I had four solid long-term contracts lined up as of a few months ago, scheduled so that I could make adequate progress on them without overloading myself, with the overlap set up so that I'd be protected if any one of them fell through.
So far, two of them have fallen through (in the non-paying fashion) and one of them is in the process of actively falling apart. I ended up sinking a ton of energy into trying to salvage each one and trying to protect clients from themselves, but ultimately it's not possible. So now I'm potentially left with one paying project... if that one falls through I'm screwed.
Maybe in some fields you can be looking for work and have some good contracts in your lap a week later? For me, jacquesm's '3 months or so' is on the money; some of my better-paying contracts take even longer than that to get to the point where I can actually start doing work and billing for it.
A good strategy: 1 background job that is long running and has a reasonably low price tag because it can be pre-empted, one high priority, short bursts of work that are paid top rate and maintenance on a number of old clients that still bring in a part of the income.
That way everybody gets value for their money and the freelancer gets a good mixture of income. You're mistaken if you think that having a freelancer with only 1 or 2 customers is good for you, in the long term you'll need to rebuild your relationship with new people because your old ones will go out of business when you don't need them for a while.
I think there are even situations where having a contract explicitly stating you are not an employee may not be legally binding if you have only one client.
To give you an idea of what I mean, the one that's in the process of falling apart took over six months of negotiation, periodic prodding, and concessions to get them to actually provide me fully signed documents so I could start work. The whole time they were telling me how excited they were about the project and how important it was to them. Clients like this all seem to exist somewhere on a spectrum, and you have to figure out whether they're just a 'less profitable' client because you'll have to put more work in (and set your hourly rate accordingly), or whether they're a fundamentally problematic client that will just never work out. This client turned out to be the latter, even if I am billing hours now.
I suspect once you've been freelancing long enough you can just say no to any client that seems like they could be a problem. For me, it's been a little over two years and the influx of work is not remotely enough to justify that (even if I get way more offers than I used to, and they're better offers)
Though I'm not a freelancer myself I know a guy who was making fairly good money off one client. He knew he should diversify but it was always "I'll look next month for other clients because I'm too busy right now".
Some time ago that said client stopped giving work to him. Now he jobs part time at the gas station to make rent and gets only small contracts because he couldn't build a client network while working for his only client.
If you have a long contract you can make up a big enough buffer in your business account so you can go months without any business income and still pay yourself a decent salary.
Other bonus is giving yourself a massive dividend now and again :}
Is this not the case with smaller projects too, though? I always tend to look for a new project towards the end of the last one, and that has worked out so far.
> You need several customers in parallel to be stable as a freelancer, not one big one.
I actually found the opposite: trying to maintain 2 projects at the same time was a nightmare.