A Freelancer’s Nightmare: The Terrible Client

As a freelancer, it’s a sad truth that you’ll encounter difficult clients more often than not. They exist in every freelancing market; writers, graphic designers and web designers alike will at one point make contracts with clients who have unrealistic demands and mindless critiques which result in endless extra hours of work. But if you’re a freelancer, you probably don’t have the luxury of dropping a nightmare client, so how do you deal with them while keeping your sanity intact?

I have a few pointers that might interest you.

Limit your client interactions

As you know, some clients change their tone depending on how you communicate with them. A client might be all roses when you talk business over the phone, but then they’ll send you a vicious e-mail about deadlines that seems to come out of nowhere. If you there’s a noticeable difference in a client’s demeanor through a specific method of communication, do yourself a favor and stick to the one where they’re the most congenial.

If a client calls you at all hours of the night, leaving irate messages about spacing issues and typesetting, you are not obliged to take their calls. Instead, respond to each call via e-mail until they get the picture that that’s the best way to communicate with you. If you let your client’s eccentricities get to you, it’ll have a terrible impact not only on your relationship with the client, but on the work at hand.

Kill them with kindness

For better or worse, you and your client entered into a binding agreement when you started on their project. There’s little you can do about a client if they start to become OCD about every detail of your process, or if they continually change their vision of the assignment. But if your client starts making unreasonable demands on your time and energy, you can combat their demands with flawless work to shut them up. Establish your expertise in the field, and there won’t be any logical reason for your clients to nitpick your work. In other words, kill your unruly clients with kindness by showcasing the strength of your work time and time again. Present them with thoughtful drafts and ambitious project plans so your client gets the message that you’re an expert.

Of course even the most beautiful web design can be ripped apart by a client who couldn’t tell great design from anything, but you’ll have nothing to lose by keeping your freelance work high quality.

Draw up a contract to prevent future hazards

If you don’t utilize contracts when you work with your clients, please do so now. A simple e-mail exchange won’t be much insurance should things go sour between the two parties. I recommend that you use your previous hellish experiences to your advantage when you draft a general freelancing contract. The more bad experiences you’ve had, the more stipulations you can write into your contract to prevent potential clients from replicating previous bad experiences.

Setting strict timelines and clear fees will go a long way to putting your client in place if they try to overwork you at no extra cost. Among other things, you should make clauses that stipulate for situations in which you work overtime, or what would occur if the project takes much longer to complete than originally planned. This way you won’t be stuck in an ongoing saga of work for a single client.

Know when to call it quits

I hope it never comes to this, but there may come a point in your relationship with your nightmare client when leaving is the best option. I would reserve this right for when your client has been negligent in pay, or if you can prove that your client has broken the terms of your contract in some clear way. Even if you do cut ties with your client, you should be sure to keep your tone as professional as possible when doing so. Clearly state the reasons why you feel that you can no longer work with them (and make sure they’re substantial reasons) and wish them well in their future endeavours. If you’ve been diligent about logging any evidence of criminal activity or malfeasance on their part, you shouldn’t have any reason to fear repercussions.

So, how do you deal with difficult clients in your work?