When to Fire a Client

You’re reading an excerpt from Art For Money, by Michael Ardelean. This small but powerful book helps every creative freelancer know their value and scale their business. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

A person is constituted in language. As such, when a person’s word is less than whole and complete, they are diminished as a person.Michael Jensen

​important​ Not being able to fire a deadbeat client, and thus being locked into a toxic relationship for money reasons, defeats the whole purpose of freelancing.

Many, if not most, of your client frustrations might stem from the fact that you can’t leave the clients you have, because you don’t have any new ones coming in.

The best time to fire a client is when you have another one. This was a realization I had with the client at the beginning of the book. Why was there so much stress involved with this one client who wouldn’t pay us? Why were we even working for such a client anyway? We were forced to. Because at that time, we had nothing else going on.

In an ideal world, with a full client roster, or maybe even a waiting list, we could have politely asked that client to buzz off the moment they showed the first sign of dishonesty.

“We understand you’re having cash flow problems. We can of course be flexible but we can’t work for free without a plan. Let us know how much time you need, and until then we’ll pause the work and ramp back up when we have a solution in place.”

But we couldn’t say that, because we didn’t have any other clients. If you’re in a position like we were, ignore what we discussed in Price Your Work, and just go get some clients.

Do discounted work, do free work, give gifts, get your work into places where people will see it, be generous, and get people talking about you. Once you have built a community of people and companies who are happy to trade you money for your work, you have earned the ability to activate the strategies outlined in Price Your Work and Writing a Good Proposal.

In the rare case that you do encounter a bad client, and you’ve taken all personal and professional steps to foster a good relationship to no avail, cut them loose. One of the best privileges of a freelancer is the privilege to fire a client.

When you’re certain it has to be done, do it. Do it kindly and professionally:

• Never in writing (amateur move), always verbally (ideally over the phone). This is hard, but do it anyway. You want to leave zero room for interpretation, and let them hear your sincere tone of voice.

• Leave anger and frustration out of it: “I’ve had a lot of fun working with you guys but it has become apparent that we are not the right fit for each other. I’m going to wrap up what I’m working on and then let you move on to someone else who can suit your needs. I wish you all the best.”

​caution​ If you’ve made every possible effort outlined in this book to develop a good relationship with the client, and there’s still a significant amount of money outstanding, then call a lawyer before you have the above conversation. Depending on what type of written agreement you had (or didn’t have) with the client, your lawyer can walk you through your options for collecting.

Taking this step will of course ensure that you never work with this client again, so be certain before you enter this territory. But once you decide, get it done quickly.

And then let it go, learn from it, and move on.

Holding a grudge is a symptom of not knowing how you want to spend the gift of the day.Mike Maples, Jr.