One Of Your Clients Is Nuts
Over the years I’ve done a lot of freelance work. As anyone who has been in the business — any business — for any length of time can tell you, there is a good chance that at least one of your clients is crazy.
Service businesses like writing, voice acting, and editing are, in many ways, carnival acts. As a self-employed or freelance provider of services to the public, you’re part hustler, part dancing bear, and always working. The plates never stop spinning. The effort you’re willing to expend to get paid and further your solvency by a day, a week, or a year is always foremost in your mind. This is the price paid to be master of your fate.
Over the years I’ve developed many excellent repeat customers. I’ve also had my share of horror stories. Unreasonable clients are as common as unreasonable people. Society is full of those who want something for little or nothing, who don’t care how their problems affect you, and who will steal from you or make unreasonable demands. If you work long enough, eventually one of these people will become one of your clients.
You are obligated to fulfill your contracts and to live up to your word, in business and in life — but you are under no obligation to let people rip you off or treat you like garbage. I have a policy: The point at which a client becomes unreasonable or abusive is the point at which I tell that client, “Go fuck yourself.”
This sounds harsh and the use of profanity alone will cause some people to accuse you of being unprofessional. The reality is that the moment a business relationship becomes an abusive struggle for profit or control, initiated by the client, it has ceased to be a professional interaction. It is now a mugging, and you, the service provider, are the man with a gun in his face or a knife to his throat.
Simple theft is easy enough to understand. Very early in my freelance writing career, I got ripped off — and badly. I completed a lengthy writing assignment for a client and did not insist on at least half of the money up front. When it came time to pay, the client simply started ignoring me. To make matters worse, this was a PayPal job for someone overseas. My invoices and e-mails were never returned. I was out my time AND my fee, with no way to pursue a client across the ocean.
This was an important learning experience: It taught me the value of getting paid up front, in full or by half. I conduct all my freelance business (save for speculative projects conducted voluntarily) on that basis to this day. It was still painful to pay that “stupid tax” when I was starting out.
Policies like these work well until you encounter — and you will — a crazy person. Many unreasonable clients are, in fact, just plain nuts, and this won’t always be obvious at the outset. Some will demand a refund on the basis that they simply didn’t prefer what you sent them, even though you’ve spent the time and effort in a good faith effort to deliver the job. Others want bizarre concessions or discounts so deep they make it impossible for you to complete the work. Still others want you to sign non-disclosure and non-compete agreements so strict you’d be better off buried alive in a cardboard box for five years.
The worst of the crazies are convinced you’re trying to screw them. If anything goes wrong, if there are any deviations from the completely routine, or if you ask anything of them, they will immediately start freaking out. You’ll know you’re in trouble when they start telling you elaborate sob stories of all the other people who’ve ripped them off in the past. That’s when you’ll realize you’re dealing with someone whose exhaustive list of problems, whose tales of abuse at the hands of others, all have a common denominator: the client himself.
You will eventually run afoul of such a customer, who may sue, threaten to sue, or simply be content to trash you online (at which point you must weigh the cost of filing suit yourself — most of the time, it simply isn’t worth what you’ll pay your attorney). You cannot and will not be able to please everyone. You owe it to yourself to stand up for YOU. If that means telling a client to eff off after you’ve made every reasonable attempt to accommodate him or her, then that’s how it’s got to be.
This is simply the cost of doing business, particularly in an age where you can work for and with people around the world for years and never talk to them in person. A very wise man, Coach Scott Sonnon, once told me, “You’ll need to grow a thick skin if you want to play with the grown-ups.” His point was that business, and especially business online, requires a steel backbone and an iron will. No one is going to look out for you, or your business concerns, if you don’t do it first.