I received a phone call just recently from a person I just met awhile ago and he was interested in acquiring my services for Internet related work. Apparently he was having trouble in setting up his e-mail account for his site and phoned me to ask if he could just send me the information to set it up for him. Since he mentioned it was kind of urgent, that meant not being paid for it.

I was just kind of thinking in my mind whether or not I should as many times people tend to continually expect you to do things for free for them in these fashions. This situation is a little more awkward as well considering the intent was to establish a working business relationship.

In the end, I did mention that I would be willing to help him set it up since it should be fairly quick I thought. Too nice in a business situation? Maybe, but just glad to help I guess.

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Today I went to help a family member as his computer was running slow and I agreed to take a look at it as he figured that he needed to spend money to upgrade it but wasn’t sure how much it would cost. Upon looking at it, I concluded that he didn’t need to spend any money as it just looked like he simply had too many applications that automatically loaded up in the beginning. I simply disabled them while doing some tweaks and sure enough the computer ran a lot faster.

This isn’t something I do professionally in a business sense, but afterwards he wanted to pay me for my time as he mentioned he would have had to pay someone to do it anyways. He is actually a business oriented person as well and so to him it just felt really wrong to not compensate someone for their time.

On the other hand, I thought that the issue was so ridiculously easy since I was knowledgeable about it and on top of that I didn’t want to charge a family member for something so simple. We ended up going back and fourth about the topic in a nice way and eventually he mentioned that he still wants to pay me back in some other way.

It just feels too weird for me to take money for these small things that feel more like a casual gander especially when it is not in a demanding business fashion. For example, if it is a situation where the person starts setting a time and place where something must be done with certain guidelines then of course you should charge the person as you can’t survive by doing things like that for free all the time.

Of course there are always those that try and abuse other’s generosities, but that is usually spotted fairly quickly.

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There was a person telling me recently on how he was given the opportunity to partake in a project that wouldn’t exactly be considered as financially rewarding. It did present a good opportunity to get more exposure for himself though. He decided not to do it though as he mentioned that he could be making more money working on a regular project.

I usually encounter people in businesses who debate whether or not they should do something for free or at a heavily discounted rate for various reasons such as at times they could be trying to help out a non profitable organization or that they wish to establish a working relationship with someone.

This type of topic always reminds me about that story on how James Cameron got his break into the film industry. In a nutshell, while most writers would sell their movie scripts for a lot of money, since he was starting out he sold the initial draft to his movie “The Terminator” for $1 if he was guaranteed to be the director for the movie. I guess we all know how it has turned out for him now.

The main times where I wouldn’t want to do things for free are situations where the other party is constantly promising you on how they will give you the moon afterwards or that it should be so easy to do. To me that usually ends up as a situation where the other party doesn’t really respect your time and offerings. But in general, it’s always good to look beyond just monetary compensation as an opportunity itself can be a lot greater.

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