Freelancer Profile: Poco People

Today we’re chatting with Poco People – Kelly Eijdenberg and Travis Tiddy – about starting up, gearing up and keeping up with their clients.

We love the Poco People for a couple of reasons. First, they’re a booming partnership (and we love partnerships) with a beautiful folio. Second, they’ve been using Paydirt from the start, log their time with sniper accuracy, and have always taken the time to give us feedback to improve Paydirt for themselves and everyone one else.

You guys are a duo. Why did you choose a partnership over working alone, or in a larger team?

Working solo and in a family studio for five years, we were both accustomed to the ins and outs of microbusiness. In order to step things up a notch, we decided that it was time to get out of the home studio environment and share a studio together downtown.
 
There are so many benefits to sharing the workload with someone else – you need somebody to bounce ideas off! Peer review quickly became a normal and really valuable part of our process. Also if you are unwell, or need to take some time off, there is somebody there to cover for you.
 
In terms of larger teams, we’ve worked with two or three collaborators on various projects, but we can’t fit any more people in our office 🙂

Your business is relatively young, but you’ve always got your hands full. How did you land so much work in so little time?

We were super organized. By the time we opened the doors we had a business plan, a bank account, a loan, all of the necessary equipment, a live website and 500 brochures mailed out to existing and prospective clients. We trialled Paydirt two months beforehand, to ensure that we would have a reliable time-keeping system ready when we hit the ground running.
 
In Tasmania word of mouth is very important, and once you earn the respect and trust of a client there is a good chance that a lot more work will flow your way. We’ve been really lucky to not have any dry spells since we started up the business, which can happen to any studio, regardless of size.

Why do you guys log your time so diligently? What are the benefits?

Time is money and it is absolutely crucial to keep a tight rein on all of our jobs so that we can improve the accuracy of our cost estimations and so that we can keep our heads above the water financially – budgeting accurately is critical in our first year of business.
 
Ironically, using a poor time-keeping system can meaning wasting hours trying to record and calculate your projects. The beauty of Paydirt is that you don’t need to think about it and you can get on with the job. We spend a lot of time on the phone and we record every conversation – whether it goes for two minutes or half an hour. Regardless of whether we charge for that or not, that information gives us a much more accurate reading than trying to guesstimate how much time we might have spent on a particular project. Our biggest risk is underquoting for a job and landing ourselves in a financially dangerous situation, or over-quoting and losing jobs and potentially damaging our reputation. Paydirt helps us minimize that risk, which is why we dig it so much.
 
We are also both passionate volunteers, so we know how critical it is to find the right balance between paid and pro bono work. The only way to achieve that balance is to understand your actual time contribution versus the perceived, and then you can start to manage that.

Give us your top business tip to share with budding young creatives.

For us it helped to set a financial target for our first year of business. With few overheads, our expected business expenses were easy to anticipate. Before we started we recorded 3 months of personal expenses to forecast our required income, and then worked out how many billable hours per day we would each need to clock in order to meet those expenses.
 
We really don’t like accounting, but our best advice for start up creatives is to put that effort in initially to get a good picture of what your new business might look like. Then you can be realistic about hourly rates, pro bono work, annual leave and all of those tedious things – and you don’t have to stress about the unknown.
 
A lot of people said to us, “Wow, you’re keen starting a business in the middle of a recession”, so we’ve been especially motivated to prove them wrong!