My WORST Project Experience in Freelance Data Analysis

My WORST Project Experience as a Freelance Data Analyst!
Over 15 years of experience in freelance data-related work offered plenty of opportunities for various experiences. This was my worst project to date. Video includes a plot twist and lessons learned. Looking forward to your comments!
Thumbnail image credit to DeeKay on giphy.com
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[@hanswurst4728]

This sounds utterly familiar. I'm also a sociologist who specialized in quantitative methods and after university became self employed with a colleague. We mainly did quantitative evaluations of change processes in companies so the data quality was never an issue because we always designed and administered our surveys as computer assisted web interviews ourselves. But we started out during our times as students where we conducted quantitative analysis for medical and pedagogics phd students for a few bucks so i've seen a fair share of bad data. They basically came to us with their excel sheets in hand containing some trash data and told us, that their first or second reviser wants them to also have "something quantitative" in their thesis.
On the topic of fixed prices: I'd say around 95% of all our projects were fixed price projects. Especially in the beginning this led to some major self exploitation because we needed the money and more importantly, the word of mouth, to get us off the ground. So we took projects where we developed a questionnaire, programmed the questionnaire, tested the questionnaire, administered the survey, cleaned the data, analized the data, wrote a report and presented the findings for around 5k€. Somehow 5k is the magical amount where you legally don't have to invite tenders in Germany so it took us quite a while to breach that barrier. I'd probably have had a better hourly rate if i'd have collected bottles over the span of these projects. Later on we were able to bump up the prices and were payed for each project phase which i'd highly recommend anybody because projects can span over several months and it's nice to have some cash flow.
Rareley we stepped away from projects but we did when clients had unrealistic visions. I think it's better to pass on a project if you already know that the client and you will not be satisfied with the results.

[@StatistikinDD]

Thanks a ton for this comment. Excel sheets, "something quantitative", self exploitation ... all too familiar. Your remark about collecting bottles is hard to swallow. Sometimes it's part of building something, I guess. Glad to read you broke the barrier. I also experienced the cash flow challenge. To people starting out self-employed, I'd strongly recommend having a financial cushion, even if you lend money initially for that. Projects and money tend to come in waves rather than continually.
Still self-employed? All the best!

[@ricardito777]

Thank you very much for this video! I am at the starting stage of my career and have only done data analysis from within a large corporation. However, there were many aspects of your experience that I could relate to like inheriting code and having to deal with Office format deliverables. I will follow you on twitter.