For a long while, I’ve held the (slightly) controversial opinion that if you’re the victim of a regular ghosting in your freelance business, then it’s your own fault.

Note that the operative word there is ‘regular‘, before you chase me with your fiery sticks and besmirch me as a traitor to the freelancer cause.

I’m not saying that being ghosted is ever deserved or in any way fair, but I reckon I’ve got a fairly strong point when I say that if you repeatedly get beaten with the same ghosting stick in business, then there’s more than a strong chance that you’re actively inviting yourself to be struck by that spectre. “Once hitten…“, or something like that.

As we all know by now, a key part of running a business that will make you money and bring you joy, is learning. Adapting, changing, improving… or at least recognising that those elements will at some point need to take place if shit things (like ghosting) are going to happen to you. And they WILL happen to you at some point in your freelance career. Mark my beautifully articulated words, my friends. There have been times in my own business where I’ve made more mistakes than money, and so in writing this blog, it’s in the hope that it will stop the same shit from happening to my peers. Freelancing is already hard enough, so I’m here to hopefully help, even if you still hate me because of that opening sentence.

If I remember rightly, my initial personal experiences of ghosting occurred post work submission. In other words, the time to get to know the client was taken and the work was completed (impeccably, of course), but the cash never came at the end. Four times this happened to me, and each time, I would chase, and stress, and cry, and panic, and feel ashamed. Yep, four times I strapped my shoes on for that dance, until I finally realised that whilst there was no way I could ever delete the painful anguish, claw back the wasted time, or magic up the missing money, there was a way I could at least stop it from happening again.

I began to charge up front.

This is in no way a revolutionary take, but for some reason, it’s still a tricky and even taboo subject for many of my freelancer peers, who just can’t seem to face the conversation or understand the transaction. That’s kind of irrelevant here, though, because on this occasion, I’m not here to bang that drum. I’ll write a blog about the sensibilities of charging up front another time.

The ghost story I have for you on this occasion is more around the ghosting that takes place after a freelancer (such as my good self) ‘hops on a call’ with a potential client…

(I note that my fellow freelancers will know this story all too well, and so if you’re a potential client of one, having contacted one of us to solve any or all of your business problems for you, this blog is a well-timed tale for you.)

I say ‘hop on a call’ like it really is that joyous and easy. In truth, it’s more likely that in trying to win you over and win the work, the freelancer you’ve approached has worked around your diary and danced to your tune to make it happen. Fair enough, I hear you say, but it’s still a point well made that this call is still less a hop and more a leap towards solving your problem, seeing as in joining you on that call your freelancer is already giving you something of their guidance, thoughts, and ideas to help you on your way.

With those things in mind, I’ll happily shout loudly that when that same freelancer goes on to write up their thoughts, put a price on a proposal, and give you a start date they’ll have taken time to look for (or make) in their diary, it’s a bit shit if you don’t even bother coming back to them to say “thanks but no thanks“, don’t you think?

(Fun fact, I had an email last month from a potential client who left it FOUR YEARS before replying to my proposal. I shit you not. DM me for the screenshot.)

Now, we know that you have options when it comes to choosing who you want to proceed with in a working relationship, and we respect an open market of choice as well as your right to prioritise what’s most important to you (price, availability, moral compass etc). We’re not expecting everyone to say “Yes” to working with us, but even though we don’t love hearing “No”, it’s still better than not hearing anything at all.

As a consumer, you don’t owe anyone your custom.

As a business professional, you don’t owe anyone a justification if you don’t choose to work with them (though it’d be helpful).

As a decent human being, however… what you do owe is thanks for a freelancer’s time – or at the very least, a message of some sort that gives them the ‘no’ they need to move onwards.

I fell foul a long time ago of these no-show nos, and as a result, to stop it happening… I made a change.

I stopped hopping.

(I stopped taking calls).

This came quite quickly after my similar announcement that I was “never meeting for a coffee”. I’m delighted to say I was an early (pre-Covid) adopter – if not a pioneer – of that particular movement, in understanding very early on that meeting a total stranger face to face in an overpriced coffee house was a shocker of a way to spend one’s business time, when the only guarantee was that it was going to leave you out of pocket and nursing a caffeine headache.

This decision never to ‘hop on a call’ anymore may have seemed a tad ridiculous to my peers, and I’m the first to admit it’s had its limitations. At that time, however, I was working my arse off to establish myself online – mainly through LinkedIn – so that anyone who fancied working with me would feel not only like they already knew me and what I could do for them, but that they also understood clearly the ways in which I worked and delivered. I may have turned down a number of hop-ons in that time (that sounds wrong, I apologise), but I also enjoyed a steady stream of people contacting me with messages that simply said, “When can we start?”

Let’s flash forward to LinkedIn in 2024, however. Two things have come into play. The first is that LinkedIn has became a saturated shit show of ‘PLEASE NOTICE ME’ content, where finding an killer post from an articulate author is like trying to find nutritional value in a Chicken and Mushroom Pot Noodle. The second is that, thanks to the first, I have no desire to spend any more time on there than I absolutely have to, and therefore my LinkedIn marketing strategy just is not the vehicle to drive my business forward.

As a result, fewer ‘new’ people know who I am on there.

The upside, however, is that my mental health has improved significantly. Social media is a vacuous suckhole, is it not, dear friends.

The result of this LinkedIn shift was that I had to start actually talking to people, and in the absence of ever wanting to go to a networking event, calls needed to be once again hopped upon.

And so, each time I hopped, I had to hope I wouldn’t find myself going above and beyond (I can’t help it) before ultimately going on to get ghosted.

It was never going to be a flawless strategy, but as time has gone on, I’ve been careful to put systems in place to protect my sanity as well as my business processes. There’s a significant element of pre-qualification before I’ll agree to any calls, and I’m never going into any of them entirely altruistically. This isn’t the case for the majority of freelancers, though, who I know for a fact give their absolute everything on all of those calls. I used to think it was because they wanted to win the work, but it’s so much more than that. Freelancers do what they do because they genuinely want to help, and because they take pride in what they do because they’re quite simply great at it.

So, this blog is to remind you that what you do after that call has ended and the proposal has been read, is an opportunity for you to show your business professionalism, at the very least.

You see, not only has your freelancer taken time to talk to you and submit a proposal to you, they’re likely holding further time in their diary for you, in the hope that you simply cannot wait to get started working with them.

“No thank you” is good manners if you fancy using them, but even a “No” on it’s own is a good start.

We might not deserve a Yes, but if that’s the case, we absolutely always deserve a No.