturbed overnight and you paid extra for that right through having a day rate?

If a client was paying for a lock-out, it was 12 hours of studio time for X price. If they got done early, it was no ones fault and they still paid X rate.

The above scenario is breaking this down to hours- or minutes (charge by the minute?). The producer or engineer on the project should know how long a portion of work should take. Hourly should be more expensive than a lock-out. A lock-out could be offset through some kind of weekly rate, but I guess that 95% of what's posted about on this board would NEVER use a weekly rate.

[JGriffin]

Where's dwlb?

Hi!

When possible I bill by project or day rate, but one particular corner of the market - VO recording for corporate jobs (audiobooks, museum tours, etc)- pays strictly hourly. (Ironically, the clients with the most revenue- maybe not so ironic, it's how they KEEP it...)

The clock starts not when you arrive to set up (work) but when the client begins. Bookings are routinely canceled or run considerably shorter than originally planned, and you are paid for the session hours as clocked only. I've put up with it because of the economic climate, but it isn't feeling worth it. Considering saying I won't work unless I'm going to be paid for the BOOKED hours, which includes cancellations of less that 24 hours, but I realize this will just get me off the call list. I'm at the point of not giving a shit, and that'll start affecting the quality of the work.

Anybody else want to weigh in on this?

My first question is, are you turning down other work to take these long bookings, thereby losing actual money when they finish early or cancel? If you are, then you have leverage to say, look, I turned away another client to accommodate you, I need to be compensated for the time I set aside. If not...what's the problem? You weren't gonna be making any money in that time slot anyway.

My situation is somewhat different from yours, but:

In my experience the client expects that if a session starts at 10 they will be recording at 10:01. They do not expect to sit around and wait for me to set up. It will be done by time they get there. However, I do have a "set-up" fee, which is about 75% of my room rate, that I charge as it's appropriate to do so. Of course, since straight VO work is 80% of what I do, there's not much to set up; it's usually "am I using the Senn 416 or the U87 today?" But I do charge setup if I'm recording several actors simultaneously and need to put up more mcs, or if I have to rig some sort of weird "one actor is patching in from NYC via ISDN, two actors here in the booth, the writer is phoning in from Paris and everyone has to be able to hear everyone and we're working to picture" arrangement. But most of the time, "setup" for a VO session takes less than five minutes.

I've tried to institute a "kill fee" for sessions that get canceled at the last minute but I've figured out that a) in advertising things change really quickly sometimes and projects get dropped at the last minute all the time, 2) my competitors don't charge these fees and I'll lose business if I try to be a hardass about it, iii) the producer who booked the session isn't the one responsible for making sure the client approves the script/budget/casting--that's the account person's job and more often than not they're trying desperately to get the client to look at the script and give those approvals right up until the last minute. It's part of how that world (dys)functions and trying to penalize people for it doesn't really pay off.

That said, union VO people will get paid a full session fee if they get canceled without sufficient notice, so it's not unheard of...and if you state it upfront and people still keep working with you, that's awesome.

Many corporate clients have to answer to Cost Consultants. These are people who claim to have figured out how much things oughta cost and get on your case if you spend more than that. The agency's business managers spend an inordinate amount of time defending project expenditures to these people. I'm certain that what is going through their minds is "if I book 4 hours but only use 2, and then pay for all four, the cost consultant is gonna crawl up my ass with a microscope asking "why did you pay for 4 hours if you only used 2?"

The question, then, is: why did they book 4 hours? One thing you might do is work with producers (or whoever your client contact is) to better estimate the time it will take to accomplish a job. Can you do a radio spot in an hour, or does it take you two? How long does it take your prerecorded-museum-tour VO guy to get through the script and how long does it take you to edit it? Is the writer confident and quick, or will he need to hear each take played back three times, change his mind constantly and make you edit syllable-by-syllable? If you help your clients estimate their jobs better you can cut down on this problem. Or, book with a main session/pad mentality: Two hours of studio time with an hour of padding where you don't book anyone else, so if they run over the two hours you don't have to kick them out, but if they don't use it they don't have to pay. This manages expectations better and you won't go into the day expecting to bill 3 hours and then get miffed when they wrap in 2. My clients only pay for the hours they actually use, but there generally isn't a huge disparity between how long they think something will take and how long it actually takes. If they do ask for 6 hours on something that I know will probably only take 2, I don't salivate at all the potential income, I say "so, wait, are you sure?"


But ultimately it comes down to a difference in mindset, and maybe the only answer is "that's that world; get used to it or stop taking those gigs." Pardon me if that comes off as harsh; it's not meant to be.

[JGriffin]

Maybe you just need to start asking them for sure how much time they think they're going to need because you have some other stuff pending. If, after explaining to them that you can be using that time for something else, they still manage to book a bunch of time and not use it, tell them that that's hurting your business, because it is.

An excellent point; one thing you might do if they ask for 6 hours --say, starting at 1pm-- is say "Well, I can take you at 1, but right now I have a hard out at 4; if you're sure you need all 6 hours I can cancel the other session, but understand I am canceling a paid session to take care of you, so I'll need to get paid for all 6 hours." And see if they really need that 6 hours.