27/01/2026
I am forever grateful to my wonderful clients and potential customers who keep me busy and appreciate my work.
However, rant incoming, there are a minority of customers who come to us self employed freelancers and expect a lot for very little charge.
I have spoken to many other amazing people that do the same thing as me and they have also experienced many of the same experiences I have.
Unfortunately being self employed means our rates have to account for:
- the work we do
- the taxes we have to pay, not that are taken out of our wages
- the lack of benefits, no sick pay, no pto, no holiday, nothing that you would typically get when you are employed
- the insurance we have to pay for
- the risk we take with working with horses.
I say unfortunately as I, and the others that do the same, do what we do as we love the job, we love working outside, working with animals, doing our passion full time. If I didn’t have to charge people, I wouldn’t however I also, like the rest of you, need to be able to afford to live.
I really love my job, running my own business however it is hard work, no matter the weather we out, rain, ice the rest, and I genuinely enjoy it but when unfortunately we regularly deal with people trying to haggle prices, complain about how much we charge, complain about us having to charge mileage, cancelling last minute because they think they’ve found someone cheaper, it dampens the job down.
I spend a lot of my day in my car, that means I cover a lot of miles which costs money. We all work very hard every day and you pay for what you get, unfortunately I have personaly found those who don’t charge the going rates cut corners.
The going rate for freelancers in Cornwall is significantly less than what you would find up country, which may tell everyone we really are doing the job because we love it.
A really good comparison another person in this industry told me is that, if you go to get your hair cut, nails done ect and you pay for that service you don’t haggle with them or complain to them about their prices. So why should that happen to us? We care for your animals, we put ourselves at risk every day and people feel it is acceptable to complain, haggle and talk down on us as if we are not offering a service just like your local nail salon, hair salon ect.
Again, I love my job and I really appreciate all of my amazing clients, it’s just unfortunate there are some people who think that the way we are our living is negotiable.
