Ranch Road Writing

Freelancing through recession: How our puniness protects.

We freelancers are prone to posing. We blithely assume such titles as President, CEO, Founder and the like, when our only subordinates are ourselves, difficult as we may be to supervise. We regularly buttress our business identities with names suggestive of manpower and resources we do not possess. And we tend to pretend to office acreage, when we in fact work steps from our kitchen, usually without shoes on. All in the name of ambition, success, and a general sense of grownupness we feel we might otherwise lack.

Which is all in good fun in the long run, unless we begin believing our pretensions. For example, a fellow freelance writer recently attributed a slowdown in his business to the recession. As the marketplace stutters and stumbles, he was poised to be as affected as the next major enterprise, say Merrill Lynch and Pulte Homes, for example.

But before we take the big fall with the big boys, let’s look at some numbers. $13.8 trillion was the US gross domestic product in 2007 (according to Wikipedia). That’s $13,800,000,000,000. Recession means that number fails to grow for two successive quarters and even declines. Could you still carve out a decent living if that number somehow dropped to say, $13,500,000,000,000? Would there be anything left for you and your enterprise? I think so.

Of course we’d rather see a booming economy, but no one is better positioned to thrive in an economic downturn than freelancers. We’re flexible, with no one to redirect or retrain for new markets but ourselves (assuming we’ll cooperate with that pompous President/CEO/Chairman.) Low overhead—at least until Starbucks raises its rents. And the attendant corporate downsizing means more work for us!

We’re simply too puny to be affected by such economic indicators. This may hurt us in the delusions of grandeur department, but its great news for our cash flow, which we can always spend on upgraded letterhead and business cards to compensate.