There will come a time when you will need to fire a client. It may not be soon, but it will happen eventually. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had a lot of great clients, many of whom I have established long term arrangements with. Like any business, I have also had a few clients who were more than a handful to deal with.
At the beginning of my freelancing days, when money was tight, and when opportunities were few, I was willing to be more patient and deal with difficult clients. Plus, I had more time to take their calls, put in extra work (which I didn’t get paid for), and provide way more in return for what I was being paid.
Today is another story. If I get an inkling that a new client could be difficult, I think twice and spend more time considering the project. You know the difficult customers I am talking about:
- The ones who always change their mind
- The client who stresses over nothing
- The client who sends you 10 emails a day
- The client who treats everything like it’s an emergency
- The client who has lots of work but has impossible timelines
- The client who calls in the evening and on weekends
- The client who adds on work but doesn’t want to pay for it
- The client who never pays on time
Sound familiar?
I am sure you have either previously dealt with clients like this or maybe even have one right now. Depending on your current situation, you are either sucking it up and dealing with them, or wishing you had never taken them on.
Dealing with difficult clients is part of freelancing, and many of us jump into projects without actually realizing what we are getting into.
Here are a couple of client stories from my past:
- One of my clients wanted to renegotiate our agreement every month. We would then have the same conversation about justifying the cost for the services I provided.
- One client wanted to start a financial website and hired me to create a content plan and write the content for the site. The trouble was, he questioned every decision he made, called me 3 times a day despite meeting once per week in person, and changed his concept for the website at least 10 times. He could never make a final decision on anything. Needless to say, the project never got off the ground.
- One client hired me to write content for his website. The trouble was, everything I wrote, he would re-write (much of which was grammatically incorrect) and then want to change the copy again. When I provided the new copy, he would change it again, making it grammatically incorrect, again.
I no longer work with these clients. I either fired them or I chose not to renew my contract with them because I realized that the money was not worth the stress, time, and hassle of dealing with them. Plus, it freed up my time to look for other, more enjoyable projects to work on.
Moral of the story: You can fire a client. A difficult client is not worth stressing about.
