A public servant who's turning freelance: the money matter.

In the afternoon I performed my second UK pitch. This time it was about the project 'Inside/Outside - UoR wants you connected'. I felt comfortable, and confident enough to pledge for it. P. - the person I spoke with - was sympathetic and appreciative about the content of the website, the visual research I made and the results. Then, we mentioned money and I think I handled it badly. We started talking about £10.000 per year (10 hours/week), but we ended with something like 'anyway it has been already set up, we should simply use it'.

So, P. was willing to negotiate, but probably I gave him the impression that I was willing to offer my ideas for free, which is fundamentally true. Bad, bad, bad. However, nothing has been defined; P. asked me to write a report to highlight the advantages of the website, and I inserted some reference to the revenue models and the structure of costs. It is now clear that even if I sold it cheap, it still has a monetary value. Let's see if I was effective enough to bring the money back on the table.

Talking about compensation has never been totally my thing, especially now that I am on training, and consequently not a skillful professional of the cultural sector. Moreover, for the last 8 years I have been a public servant with fixed wage and no pressure (or opportunity) to negotiate money. In all this reinventing my self process, I need also to put in place a strategy to overcome money-related issues. As a start, I downloaded 'Accounting for non accountant students'; at least I will know the difference between financial account and management account.