For the upcoming weeks I will be covering various bad habits of clients and how best to deal with them. Although 90% of clients are fine, when you do come across those bad clients it can often feel very isolated as a freelancer, but thankfully there is free advice..so here comes mine.

Why it’s a problem

When I’m talking about Emergencies, I’m talking about those clients who make everything an emergency. Everything needs doing yesterday. If you don’t deliver then their entire business goes up in flames. The issue with this type of client is that they seem to think they are you’re ONLY client and that you in fact have nothing else to do. As everything is an emergency for this client, its quite likely they’ll call you out of the blue,making it difficult to schedule them in. This type of client can be especially troublesome if they aren’t paying you all that much money.

Education is Key

Sometimes what a client wants can’t physically be done in the time they need, and often when working to a tight deadlines quality gets sacrificed and poor choices are made. It’s important that we try and educate our clients on realistic timelines and deadlines so that they can be more aware of when they need to come to you in the process. It’s surprising how “Urgent” these projects often turn out to be once you’ve said it can’t be done.

Remedy

Where possible try and get the ‘urgent’ project done in time. Make it very clear though the extra hours, late nights and effort that go into delivering the project. Hopefully this will mean that they think about you earlier and the next project isn’t urgent. Bear in mind that in many cases the urgency around this project may have come from elsewhere.

Where a client repeatedly comes to you with urgent projects, try and find out the root cause, why so many things are happening last minute. Be sure to tell them you do actually have other clients and projects that need your attention. Where the problem persists you could also try charging a ‘rush fee’ for completing on their project.

Ultimately anything rushed will not reflect the hard work and level of quality that you normally put in. It also adds a level of stress to your life that you can live without!