How to juggle multiple clients as a solopreneur

The number of clients you take on directly impacts your income, but more clients also means more complexity.

[Photo: Ilona/Adobe Stock]

Anna Burgess Yang is the author of Work Better, a newsletter about the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck.

At any given time, I’m juggling multiple clients. That means I’m juggling context for multiple projects, background information on various companies, and a lot of deadlines. Some of my clients give me a steady stream of work each month, while others pop in with a request every few weeks. 

Whether you’re coaching, doing creative work, or have long-term retainers, most solopreneurs eventually find themselves managing multiple clients simultaneously. The number of clients you take on directly impacts your income, but more clients also means more complexity. 

In my corporate life, I worked as a product manager at a software company. Even though my work is very different now, much of the project management follows the same basic concepts. 

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Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more, visit workbetter.media.

When running a solo business, you need to estimate your capacity, plan for future work, and not lose track of 100 moving parts. 

Think in slots, not hours

If you can’t accurately assess your bandwidth, you run the risk of overpromising and underdelivering (or working some really long hours). 

Rather than trying to track hours across overlapping projects, I break my week into client “slots”: blocks of time dedicated to a single client or deliverable. I have three or four slots available per week. One slot equals one deliverable. My slot is an entire workday, but you might do half-days if you need to spend time on smaller chunks of client projects. 

Slots give you a visual map of your capacity. When a new request or deadline comes in, you’re not guessing whether you can fit it in. You look for your next available open “slot” (or multiple slots, if the project needs to be done over several days). 

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