A professional, businessy type question for you

[ansonjew]

Hopefully some of you more experienced freelancers can help me with this question.
I'm kinda new to freelancing, and I frequently come upon this situation:

You get a call from a reputable company saying they need some work done this week and ask you to email some samples and they will call you back the next day. No sooner than you've sent off the email, you get another call from another company wanting to know about your availability for the week. What do you tell them? In short, what do you do when fact that you got two calls leaves you with the possibility of getting neither job? Its weird, this seems to be the rule rather than the exception for me; I'll go a long time without getting any calls, and when they come, they all come at the same time. It's frustrating!


Anson

[Lono]

no shit man.. when it rains it pours for me too.

theres no real answer to your question other than, weigh the two deals out to what would best suit your personal situation.
if moneys most important, go for the better paying gig,, if time is more important,, etc. if you think your a machine do them both ang give up your social life for a bit. its just like the hunt.. if it takes you a week to track down a beast that will feed your family for a month, you have to do it,, because you cant count on making such a kill consistantly. so kill as much as you can if the oppertunity is there. thats my philosophy.

-Lono

[mcotie]

take em both, draw fast!

[Jason Manley]

and give some parts of it to mcotie or another friend on the site if you cant get it all done. he can draw the hands and feet or you can do all the heads...divide it up and in the end make it look bad ass. the easiest way to keep it unified is for one to do the prelims and another to finish them. I used to do team murals in art school and you would be surprised how much work two people can get done.

if you cant do it yourself of course.


but...i will say this...dont take more than can be possibly done. small success is better than failure big.



j

[Erik]

It's the same with me too: either no work or too much work. Ok, that's in webdesign though, not in conceptart...

Choose the coolest one and tell the other that you can do it next week. Or the one that pays most in case you need the money.

I think that it's better to be honest to your client about your schedule and to do one piece at the time so you can reach quality. In design related issues never let the quality suffer if you can avoid it because it will always hurt your reputation.

Besides, being dishonest with a client about delivery schedules usually has you talk to them for hours to set stuff right later... Something you defintely don't want!