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Life As a Freelancer and Consultant – The Good and Bad

May 29, 2009 By Jesse Petersen

There are far more perks to being a small business owner than downsides, in my opinion. I can take a day and sluff off if I don’t feel well or need to run errands. Doctor’s appointments were always making me have to make up my hours when I was an employee, but forget that life now.

For me, the two worst parts (and really the only bad parts about my line of work) of a job are:

  1. Getting to the estimate part of the deal and waiting for either a) death by shock, b) complete rejection and instant counter-offer (sheeah, that works), or c) an elated new client
  2. Finishing the work and shooting out the invoice with a nice “thank you” in the “notes” field and see what comes of it

Thus far my experience has been overwhelmingly positive with only one non-payer who will get their site unlocked once they pay, one who seems to continually misunderstand the scope of the project and wants $3000 worth of work for $800, and one who offered me baby clothes as an exchange for my skills. I’m still in the early stages of figuring out my billing and deposit system, since I don’t think many of my clients quite feel comfortable with a full-prepay for jobs under $3000 yet, but I do insist on my first hour of consulting and site work for new clients ahead of time and have great results with that by billing exact time after that first hour.

Here is a video that will really make you empathize with freelancers everywhere:

Filed Under: Business, Customer Service, Featured, Funny Friday, Humor, Video Tagged With: barter, begging, consulting, freelance

Read the Fine Print, and Don’t Forget About It

May 4, 2009 By Jesse Petersen

What!?Let’s set the stage for a tale of a 3-hour tour I took today. Imagine you have a physically and medically exhausting genetic condition that necessitates 16+ specialist visits per year, well over $2k/mo in prescription medications, and a PPO insurance plan that is just shy of costing the same as a second mortgage. Now imagine you just received a letter in the mail from your health insurance company that informs you that your recent doctor’s visit was not covered due to said condition and that no expenses due to said condition will be covered for the first year after enrollment in the plan.

My wife and I are complete and total medical opposites; she’s only been to the ER once, can count her lifetime usage of antibiotics on one hand, and doesn’t even like doctors. Every fiber of me wanted that for one year. Just one year.

That’s not exactly true, though, because there were fibers that were upset with the insurance, upset that I’d left my office job, upset that I might have chosen the wrong insurance plan, and upset that I am not independently wealthy to pay for my own condition by the age of 30. Okay, the last one was ridiculous, but those fibers were there, too.

After two hours of discussion our options and mentally and emotionally preparing to call my old boss, I looked up our plan details since our paperwork didn’t mention anything about that clause. After 20 minutes of searching, I found the page that states that prior creditable coverage within 63 days of enrollment waives the exclusion.

Shoot, we didn’t have any lapse at all! What gives!?

A quick call to customer service and I was in touch with a rep. within 3 minutes. I told her about the letter and that we had continuous coverage with them for the last 9 years, and wondered if that didn’t count as “creditable” coverage. She immediately saw my previous plans with starting and ending dates and was prompt to apologize for any inconvenience and anguish the letter had caused.

Now THAT’S customer service!

The company?

Aetna.

Filed Under: Customer Service, Personal Tagged With: Aetna, coverage, health insurance, HIPAA, insurance, pre-existing condition

We Aren’t Criminals, Sam’s Club

May 1, 2009 By Jesse Petersen

sams-club-logoBack in June of 2007, I wrote about a guy who was tired of being stopped at the door of Sam’s Club in “Sir, May I See Your Receipt?” I normally don’t mind the procedure too much, but two of the last two times at our Sam’s Club has brought down my hammer upon their heads.

A month ago we were stopped at the door like everyone else, and she nicely pointed out that they had not rung up one of our stacks of drinks. How they missed an entire stack, I don’t know, so we walked right up to the customer service counter and ran another receipt for them. Yesterday was on an entirely different level.

The finger-pointer counted our items, looked at the receipt, and then counted the items again. And again. And again. Seriously, four times! And then she pulled out a man-sized set of kahones and asked us if we had another receipt for our items. /blink, blink… NO! She put our receipt on a bin by the door and told us to go to the counter and pay for our missing items: 48 cans of Fanta Orange… on the top of all of the other items. Not like we paid for our cart and pushed 300-400 lbs of drinks ALL the FRIGGIN’ way back to the BACK WALL of the store to grab $14.21 of additional drinks after we already dropped $131. If we’re good for that much, I think we can scrape up enough for 2 more cases, lady.

So we stood in line right there in front of her growing line of other suspected criminals, as if we’d done something wrong, for a full three minutes before deciding to go through checkout again. Getting there, we realized we didn’t have a receipt for the rest of the stuff, so I had to convince the clerk that I just needed two cases rung up (I’m sure the receipt Nazi would stop us if we tried to exit with a receipt showing two items, dude).

Arriving back at the exit, she grabbed our receipt as I told her I didn’t appreciate having to communicate to the checkout guy that I’d already paid for the rest of it but that you were holding on to our proof, for some reason. *Duct tape your head now, last warning* She pointed at the “customer service” counter and said we could have just gone there. We both turned around and I pointed and exclaimed in a pretty pissed off tone that those people had been in line ahead of us the whole time and were still standing there.

“Oh, sorry.”

Filed Under: Common Sense, Customer Service, Personal Tagged With: checkout, rant, receipt, Sam's Club, security