8. Mad, Bad and Difficult Clients
Unfortunately you will come across some of these. I still do, despite my experience and methods of avoiding them. There are bad freelancers too, but we are not concerned with them. I do purchase services as a client, e.g. website design, occasionally, so I know what the other side of the fence is like.
A significant number of clients are cheapskates, bullies, idiots or some combination of all three
This is the downside of freelancing. You will find yourselves having to work with these people because they have commissioned something from you.
Bad Clients: in order of Pain Point
1. Clients who don't pay you or withhold payment for trivial reasons.
2. Clients who are bullies.
3. Clients who want a “free sample” before they will pay you for the “next job”. (Note that this is not allowed on all the freelance marketplaces, so you should report it).
4. Clients who are passive-aggressive: e.g. drop work on you on Friday 5 pm and want it at 10 am on Monday.
5. Clients who don't know what they want, and when you create what you think they want, don't want it, so you have to redo the work, possibly numerous times.
6. Intermediaries who commission work from you then pass it on to a client, who then wants lots of changes.
7. Clients who foist short deadlines on you (unnecessarily).
8. Committees of clients, so you end up making a whole host of changes for each person, often going round in a circle to much of what you originally submitted.
9. Clients who extend the scope of the work, but don't want to pay any extra.
10. Clients who want to acquire the intellectual property for the job for free. *
That covers most of the pain points. *IP is a complex subject and I will cover it briefly in a future posting.
I have strategies to deal with most of these people. I usually try not to work with them if I think they will be bad, but if you are beginning a freelance career that may not be so easy, especially if you want a testimonial/good feedback to raise your profile.
Although the freelance marketplace sites' escrow system should stop Point 1, it is possible for bad clients to circumvent this and obtain your work for free by not accepting the work you have sent them, starting a dispute and the site will often side with them and return the money to the client. Obviously they can't do this too often or the site will ban them so they flit from one to another.
So when you are on a freelance job site you should check out the client's feedback carefully, before applying for a job. Ones with low or bad feedback probably aren't worth trying for.
Always get money up front with the first job from a new private client.
I write an email that goes like this:
Note: this is actually a legal contract. You don't need a legal document, this would stand up in court. You can go a little further and mutually sign a contract but it is not usually worth it for a small writing job.
Golden Rule of Freelancing: Always be Firm about Money
I know it feels difficult, but if anyone is going to mess you around about money you need to know asap. If the client is decent, then you don't need to go through with this rigmarole each time, it's more normal to invoice on a monthly basis for the work you have done.
You can use a similar agreement to the above email on freelance websites when you have got a job, to summarise the main points necessary, e.g. in my case, topic, word count, audience, and delivery date.
Job Descriptions on Freelance Marketplaces
You often get jobs posted that look like this:
I'd ignore this as the poster is some kind of idiot: doesn't specify anything useful. May well be a bad client Point 5.
Compare:
This job isn't for me, but the posting shows that the client knows what they want and is probably OK to work for because they can clearly define what they need from the freelance job. Clients with zero feedback (that is, have never used the particular job platform before) are often more stressful than ones with a lot of feedback. Obviously everyone has to start off with zero feedback but it is a warning sign: I do take jobs from zero feedback clients but tend to avoid them if I feel from any emails/DMs that they will overuse my time because they don't know what they are doing = effectively underpay.
What to do if a client turns out to be difficult
I dump them as soon as possible. I know many freelances find this extremely hard, but I want to work with good clients, and the bad ones just cause so much hassle and monetary loss that they are not worth while. I get payment from them,
by being very polite and persistent, then refuse further work because I am “busy”. I manage to not sent them abusive emails, even if I have drafted one. There's no point in doing that.
Another example: I was working with an extremely clever man, who ran an AI company at the leading edge of technology. He knew he couldn't write so engaged me to ghostwrite articles under his name in trade magazines and websites. He never knew what he wanted, so I would write a clear first draft and he would insist on changes, throwing in everything he could think of. By draft 4 or 5 it was a complete mess, then he would be irked by why I couldn't make the content read well.
He was perfectly pleasant. When I explained that it was taking me much longer than I anticipated he upped the money, but I decided that it was not worth working with him, told him I was busy and refused any further work. The hourly rate probably worked out at about £7.00 per hour (a quarter of my normal rate) because I was constantly revising the articles. So was not worth doing. Better to find other clients.
I hope this chapter won't put you off, as most clients are decent and some are really good to work for, but there are definitely unpleasant people and rip-off merchants about, it's a fact of freelancing life.
