[Eric Munch]

Thanks to all who responded! It is very much appreciated.

So it seems that the obvious way forward is to get more clients and move on as soon as it’s feasible.

Bob, your post was actually my favorite! I had a pretty good idea before posting, but I honestly appreciate it coming from someone that knows what they’re talking about. I certainly do not want to go get a day job! We do have other clients, but they make up a small percentage of the total work. This will be my number one priority. Maybe by next year’s time I can be making $1000 per minute as Todd mentioned!

Also, thanks Mark for the Grinders article tip. Great read.

In response to Brian’s post about streamlining the work and cutting down the amount of hours – The problem is that over the last couple of years I’ve worked as hard as I could to deliver the best product possible. Now that I consider myself far more experienced and have been delivering pretty darn good products, it’s difficult to suddenly do a lesser job. Even though I have gotten much faster (when I started I was doing a project a month, now it’s three or four), if you include capturing, editing, researching and finding all appropriate media and music to make an interesting piece, color correction, motion graphics, audio mixing, green screen rendering, DVD encoding and menu design – and 7 months of revisions (haha), some of these projects have easily added up to 100 hours of time. Having said that, if the tables were turned I’d probably be saying the same thing…

Mike – Without contracts the amount of work has sometimes (often) gotten out of hand. It has been paying the rent, but I’d love to see a little more daylight than I currently do. I am working out a contract template for all future work. Hopefully this will put a stop to these open-ended situations, at least until I can find other/better clients.

Again, thanks to everyone who posted. This forum is a great resource!