How to build a balanced client mix (even when work is hard to find)
In this article, you will learn:
- How to create a LinkedIn carousel with Canva to attract new clients while you sleep
- Why building options as a freelancer gives you power
- The client mix formula that actually works
- How to get more clients even when work is hard to find
- Managing multiple clients without losing your mind
- What action to take next
Many freelancers fall into what’s known as the anchor client trap. You build a great relationship. The work is steady, the pay is good — and gradually, out of loyalty or simple comfort, that one client comes to represent 60%, then 70%, then 80% of your income. Life feels comfortable right up until the moment it isn’t. A budget gets cut, someone gets hired in-house, or the company goes in a different direction. Suddenly, you’re scrambling with bills to pay and no income to cover them. It happens constantly, and yet it’s preventable — even in a difficult market.
Options give you power as a freelancer
With the UK jobs market still struggling after nearly three years of declining permanent positions, clinging to one reliable client is understandable. When work feels scarce, stability feels precious. But over-reliance on a single client doesn’t create stability — it just creates the illusion of it.
Having multiple clients changes your business position. You can push back when a client becomes difficult, negotiate rate increases without fear and absorb the natural end of a project without it becoming a crisis.
You’re also exposed to more varied work, which keeps your skills sharper and your thinking fresher than any single long-term engagement typically allows. Most importantly, you have genuine options and options are what give you power as a freelancer.
The client mix formula that actually works
The goal isn’t to spread yourself thinly across as many clients as possible. Most experienced freelancers work with three to four clients at most, and structure them deliberately. Think of it in tiers.
Your anchor client should make up around 40–50% of your income. This is your deepest relationship — ideally a retained arrangement involving strategic work, with a client who knows you well and values your input. They cover your core bills and provide your baseline stability.
Alongside them, two secondary clients at roughly 20–25% each give you a solid foundation without putting all your eggs in one basket. These are consistent, well-paying relationships that don’t demand the same depth as your anchor but contribute meaningfully to your income.
Finally, an exploratory client at around 10–15% gives you room to test a new industry, offer a new service, or develop a relationship that might grow into something more significant over time.
The practical value of this structure is that no single loss is catastrophic:
- If your anchor client disappears, you still have more than half your income
- If a secondary client wraps up, you lose a quarter at most
- You’re never in panic mode, which means you’re never making desperate decisions
How do you get more clients when work is hard to find?
This is where the typical advice usually gets unrealistically breezy, and that’s the last thing freelancers need right now. Finding new clients takes time, and in a sluggish market it takes more of it. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible — it means you need to be consistent and strategic rather than reactive. You will have to try new ways of marketing yourself (alongside word of mouth recommendations).
If any single client currently represents more than 50% of your income, make diversifying your quiet but urgent priority over the next 90 days.
- Start by dedicating five hours a week to business development, protected from being absorbed by client work. Use that time to reconnect with past clients, have genuine conversations with people in your network, and send personalised outreach — not bulk emails, but considered messages to specific people about specific things you could help them with. LinkedIn, industry communities, and referrals from existing clients are often the most fruitful channels, and they’re worth investing in even when they don’t produce immediate results.
The goal in this phase isn’t to replace your main client — it’s to reduce your dependency on them so that if something changes, you’re not starting from zero.
💡 Tip: How to create a LinkedIn carousel with Canva to attract new clients while you sleep
If you’re putting time into business development anyway, LinkedIn carousels— the swipeable, slide-based format — consistently outperform standard text and image posts on LinkedIn. That’s according to Kate Browning of Cherry Blossom Management, a Canva expert who creates digital marketing materials for clients and gives Canva masterclasses to small business owners.
Why faff with making carousels? They can generate, on average, three times more reach than static posts and significantly higher engagement rates.
For freelancers, they’re particularly powerful because they let you show expertise in a format that feels genuinely useful rather than promotional.
For example, you could create a carousel that offers useful tips tailored to your industry and services. For example, “five questions to ask before hiring a freelance [your specialism]” or “how I structure a project from brief to delivery. ”
Carousels do your business development work for you, long after you’ve posted it.
Here’s how to do it:
Step 1: Choose the right template and size.
Open Canva and search for “LinkedIn Carousel” in the templates bar — Canva has dedicated templates for this format. The correct dimensions are 1080 x 1080px (square), which also works natively for Instagram carousels if you want to repurpose the content. Some freelancers prefer 1080 x 1350px (portrait) for Instagram as it takes up more screen space, but square is the safest choice if you’re posting to both platforms.
Step 2: Pick a clean, readable template.
Filter by your colour palette or choose something minimal. Avoid anything too busy — carousels work best when each slide has one clear idea, a short headline, and breathing room. The templates under “professional” or “business” categories in Canva tend to work well for freelancers. But the colours should reflect your “business personality”.
Step 3: Plan your slides before you design.
A solid carousel typically has six to ten slides structured like this: an opening slide with a bold hook (“Why relying on one client could cost you everything”), four to seven content slides each making a single point, and a closing slide with a clear call to action (“Follow for weekly freelance tips” or “DM me to talk about working together”).
Step 4: Keep your branding consistent.
Use the same two or three fonts (no more) and your brand colours across every slide. Canva lets you save a Brand Kit if you’re on the Pro plan, which makes this automatic. Consistency across slides is what makes a carousel look polished rather than cobbled together.
Step 5: Download and upload correctly.
Download as a PDF (standard quality) — this is the format LinkedIn reads as a carousel document. Go to LinkedIn, start a post, click the document icon, and upload your PDF. Write a strong opening two lines of text for the post itself, since that’s what people see before they click “see more.”
- Aim to create two carousels per month to start.
- One could share a practical insight from your freelance work; the other could address a common question your clients ask you.
- Done consistently over a quarter, this kind of content can build the kind of visibility that brings inbound enquiries, which is the best possible position to find new clients from.
- Don’t want to faff with Canva? Look for marketing content creators on LinkedIn or on freelance platforms to do it for you. It’s an expense that could give you a great return on your investment. But always ask for samples of their portfolio, delivery times and outline exactly what you want in text, style provide fonts, so they don’t start charging for extras you didn’t ask for.
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Managing multiple clients without losing your mind
The concern about juggling multiple clients is legitimate, but it’s mostly a question of structure. Time blocking is the most effective tool freelancers often underuse: give each client dedicated days or half-days rather than switching between them constantly. I know this doesn’t always work when certain clients are daily email and Slack Channel fanatics. However, you can pair that behaviour with clear expectations set from the start.
For example, how many hours per week is each client really getting or demanding? What’s your availability? How do you handle requests that fall outside the agreed scope? Answer all of these for yourself and your client so most of the chaos and stress disappear before it begins.
When clients inevitably compete for your time, communicate early and charge accordingly.
- If you can see a scheduling conflict approaching, flag it to your clients before it becomes a problem.
- If someone needs urgent work that requires you to rearrange other commitments, a rush fee of 50–100% is reasonable and has the useful side effect of making clients reconsider whether something is truly urgent.
- And if taking on a new piece of work would mean delivering poorly to an existing client, ask for a different deadline or decline it. Your reputation with current clients is worth more than any single new project.
What to do this week
Look at your bank statements and work out what percentage of your income each client currently represents. If any one client is above 50%, that’s your red flag.
- Block out five hours this week — not next week, this week — for business development and make a list of where new clients realistically might come from: past clients, referrals, your network, communities where your ideal clients spend time. Pick one channel and focus on it consistently.
Coming up next in our article series on how to become an indispensable freelancer:
