How to Spot a Dud Client and Get Out While You Can

I know how to spot a dud client. I spent far longer (read: years) working with one of them than I should’ve, before I wised up and realized that any money you receive from them is not worth it and likely to incur a loss — since that money will likely end up working you ten times harder than it’s worth, strip you of motivation, and is time better spent marketing your business to help you earn cash from more professional clients.

I’ve only had a few of these clients, and I don’t have one now and I haven’t had one for some time. That’s because once you learn to spot a dud, you can avoid them pretty easily. Unfortunately, many freelancers are caught in a cycle working with those dodgy clients on the bottom of the rungs and have just given up on thinking that freelancing is anything more than this. The idea of a client who pays well and on time, and doesn’t frazzle your mind with ridiculous requests and claims, is a mythical beast of ancient lore to them.

If you’re in this situation, you need to find a way out of the cycle, and the first step is learning to spot the rotten apples so you can make a change from the bad to the good — not just from the bad to more of the same. Likewise, even if you’ve only got one of these fellows on your client list, it’s equally important to move on and reinvest the time on better things.

1. Perpetually Late Payments

It’s totally normal to receive the odd late payment from a client. Sometimes bank transfers don’t work speedily to everyone’s advantage, or sometimes the money is caught in a bottleneck for a few days. But if you’ve got a client who is consistently late on an all-too-frequent basis, and is more than a few days late each time, you’ve got a problem. Professional clients pay on time, almost all of the time.

2. Constantly Trying to Haggle You Down Below Industry Standard Rates

It’s hard to say what an industry standard rate is in this hodge-podge, ad hoc method of working we call freelancing, but we all have some idea of where the line must be drawn. And it’s also fairly reasonable and expected for a client to try and talk you down a few dollars.

But here’s where it gets out of hand: the client takes you on board for a job and pays you for a project. The next time they want to use you — you were worth the money, after all — they try to take you down to criminally low pay levels. “It cost an arm and a leg last time, and I was hoping our good relationship would be a factor in this…”

Suddenly they want the mate’s rates, and not just any mate’s rates; the kind you’d give to your own grandmother (what’s that, free? $10?). In other cases, from the get-go they’ll be trying to get you down to $10 an article or weasel a $200 website from you. These are easier to shut the door on than existing clients, but still a pain in the rump.

3. Moving Targets

Ever feel like you’re getting close to the end of a project and the client suddenly changes the goalposts? They want twelve thousand words, not eight. They want a Flash game hidden inside the website as a “special interactivity user experience market penetration strategem.” (The scary part is, some marketing manager somewhere might actually call it that.)

There are clients who will try to redefine the whole project multiple times over its lifespan. There are those who will insist that you add to the project without extra pay. There are those who are just never happy with anything you do. Clients who move the goalposts are duds.

4. Clients Who Act Like Secret Agents

There are a million of these guys out there: the overly secretive client. The client whose every idea, every plan, every thought, every drop of perspiration is going to alter the world and revolutionize society and the ripples in humanity will be felt for the next thousand years. And so, to glean the wisdom that obviously shines from even the bottom of this client’s feet, we must sign an NDA and swear an oath of loyalty and secrecy.

Okay, I know there is a need for an NDA in many situations. I’ve used them myself, so I couldn’t say they were a bad idea if I wanted to. But that’s not the point in itself; there are companies who use NDAs to protect themselves. Then there are clients and companies for whom the copious NDA signing is a ritual in itself, a tangible representation of the paranoid and secretive corporate culture where that piece of paper is the most important bond people have between them. When clients are so secretive that they get in the way of your completion of the project, they are duds.

And, I must add, their ideas never end up starting that big revolution. Probably because nobody ever got the chance to hear about them!

5. A Bad Memory

Your client might not think they have a bad memory, but it certainly seems that way to you. Their version of events is always different, their recounting of some verbal agreement always swung further to their advantage than you’d have allowed, and their ability for catching you off-guard and getting you to agree to something verbally without realizing it is a strong one.

These manipulative clients use “their version of events” to wring what they want from you, even when their claims run contrary to the record of emails, phone calls and meetings.

A dud client has a memory that isn’t congruent with other General Elements of Reality.

6. They Can Do Your Job Better

When people hire a freelancer, it’s usually because they need a professional to do a job they can’t. Granted, there are times when a professional will contract another professional to take on excess work, but for the most part the client doesn’t have the same skillset as you.

Dud clients don’t seem to get what all the fuss is about, because they believe they know how to do your job better than you. They tell you how to go about things, what to change and where, and tell you how and why you’re wrong when you explain why their ideas aren’t good for them.

I knew a guy who would sit down in a meeting with one designer and one developer and they’d come up with a plan for a site. He’d call himself the site’s “designer” and ultimate creator, and claim that the designer and the developer were just part of the “assembly team.” That’s a classic case of a presumptuously arrogant client.

Tags: client the working day

Joel Falconer |
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