5 min read
Whether it’s a slow quarter, rising costs, or the kind of wider economic wobble that makes the news every few months, most freelancers and small business owners will at some point find themselves wondering: if a big customer or client pulled out tomorrow, how would I cope?
Building a client list that can weather difficult times isn’t about luck; it’s about making deliberate, consistent choices that give your business more stability and options. Here are eight ways to do this:
Before you can do anything else, you need a clear picture of your current customer base. Pull up your invoices from the last 12 months and ask yourself: how much of your income came from one client? If the answer is more than 30-40%, that could signify real vulnerability because losing a single client should be uncomfortable, not catastrophic.
Set a goal to have a diverse client base; this could be across industries, sizes, and sectors. If all your work comes from, say, hospitality or retail, then a downturn that hits those sectors hard will hit you equally hard. Spreading across a range of sectors with varying customer bases and resilience levels provides some insulation.
Services like healthcare, accounting and bookkeeping, digital marketing and tech support tend to hold up well during economic downturns because businesses continue to need them even when budgets are tight. When you’re thinking about which new clients to pursue, it’s worth factoring in how recession-resistant their sector is likely to be.
Accounting and finance services, for example, remain in demand during recessions because individuals and businesses still need help with tax, planning, and financial management regardless of broader economic conditions. Similarly, digital marketing tends to be more resilient than traditional marketing because overhead is lower and returns are often more measurable, making it easier for clients to justify the spend, even when they are cutting costs elsewhere.
This doesn’t mean you should work only with accountants and IT firms, but it does mean being aware of the spread and consciously building towards a more balanced mix over time.
Monthly retainers are arrangements that commit a client to paying for a set amount of work on a regular basis, and are the closest thing to stable income in a freelance business. If you are currently working on one-off projects, think about which of your existing clients would benefit from ongoing support and how you might structure that conversation.
Retainers work because they benefit both sides: the client gets consistent, prioritised access to your time and expertise, and you get predictable income. When economic pressure builds, clients who already have a retainer relationship with you are also less likely to cut you than a one-off supplier they barely know.
When things get difficult, clients tend to hold on to people they trust, so reputation and relationships are your most durable assets. This means staying visible and genuinely useful to your existing clients, not just when you have an invoice to send, but regularly. Share relevant information, check in, and be interested in what’s on the horizon for them.
The clients most likely to stick with you through a difficult period are the ones who feel genuinely looked after. The clients most likely to cut you are those who see you as a supplier rather than a strategic partner.
Just because a company has to reduce its headcount does not mean the work disappears; businesses that have let go of employees still need people to handle marketing, administration, finance, and operations. If you can offer more than one thing, you become harder to replace, so think about the adjacent services you could credibly add alongside what you already do. You do not need to reinvent yourself; you just need to extend your usefulness or outsource parts to others who can add to what you’re doing to provide a more complete package. For example:
Not every client is worth having, even when work feels thin on the ground. Clients who pay late, who argue over invoices, who keep changing the brief or who take up disproportionate amounts of your time for what they pay are costs as much as they are income and during a recession, they can become genuinely destabilising.
Before taking on significant new clients, it is worth assessing their creditworthiness and the vulnerability of their own revenue if their sector is struggling; your invoices may well be among the first things they delay or dispute, and that’s additional stress you won’t need.
One of the most common mistakes freelancers make is stopping their business development the moment they have enough work and when a gap appears, they scramble. The better approach is to keep a steady, low-level flow of outreach, networking and visibility going at all times, so that when you do need new work, you have warm relationships to draw on rather than starting from scratch.
LinkedIn is a good place to maintain this kind of steady presence without it consuming your time. Posting consistently, engaging with your network and keeping your profile current means people remember you are there.
Keeping your overhead lean and your cash reserves healthy means that if a client pauses or walks away, you have time to respond rather than panic. Aim to hold enough to cover at least two to three months of operating costs in a separate account, and treat it as off limits unless you genuinely need it.
You cannot control the economy, but you can control how prepared you are for sudden downturns. A client list that is diverse in sector, secure in its relationships, spread across retainer and project work, and backed by a clear pipeline gives you real resilience. Start with a simple audit of where your income comes from, identify your biggest single point of vulnerability, and work on that first.
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