Bill H wrote:
We are at the beginning of a period of abrupt economic slowdown, which will eventually be over. In the interim, businesses from Nadine's Ice Cream Shop to Walmart are dealing with the issues involving remote work. Nearly every freelancer knows how to do this, and how to manage it - including a remote workforce - because we live it every day.
I encourage freelancers to reach out to past clients and offer to help with learning how to do this. You can offer general advice for free, or you can offer specific advice for a fee. And if you do charge, you're not profiting off misery. You're helping your clients keep their businesses. The good clients will acknowledge this, and the great ones may have already reached out to you.
If you have the skills and experience (some of us do), you can propose to come back once the crisis is past, assess what worked and what didn't, and help the client create a business continuity and disaster recovery plan. This is the exact situation where companies with plans are likely to survive, and those without are more likely to fail.
Bill, I don't believe in giving unsolicited advice, I really don't. Especially when such advice is not absolutely necessary.
The services I offer are clearly listed on my profile.
As soon as client feels the need to have me do some work for them, they know where to find me.
But I won't harass them with advice and lectures on stuff they probably already know.
For instance I might advise my client that they need to sack their CEO and a whole lot more people in the company and become a remote-only team lol.
Which will garner quite some backlash and they'll then altogether stop giving me even the work they used to.
Faced with an economic crisis due to the pandemic, my client knows what to do.
I won't be the one peddling advice at them. Maybe Upwork can give them high-level advice on remote work (Upwork recently published a lot of marketing content inspired by the pandemic). But not me.
