The most expensive question in freelancing
“When can you start?” gets answered with a guess, and the guess costs you either weekends or work. Here is how to calculate it instead.
Freshlance4 min read
Every freelance engagement begins with the same question, and almost nobody answers it accurately. A client asks when you can start. You glance at a calendar that shows meetings rather than workload, think about the three things currently on your plate, and produce a number that feels defensible.
Both kinds of wrong are expensive
Guess too early and you have promised time you do not have. The work still gets done, but it gets done on a Saturday, or by shortchanging another client who then notices.
Guess too late and you lose the job to someone who answered faster. Worse, you never find out that you had the capacity all along.
The data already exists
You know roughly how many hours each active project has left. You know roughly how many hours of real billable work you get through in a day. Those two numbers are all you need: remaining hours divided by daily hours, walked forward across the calendar while skipping the days you do not work.
The reason nobody does this by hand is not difficulty, it is staleness. A spreadsheet is accurate on the day you build it and wrong a week later. So the calculation has to be derived rather than stored, recomputed every time you look at it.
What changes when you know
You quote start dates with confidence. You spot the overcommitment before you agree to it rather than after. And you can put the number on a booking page and let clients pick from dates you can actually honour, which removes an entire email thread from every new engagement.