Client Kudos
Category: Economy & Business...
Posted Thursday, September 06, 2007 at 08:43 AM [GMT-6]

We freelancers are quick to complain about the "clients from hell," seemingly sent to us as punishment for using FrontPage in another life. You know the ones: slow-paying, unresponsive, overly critical or completely indecisive, unable to distinguish between the concepts of "hiring" and "owning," and so on.

But, more often than not in my experience, interaction with clients can be amazingly positive, and I'd like to share two recent examples, coming from opposite ends of the economic food chain.

• A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted about performing some maintenance on a website. It was in such a mess that I told the client that I really didn't want to be associated with it, but if he ever got to the point where he was willing to undergo a complete makeover, I'd be happy to give him a quote. I could sense his sigh even via email ("here we go again..."), but he requested the quote, which I sent him the same day. He was apparently happy with it, as he not only accepted it, but told me he was adding to the dollar amount, because, well, you never knew what might come up. The addition was significant – about 20% of my original quote. He asked how much I wanted up front and I told him I didn't charge anything until the job was finished. Nevertheless, I received in the next day's mail a check for more than 50% of my quote.
  
  The job went quickly, I was finished in a few days, and we went live with the new site. The client seemed very happy and offered to hand-deliver the balance of the amount due. I asked him to let me email an invoice, explaining that I had to collect sales tax on a portion of the work. I emailed the invoice, which was for the balance of my original quote.
  
  A couple of hours later, I heard a commotion at the front door, then a car drove off. The client had put an envelope in my drop box and left a plastic bag on the porch. I carried both into the kitchen and found that he'd left the following: a check for the invoice amount, cash in the amount of the "addition" he'd made to the original quote, three screen-printed t-shirts to send to the Nephew at A&M – and a quart Mason jar full of homemade salsa!


• Having large corporations for clients can be a mixed blessing. You don't normally have to worry about getting paid, although the timing might be dicey. The worst part is the bureaucracy you have to deal with (and I know first hand what that is, having dealt out enough of it myself during a 25 year career as a corporate drone). But, when the local office of a $500 million dollar company (assets) called, I figured I could cope with the inevitable headaches because the work sounded fun.
  
  Sure enough, my initial experience seemed to confirm my fears, as I found myself filling out all sorts of forms to get into the company's vendor system. The first draft of the consulting agreement they provided contained some unacceptable terms, and I sent it back asking to have them either re-written or excised (and I figured this was probably the end of our relationship). To my surprise, they immediately agreed to drop the offending language, agreeing that it wasn't relevant to the type of services I'd be providing. However, one thing that stayed in was their policy of paying invoices in 45 days and via electronic funds transfer. Oh boy, I thought; not only will I have to wait forever to get paid, I'll have to periodically monitor my checking account to see when the payment arrives. Oh well.
  
  Anyway, they sent over the first major project and I got it done, and when the end of the month arrived, I generated an invoice and emailed it to my contact at the company...and started the 45 day clock. Imagine my surprise when later that afternoon I received an automatically-generated email containing a PDF document which in turn contained these words: "This notice is to inform you that an attempt has been or will be made to send funds electronically to your bank account via ACH or Wire transfer." The funds appeared in my account the next day – the day immediately following the transmittal of my invoice.
  
  Now, I'm hesitant to think that this will be the model for all future payments, but it surely is a good start to our business relationship!

As I look back over my time as a freelance consultant, I find that these two experiences are actually more representative than the hellish interactions I mentioned at the top of the post. I'm not sure why, but I suspect the fact that most of my clients come by way of referrals probably introduces some "pre-screening" into the equation (on both sides of the transaction).

The work that I do now has its share of headaches, but for the most part, my clientèle isn't a contributing factor.