When someone is looking for freelancers, potential clients often apply the same logic for hiring a new employee or an on-site contractor. You can tell once you begin to hear things like:

• “We need you full time”
• “You need to be available during typical work hours”
• “We need you dedicated only to this project”

This is problematic thinking but, I don’t think it’s intentional. It’s a skill to learn to work with freelancers, most of which revolved around communication. In short, you are a shared resource while most people are used to having a dedicated resource.

I often find myself educating people on the differences. After I explain to them the differences, I not only let them know, I let them know it’s in their favor. By being a freelancer you’re exposed to a bigger network through other clients.

Not to mention, It’s good marketing to let them know you’re in demand.

It’s also absolutely expected for a freelancer to have multiple clients. If you don’t, then someone could jump to negative assumptions as to why you are clientless. When you do have other clients, the first thing that comes to mind is “clearly others see value from this person…”.

The main concern from a client perspective is your available time to work on their project. Obviously, they want it done in a timely manner and want to plan for it. A simple response and fix to that would be:

“I have other projects going at the moment but, I can allocate 25 hours to this one. If you need more I can adjust for more bandwidth”

That will show you have a level of control on your time and they can assume the same bandwidth cap or something similar is placed on other clients. Be sure to tell them upfront to give transparency and prevent any confusion!