Over the Hills

I’ve written hundreds of columns about Curio City Online over the past 13 years. I haven’t been posting much lately, because what more is there to say? A year ago Blue Hills Editorial Services crept into my blog. Since then, my focus has shifted almost entirely to Blue Hills; last week I removed Curio City from my voicemail message, since I had already stopped returning most phone calls. You want to order a $10 thing but you’re afraid of the internet? I’m sorry. Back in the day, I would have taken 20 minutes to call you and enter the order for you, but the time and aggravation aren’t worth the $2 that I would pocket anymore.

Yesterday I completed a $3,000 editing assignment for a new client (who will almost surely have more work for me). It took me roughly 80 hours over three weeks. When sales are average, Curio City takes four months to pay me $3,000…and sales are (unsurprisingly) running well below average. If Blue Hills can eventually land one project like that each month, I’ll be on easy street.

Most of my clients are corporate, but I do some work for individuals as well...if you ever need writing or editing help, have a gander at our website. I wish I'd made this transition nine years ago, when Curio City first started to stumble. But I have a lifelong habit of riding out doomed situations for too long, mostly because I hate change, and Curio’s fate wasn’t unavoidable until two years ago.
 
Blue Hills has no overhead; 85% of its revenue goes to payroll. Curio City is nearly the opposite; 80% of revenue is lost to overhead. So why is it even still in business? 

Curio income arrives in advance -- shoppers pay when they check out, before I fill their orders. Blue Hills, again, is the opposite. Some clients pay on acceptance, some pay on publication (when they themselves get paid). My most regular customer’s small jobs only rack up $50 or $75 each; it takes me a month or longer just to reach their minimum $200 billing threshold. They then have 30 days from the invoice date to pay, and they are routinely late. I'm still waiting for a $200 check for work that I did in December and billed in January. I won’t see the $3,000 for the project that I turned in yesterday until the first week of May, at the soonest. Curio City reliably pays me at least some pittance every two weeks. 

Corporate clients always pay up eventually. Individuals are chancier. If someone flat out refuses to pay, there’s nothing I can do. That hasn’t happened yet, but it’s a hazard of the freelance business.  It's not like I have a battery of lawyers standing behind me. Unions are not a thing in the gig economy. 

Long delays in payment are okay as long as the pipeline stays full – being owed money well into the future is fine as long as you also have previously-owed money coming in now. Blue Hills isn't steady enough to provide that yet, and will never be entirely reliable: the five-figure project that I was expecting in April got canceled this year because the client’s grant didn’t come through, and they figured out that they could do it in-house. 

So Blue Hills’s success is not written in the stars, although it’s promising. Curio City’s just a matter of managing decline. I think that I can do that gracefully, much as Obama managed America’s decline for eight years, but I can’t rule out a chaotic and catastrophic failure, such as the US is undergoing now.