My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [59]
Chapter 14
The Client from Hell
What to do if a client stiffs you, moves the deadline, or otherwise bleeds you dry
“You’re fired!”
—Donald Trump
Besides money and deadlines, what do freelancers bitch about the most? Nightmare clients. The scrooge who refuses to pay on time. The workaholic who starts texting you at 7:00 AM and doesn’t let up till midnight. The creep with a crush who insists on dropping off the project specs at your house on a Saturday. The perpetually frazzled prospect who hands you the work three weeks late and expects you to turn the project around in forty-eight hours—over Labor Day weekend.
Most hell clients don’t come with “666” tattooed on their forehead. At first blush, they may seem as harmless as a newborn puppy. Then, like the hand reaching out of the ground at the end of a third-rate slasher movie, they move in for the kill, sucking up your time, your money, and ultimately your soul.
Fortunately, a majority of terrifying client interactions can be nipped in the bud with clearer contracts and better boundaries. In this chapter, we’ll look at several of the most common client maladies and some remedies for each of them.
PROBLEM: Your Check Is MIA
“For a corporate writing gig, I had the client actually come over to my house and bring me flowers in lieu of payment because they just couldn’t get the money out of the company,” says freelance writer and author Meghan Daum. “I was working from home doing this gig. But people who were working there had just stopped coming in because they could not get their checks cut. And I would call and call and call and the money wouldn’t come. So finally the accounts person came to my house with a thing of flowers and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ It was just unreal.”
Meghan’s not alone in her tale of payment woe. Though we freelancers wouldn’t stay in business for long if having clients stiff us were the rule rather than the exception, most of us have experienced the incredible-disappearing-check phenomenon at least once.
SOLUTION: Contrary to popular belief, when a client tells you “The check is in the mail” or “I sent your invoice to accounting weeks ago—you should have been paid by now,” they usually mean it. In the past six months, I’ve had payments disappear into the void for an impressive array of seemingly innocent reasons: My invoice hit the client’s email spam filter, the client had a personnel change in accounting and the new gal was backlogged, and so on. I even had a check arrive in an envelope stuck to the adhesive of another envelope that was addressed to—and contained a check for—another freelancer. Clearly an automation goof.
But what if it’s not a quaint little assembly line goof? How can you protect yourself against clients who willingly hold your payment hostage for weeks on end, or worse, all of eternity? Some suggestions:
• Sniff out clients before you begin working with them to make sure they’re on the up and up (see sidebar).
• Make friends with the accounts payable person so you can consult with them directly when a check’s gone missing.
• For big projects, request 25 to 50 percent of your payment up front and have the client pay the remainder in chunks as you meet each milestone of the project (put all this in your contract). If the client hijacks any of your payments, tell them you won’t lift another finger until they pay up.
• Charge a late fee, something small, like 1 to 5 percent for every fifteen or thirty days the payment is overdue. While you may never see the late fee, adding one to your contracts and invoices can prompt the client to pay up. It can also annoy your star clients, so reserve this tactic for clients