Drowning Street
Well this has been quite a week for me. It is a constant source of amazement how quickly life can change with only miniscule step changes.
I was commissioned to put together a PowerPoint presentation by a client who had been invited to enter his company into a company/business IT competition - think "Dragons Den" and you have some idea. Specifically, I had to run a broad brush Venture Capital presentation as part of a request for 6 million euro, produce some supporting graphs and a series of key features with summaries of the business, its market, competition, strengths and weaknesses.
Again this may not sound too much like writing however it was in reality; the client had already done all the research and needed someone with a good grasp of English to put a business class English language presentation together which for them was difficult. The difficulty was the MD was Swedish with the co-owner Ukrainian, and though both had very good English when I spoke with them, it became painfully clear that English writing quality was not a strength in their corporate armoury.
For approximately one day, I received $900 and a further commission worth substantially in excess of that.
Now this is a client I like!
Even better this client turned out to be one of the freelance websites I use to source work - www.getafreelancer.com - and my reviews now have a top notch client that project providers simply cannot ignore when they check my references as they are advertising their own requirements on the site.
Comments: ERH was able to put words on my thoughts. The most amazing was that he did it without knowing about most of them! Out of nothing he created a great presentation. Extremely gifted and hard working at the same time. A very rare combination. You're lucky if he make a bid on your project!
On the back of this glowing review, last week alone I received $2,000 worth of work which in "proper" money is about £1,000. I'm working long hours for this but it is tangible proof that I am starting to cut into the market and making what I consider to be "proper" money.
I'll probably be absolutely broke next month after these commissions are ended but I somehow doubt it.
In my email inbox this morning were three new emails from customers, two old ones and one referred to me by another. Today, I woke at a few minutes to 6 and noted we still have daylight at this time, sorted the heir out and packed him off to school while I performed my own pre-writing ritual with a run, dog walk and a strong, sweet coffee.
Unlike other morning rituals, this one was different and I have not been able to write a single thing all day ... except invoices and payment notices 
Related posts:
- How Much Am I Worth?
- Writing the Professional Project Proposal
- Helium – A Writers Marketplace?
- Avoiding Writing Scams
- The Interminable Wait After Pitching for a Project
- Be a Control Freak with TCP
- Get A Freelancer
- Who’s going to pay me to write?
- How to Establish a Web Presence for your Writing Services
- Being Professional: Comes Through in First Impressions