| Vom Thema belegte Seiten: [1 2] > | How many clients do you work for? Initiator des Themas: Juliano Martins
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Juliano Martins 
Brasilien
Local time: 14:27
Mitglied (2008)
Englisch > Portugiesisch
+ ...
I think it’s a good practice to distribute your words among many clients. That way your risk of getting less jobs/words every month is lowered. And you have more opportunities to select the best paying clients in the long run and increase your translation and proofreading rates.
Here is my example of how many different clients I worked for per month in 2015.
Average per month: 12.67 clients
Total during the year: 29 clients
And here is my progression from 2008 until 2015.
Average per year: 20.25 clients
Average per month: 7.55 clients
Total for the period: 85 clients
The red line is the total of different clients per year. The blue line is the average per month in that year.
Do you know your statistics?
[Edited at 2016-10-26 17:54 GMT]
| | | | | Methodology for Counting clients? | Oct 26, 2016 |
How do you count clients?
Are you referring to individual direct clients, or business from LSPs?
If you get business from an LSP, does it count as one client, or are you referring to each of their clients as an individual client?
| | | | John Fossey
Kanada
Local time: 12:27
Mitglied (2008)
Französisch > Englisch
+ ...
I have worked for 73 different clients in the period from June 2015 to now. I haven't done a detailed analysis, but out of those there are probably fifteen major ones and the rest are one-offs or minor. They include both direct clients and agencies. I don't count an agency's end client as my client, since the agency is my client in this case. I would frequently have no idea who the agency's client is.
[Edited at 2016-10-26 19:51 GMT]
| | | | Juliano Martins
Brasilien
Local time: 14:27
Mitglied (2008)
Englisch > Portugiesisch
+ ...
THEMENSTARTER | Each client is a translation agency | Oct 26, 2016 |
I have an Excel spreadsheet since June 2008 where I enter all the jobs I do. Therefore, I know exactly which clients I have worked for, how many projects, how many words, etc.
Almost all my clients are translation agencies (a little over 60 agencies). And very few are individual people (around 20).
I counted each agency or person in each month or year, regardless of how many projects they sent me. Of course that there are clients who have just sent me one project, while... See more I have an Excel spreadsheet since June 2008 where I enter all the jobs I do. Therefore, I know exactly which clients I have worked for, how many projects, how many words, etc.
Almost all my clients are translation agencies (a little over 60 agencies). And very few are individual people (around 20).
I counted each agency or person in each month or year, regardless of how many projects they sent me. Of course that there are clients who have just sent me one project, while others have sent me many hundreds.
Below you can see a section of my spreadsheet for the last few days. I am showing here only the name of the client, the day, month and year of the job. In the complete spreadsheet there are still other columns, such as: currency, wordcount, rate, language pair, etc.
I attribute colors to each important client (who sends me many jobs) and green to small clients.
You can see in this section that there are 9 clients: Aabam, Deepad, Lingo24, Spantech, OmniTrans, TheBigWord, Translateplus, Verbo Tradutores, Echo International.
That’s how I counted.
 ▲ Collapse
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| An average of 7,2 per month for 2016 so far | Oct 26, 2016 |
I just had a look at that for this year:
Jan.: 9
Febr.: 10
March: 8
April: 3 (mainly because of my holiday)
May: 12
June: 5
July: 5
Aug.: 6
Sept.: 6
Oct.: 8
= an average of 7,2
The interesting thing is not only how many customers you work for but what percentage of your income you earn with them...
| | | | Juliano Martins
Brasilien
Local time: 14:27
Mitglied (2008)
Englisch > Portugiesisch
+ ...
THEMENSTARTER | Thanks for sharing | Oct 26, 2016 |
Thank you, Andrea!
For this year, 2016, I have the following so far:
Jan: 20
Feb: 14
Mar: 12
Apr: 15
May: 12
Jun: 16
Jul: 15
Aug: 19
Sep: 17
Oct: 19
Average: 15.9 clients per month
You are right about the importance of what percentage comes from each one. I try not to make any client very important, because if someone represents a big percentage of my income and for any reason disappears, th... See more Thank you, Andrea!
For this year, 2016, I have the following so far:
Jan: 20
Feb: 14
Mar: 12
Apr: 15
May: 12
Jun: 16
Jul: 15
Aug: 19
Sep: 17
Oct: 19
Average: 15.9 clients per month
You are right about the importance of what percentage comes from each one. I try not to make any client very important, because if someone represents a big percentage of my income and for any reason disappears, then I would have a problem. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
Vereinigtes Königreich
Local time: 17:27
Mitglied (2014)
Japanisch > Englisch
| Lower dependence = lower value? | Oct 26, 2016 |
Juliano Martins wrote:
I think it’s a good practice to distribute your words among many clients. That way your risk of getting less jobs/words every month is lowered. And you have more opportunities to select the best paying clients in the long run and increase your translation and proofreading rates.
I have known some very successful companies in different industries that emphasised the same approach of not allowing any one customer to account for more than (say) 5% or 10% of their revenue, so basically I agree that lower dependence is highly desirable - in theory.
In practice, I also feel that the less work an agency gives you, the less you depend on it, but the less dependent the agency is on YOU. That is, you have lower visibility and a smaller "mind share" with that agency's staff. If I have 20 well-diversified agency clients each accounting for 5% of my work, I am not going to be much affected by fluctuations in the business of any one agency. On the other hand, in any particular month I will only be doing a couple of thousand words or so for those clients.
From that perspective I am probably not making a significant impact on that agency's translation capacity in my language pair. So how important am I to them? Probably not very, which means that the best jobs will not be offered to me and that I will have little leverage when negotiating rates or deadlines.
In my situation I have half-a-dozen "major" clients that give me a solid chunk of work most months and a number of smaller ones that offer me work less frequently. These major clients know know my work patterns and my specialisations. They want long-term relationships because they think it results in more stable product quality and more easily predictable capacity.
For example, if I have translated something through Agency A for end client Company B in the past, Agency A will try to ensure that work from Company B comes to me in future, because they value consistency. The other side of the coin is that I cannot repeatedly reject work from Agency A without repercussions and a downgrading of my importance in their eyes. Some of the much-vaunted freedom of the freelancer has been lost.
I could easily double or triple the size of my client base and fill every hour of the day with work if I were not selective about rates and the kind of work I do. Agencies contact me every week or so to offer me work. Most projects don't pan out, but every few months we agree on the details and one becomes a client. Most come back to offer me more work. Being selective reduces the number of clients with which you can deal, but that has positive implications for working conditions.
My conclusion? It's hard to reduce dependence on clients without encouraging the perception you add little value for them as a translator. After all, if you're a competent translator with a well-differentiated skill set, a good agency will want to use you more than 5% of the time. If you keep saying "no" to them, eventually they will shrug and move you from their "A team" list to their "B team" list.
To look at it another way, a "less good" agency that doesn't care much about the translators it uses and that isn't prepared to pay good rates will not mind if it is only using a translator for a thousand words a month. Such agencies see translators as fungible assets in a homogenised, semi-automated process. They don't want the best, they just want a certain minimum level of competence.
At least one agency on the list you posted in this thread has a reputation for being exactly such a "less good" company. It has repeatedly been accused by freelancers of bullying behavior, such as trying to impose unilateral cuts in rates every couple of years. Can one get high-end rates from agencies like these? And if one cannot get high rates and settles for lower rates, is that an acceptable trade-off given that it reduces dependence? Interesting questions.
Another thought: suppose you go the other way, toward the high end of the market, and have a small number of agency clients that pay well and treat you well, but on which you are fairly dependent (by which I mean that you cannot lightly reject work). Are they not in some respects as demanding as direct clients would be, while paying lower rates than direct clients?
Regards,
Dan
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Dan Lucas wrote:
In my situation I have half-a-dozen "major" clients that give me a solid chunk of work most months and a number of smaller ones that offer me work less frequently. These major clients know my work patterns and my specialisations. They want long-term relationships because they think it results in more stable product quality and more easily predictable capacity.
Exactly my case here. About 10 clients for which I work constantly meant 85% of my income last year, with the two biggest accounting for 18% and 12%. The other 15% is spread over 30 minor customers.
My strategy here is to have a shortlist of 10 "strategic clients" to whom I never (or very rarely) say no. If I have free capacity, I take in jobs from the other non-strategic customers. I also try to take in jobs from new customers, just to open up more markets and have access to more work should one of the big accounts fail.
As for the OP's question -- I just calculated it out of my records for the sake of the exercise -- this year it has been so far:
January 22
February 16
March 13
April 13
May 17
June 18
July 17
August 15
September 13
October 16
(Edited to add the average)
Average: Jan-Oct 16 different client (month-to-month; some 30 different customers in the year as a whole). Each client with a number of different jobs in every month, in some cases two/three jobs daily.
[Edited at 2016-10-27 07:19 GMT]
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| 12 different customers... | Oct 27, 2016 |
...this YEAR to date from January 2016, and 221 jobs delivered. I also worked with 4 new customers this year (all through proz.com), but for a negligible total amount.
30 different customers since September 2010, and 1573 jobs delivered.
I invoice between 3 and 7 customers each month.
From Sept 2010, the 10 top customers account for 93% of my turnover.
From January 2016, the 10 top customers account for 99.5% of my turnover.
Virtually all... See more ...this YEAR to date from January 2016, and 221 jobs delivered. I also worked with 4 new customers this year (all through proz.com), but for a negligible total amount.
30 different customers since September 2010, and 1573 jobs delivered.
I invoice between 3 and 7 customers each month.
From Sept 2010, the 10 top customers account for 93% of my turnover.
From January 2016, the 10 top customers account for 99.5% of my turnover.
Virtually all of them are agencies.
I've always had very few customers taking over most of my working hours, but they change over time. When one sends me less work for a period of time, another one (existing or new) will emerge and gradually take up the working time left available.
Philippe ▲ Collapse
| | | | Samuel Murray
Niederlande
Local time: 18:27
Mitglied (2006)
Englisch > Afrikaans
+ ...
Juliano Martins wrote:
Do you know your statistics?
I did a quick count for 2016.
Number of distinct clients:
Jan: 21 clients
Feb: 23 clients
Mar: 21 clients
Apr: 21 clients
May: 25 clients
Jun: 26 clients
Jul: 14 clients
Aug: 23 clients
Sep: 17 clients
Number of distinct clients:
2016 so far: 71
Number of "jobs":
2016 so far: 1387
However, from my single largest client (a multinational agency) I had jobs from 65 individual PMs, which leads me to think that perhaps there is a case for counting the individual departments of agencies as distinct clients.
Client spread:
1-3 jobs per client: 48 clients
4-10 jobs per client: 18 clients
11-25 jobs per client: 10 clients
40-50 jobs per client: 4 clients
367 jobs per client: 1 client (approx 10 PMs) (pays low rates with no minimums)
510 jobs per client: 1 client (65 PMs) (pays medium rates with low minimums)
[Edited at 2016-10-27 08:28 GMT]
| | | | | A handful of good regular clients and a LARGE number of occasional ones | Oct 27, 2016 |
To counter the effect described by Dan Lucas, I have a few good regular clients and a lot of smaller ones. I would be quite seriously affected if I lost one in particular, and I did lose my first major client when the company went bankrupt. I was luckier than many colleagues and got away with a scare.
Since then I have had several good clients whom I have missed when they disappeared... but not so much financially. Others have always filled the gap. However, some of them have provi... See more To counter the effect described by Dan Lucas, I have a few good regular clients and a lot of smaller ones. I would be quite seriously affected if I lost one in particular, and I did lose my first major client when the company went bankrupt. I was luckier than many colleagues and got away with a scare.
Since then I have had several good clients whom I have missed when they disappeared... but not so much financially. Others have always filled the gap. However, some of them have provided up to 50% of my earnings while they lasted.
There is a middle range who come and go, typically small agencies and colleagues who normally translate in the opposite language pair (English to Danish), but occasionally are asked for translations into English. These are high-value clients in proportion to their size, but the volume of work they send me fluctuates considerably.
Over the years I have worked for a very large number of one-off clients or clients who only return very sporadically. These may be good while they last - a whole academic book, followed by some research papers in one case, but then the client disappeared again. Academics move to different posts or projects, and their translation needs change...
I invoice about 8 - 10 clients a month. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Sheila Wilson
Spanien
Local time: 17:27
Mitglied (2007)
Englisch
+ ...
| My readily available statistics: | Oct 27, 2016 |
2012 to the present day is easiest for me, as that's the period I've been here in Spain, for which I redesigned things a bit.
7/2012 - 10/2016
# different clients invoiced: 57 (only 6 based in Spain)
# different countries invoiced: 26
Average # invoices per month: 5 (3 to 10 typically. I almost always invoice clients monthly)
Year 2015
Major clients (>10% of annual income): 4
Other clients: 18, of which:
One-off clients: 8
Repe... See more 2012 to the present day is easiest for me, as that's the period I've been here in Spain, for which I redesigned things a bit.
7/2012 - 10/2016
# different clients invoiced: 57 (only 6 based in Spain)
# different countries invoiced: 26
Average # invoices per month: 5 (3 to 10 typically. I almost always invoice clients monthly)
Year 2015
Major clients (>10% of annual income): 4
Other clients: 18, of which:
One-off clients: 8
Repeat clients: 10
Of the total number of clients I've worked with since 2012, probably about 15 are translation agencies who commission work for their clients. None of the agencies I collaborate with are the big ones that have continually changing PMs. I've tried several but it never works out well in the long run.
Some of my work with agencies is translating/editing their own marketing materials, so they're actually then my direct clients, confusingly enough.
I also do a lot of work for marketing or communications agencies and e-commerce portals. So, they have clients but they aren't translation agencies - not sure where they would fit in.
Then there are the real direct clients. Most of them are companies, a good number are fellow professionals, and a few are private individuals (self-publishers, academics and CV owners in the main). ▲ Collapse
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| How Many Clients? | Oct 27, 2016 |
Off the top of my head, I would say half a dozen. Then again, one of them happens to be the Japanese Government, from whom I regularly get work from at least a dozen ministries. Within those ministries as well, I am getting work from perhaps 25 different departments. Just thinking about it sometimes makes my head hurt. It is rather depressing when you CC 35 people on a project only for everyone of them to respond to you individually.  ... See more Off the top of my head, I would say half a dozen. Then again, one of them happens to be the Japanese Government, from whom I regularly get work from at least a dozen ministries. Within those ministries as well, I am getting work from perhaps 25 different departments. Just thinking about it sometimes makes my head hurt. It is rather depressing when you CC 35 people on a project only for everyone of them to respond to you individually.  ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Maybe OT, but this has been boggling my mind since I see the phrase "work for" | Oct 27, 2016 |
Why do people say "work for" an agency? Shouldn't they be saying "work with" or "collaborate with"
Work for sounds like you're an employee of that company, and I'm pretty sure you 're not a full time employee, but a freelancer.
My stance is that you and the clients are on the same ball field. Why make distintictions as if the client is superior than you?
| | | | Sheila Wilson
Spanien
Local time: 17:27
Mitglied (2007)
Englisch
+ ...
| Clients within clients | Oct 27, 2016 |
James Hodges wrote:
one of them happens to be the Japanese Government, from whom I regularly get work from at least a dozen ministries. Within those ministries as well, I am getting work from perhaps 25 different departments. Just thinking about it sometimes makes my head hurt.
I've been working with a big Swiss NGO for years that's a bit like that (but on a rather smaller scale, thankfully). Each department wants its own invoice, of course. The real hassle with them is that I need to sign each invoice - that means printing it, signing it, scanning it back in. A real pain.
What embarrasses me is that sometimes I simply can't remember who's who. At least two women have got married and changed their names, and at least two share the same first name. Fortunately, I don't have any phone contact with them so I don't have to know in an instant what we've discussed before.
@ Yasutomo: You're right, it is an important distinction. I dare say I make the mistake occasionally on paper, but never in my head. We can't afford to think like employees. I do say "I do work for" though (just to complicate things  ).
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