Last week I was on a call with a designer about something completely unrelated and halfway through she stopped and said "oh, you'll like this one."
She had just fired a client.
She had been working with him for nearly two years and in the past month or so he had gone completely rogue. He'd been ringing her suppliers behind her back trying to access her trade discounts. One supplier was finding the client so challenging he rang the designer and said they refused to now serve him! Not only that he'd called her one Sunday morning to say he wasn't paying her final invoice, because in his opinion she "hadn't done enough work to justify it". Eventually he was causing her so much stress she had terminated the project.
The thing is, most difficult clients were not difficult when they signed. They turned difficult somewhere in the middle of the project and if you trace it back you can usually work out what’s gone wrong.
To me working with a design client is a bit like taking a long road trip where you’re the driver and your client is the passenger who has just loaded hundreds of thousands of dollars into the boot of your car. They have no idea where they're going and they are trusting you to get them (and their money!) to the destination safely.
So picture the drive when you don't share your plan…
You pull out of the driveway and don't tell them the route. You don't say how long it'll take, which way you're going or when you'll stop along the way. To you it's obvious because you've driven this route a hundred times. To them it's a complete mystery and you're making them nervous.
This is similar to the way many of you are running your projects. Most clients have never worked with a designer and have no idea what the stages are or how long each one takes. So when you don't lay out a clear plan at the start (and continue to update them as the journey continues) they get worried and start asking lots of questions.
They are sitting there with no map, you’re not explaining what is happening and you have a boot full of their money. They start thinking “are we lost? did we miss the turn? why isn't she saying anything? I need to go to the toilet!!” So they do the only thing they can do, which is start asking. "How's it going? Are we nearly there?” They start to freak out at every turn and yell for you to brake sooner. They’ve suddenly turned into an annoying backseat driver!!!
In a real project this is the designer who doesn’t make contact with their client for a fortnight because nothing much is happening or because they are busy on another project. They only send updates when they’ve got something “new” to share. But at the same time the client is at home, with hundreds of thousands of dollars involved and they are hearing nothing from you.
Which brings me back to the man on the phone on a Sunday morning, refusing to pay his final invoice.
By the time a client is questioning whether you did "enough work to justify" your fee, the trust is already gone. This is often the result of months of poor communication and leadership. When a client feels in the dark long enough, they start filling the gaps themselves and this is how they end up on the phone to your suppliers trying to work out your discount. They aren’t necessarily trying to be difficult (although some are of course, we’ve all had those clients!), they’re doing it because they stopped trusting that you're on top of things and they’re now trying to take control themselves.
But if you walk the passenger through the entire route before pulling out of the driveway (and explain how important your role is as the driver) you’ll end up with a passenger who can sit back and relax.
Having said that some clients are genuinely difficult from the start!! So let's just finish by talking about them.
The temptation with clients like that is to go softer on them, tread carefully and let little things slide. After all you don’t want to make a tense situation even worse. But this is the worst thing you can do.
The anxious, controlling, asks-a-hundred-questions client is the one who needs you to lead the most, because they're the first to grab the wheel the moment they feel lost. The less you tell them about the drive the more room you give them to be a backseat driver.
So in these situations you want to sit the client down on day one and spell everything out in boring detail e.g. how the entire process of working with you goes, how you charge, how long things take, the typical sorts of problems that tend to happen in a project and how changes get priced and signed off. A client welcome pack is great for this but for particularly controlling clients an in person kick-off meeting is the best approach.
As the project continues you should then send an update every week for the entire project (this is The Friday Email that I’ve spoken about lots of times before). You send this even on the weeks you have nothing to report because that boring update is what stops them emailing and calling you constantly.
The designer I spoke to did the right thing by firing her client. No client is worth stress and anxiety. BUT…if that does happen it’s important to analyse the project and work out where things went wrong so you can learn for next time and adjust your process.
