Four kinds of client

A freelance animator in Dubai draws in a soft, hand-made style, and after a few years she has started sorting the people who hire her by two questions. Are they large or small? And do they want her, or just someone who can animate?

Large clients who just want animation are the steady ones. Studios with long series to fill, explainer films, frames needed by the thousand. The specification is fixed, the price is the going rate, and being better than the specification earns her nothing. They can fill her week, and their invoices usually clear.

Large clients who want her particularly are scarce. A studio that has seen something in her drawing nobody else offers and will pay properly to get it. She can count them on one hand. When one appears, it is worth a great deal of care.

Then there are the small clients who want just animation. Most of her enquiries come from here. A small business that wants the cheapest possible clip, in a hurry, and then changes the script three times after the drawing is done. They behave like a large buyer without the volume and like a small one without the loyalty. However pleasant they are, the sensible answer is a polite no.

Which leaves the fourth kind. The small client who has listened to her work and wants exactly that. A children's author, a musician with a particular sound, a family business telling its own story. They pay her rate without arguing, and they receive more than the invoice says, because she cares about the result.

Those clients exist in every city and every trade. They are much easier to find when you decide they are who you are looking for, rather than taking whoever arrives.

And easier still when what you offer is genuinely yours, the thing they could not get by hiring the next name on the list.