I’ve talked before about how much I love my clients. I’ve also talked about how much they can frustrate me sometimes, but at the end of the day I love my clients. They treat me well and I hope I offer them the same respect and love back. When you work as a freelancer in any industry, your clients can make or break you. If you don’t treat them well or bend over backwards for them then you’re on a short road to financial problems. I’ve witnessed several situations recently that made me think it was time to set the record straight. One of the situations I heard about from a potential client who was stuck in a “loveless” contract with another designer. The second was an experience I had with a freelancer who didn’t disclose the details of their process upfront. Finally, a fellow designer refused to take blame for a unsuccessful launch.

Let me talk a little about some of the problems surrounding the first situation. The other day, I was contacted by a former high school colleague who now works at a large corporation. They are in the midst of a website redesign but have ran into significant problems with the designer they’ve hired and were a small fortune into paying for something that never seems to materialize. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard these complaints about this particular designer. That’s the problem when you work in a small town. Everyone knows about how everyone else is doing. This particular designer seems to think it’s right to treat his clients as second class citizens especially if they don’t have their acts together out of the gate. For example, if the client doesn’t have the site content completely written out for this designer then the designer belittles them and pushes their account to the bottom of the pile of work. This isn’t the right approach. The reason clients don’t usually have their stuff together properly upfront is because they don’t usually know any better. It’s part of our job as freelancers to work with clients and teach them about the steps it takes to put together an effective, successful website. Spend time with your clients. Have hard discussions about what is needed and what is not and land on something tangible that can be tested with real users. No suggestion is wrong because at the end of the day your client knows their business better than you ever will. You on the other hand bring the experience of years of crafting successful digital experiences to the table and can help navigate these suggestions into useful elements scattered throughout the experience.

I’ve been having conversations with a few other entrepreneurs and friends about this experience and we all agree that at the end of the day, your client should want to feel like they could call you up for a drink or a night out watching hockey. As you can probably see this isn’t the case for the client-designer relationship mentioned. However, it’s the case with several of my own clients. Each of them I love talking to and spending time with. Having this type of relationship with your clients can have extreme long term benefits. Not only does it allow for you to do better work for them but also have a deeper understanding of their business and goals in general. In fact, the benefits go beyond that. A deep relationship can lead to referrals, unsolicited gifts and rewards that sometimes out weigh the monetary values. I love being able to contact my clients just to say hi, see how their families are doing, send an interesting article to them that might benefit their business or a simple congratulations when milestones happen in their lives. Our phone calls, meetings and general conversations are always more friendly and get into deeper experiences that benefit the end product. Sometimes these conversations get heated but by having that base level of trust, no one ever walks away from the table hurt. From what I’ve heard about this other designer, none of this is the case. The designer is quick to be negative and strives at burning bridges.

The next is a situation that I’ve recently experienced first hand. In working with a freelancer, there were several unknowns about the costs and what services they were offering. I made certain assumptions based on my own work ethic and services that I later learned were wrong. The individual performed what I would consider minimal services as a part of the original agreement and then blind sided me with several additional costs that were never discussed. It has always been my belief in putting everything on the table upfront. Informing your clients on all the ins and outs of your process leads to a greater sense of trust. Sometimes this doesn’t work out in your favour because costs are too high but most of the time it works out great as it gives you a place to negotiate from. I always provide a line by line breakdown of how costs are allocated. Later if something arises that was either outside the scope or beyond the initial agreement, all parties can see that it is “above and beyond” cost and we can deal with it together. It helps to set a bar on what is a major component verses a nice bonus. Hiding costs from clients is never a good idea because eventually they need to be discussed. By not being upfront with these costs in the beginning leads to stress, irritation and a lack of positive feeling about the relationship. It’s like when you go to a restaurant and they screw up your meal. If the waiters do nothing about it or provide attitude then they probably aren’t going to get a tip and you’re probably not going to recommend that restaurant to your friends and family. However, if the staff try everything in their power to turn that poor experience around then you are more likely to remember that instead of the bad meal.

This also leads to not only providing a detailed quote for clients but also a details contract that discusses things like copyright, additional costs and timelines. I never send a contract off to a client without discussing every part of it with them first. Unless it’s a client I’ve been doing continuous work for then I send it just say “You’ve seen this before but please reread it for this new project, sign and send back”. Taking a sit down approach is a bit more time consuming but I know that when my clients sign the contracts we are all on the same page and know exactly where we are going from there.

My final experience with treating clients well comes from a partnership I recently finished up as a favour. That was my first mistake. I’ve always said that going freelance was going to be a learning curve and this experience definitely has been. I’ve screwed up with clients before. However, I’m always transparent about it with them and take full responsibility when I’ve messed up. Only once has this lead to a client terminating the contract and refusing to ever speak with me again. The rest of the time, my clients have been extremely understanding and I’m so grateful for that. I strive for perfection and always try to deliver the best possible end product but sometimes I fall short. For whatever reason things happen sometimes. Not often and with each experience comes learning.

During this relationship project that I was working on, I partnered with a former colleague who brought in a client for us. He took on the role of project management and design having only designs a couple of websites ever in his life. He told me that he had discussed with the client the goals of the site and how we would continue moving forward. We set up a plan of attack and strongly suggested we get continuous client feedback on every move. My partner said not a problem, he would do that. For each step, I would ask do we have approval or what revisions do we need to make, then we would carry on. I only ever got the opportunity to talk and have a face-to-face with the client once which was the day before we set the site live. I got a sense from the client on the day we met that this wasn’t exactly what he had wanted and wasn’t fully supportive of the site we had designed for him but it was too late to go back and revise everything. After the launch, I found out from another individual that the client wasn’t happy at all with the end product and that my partner had quickly thrown me under the bus telling the client that I had wanted to build things a certain way no matter what and it was my problem that certain features hadn’t made it into the design. I’ll be honest some of the additional features the client wanted may not have made it into the final design after hearing what they were but I would have at least like to have known about them before hand so I could talk to the client about their importance to his business goals.

The partner passed off all the blame to me so he could continue to get the discounted deal the client had offered upfront. I on the other hand was getting dealt a bad deal by being talked about as someone who doesn’t deliver on their promises. I found this whole thing extremely upsetting as I never got the opportunity to discuss with the client all the initial questions and discovery phase that I usually would. I was going by the word of my partner. I learned that I have to be more forceful in these situations to get in front of the clients and spend time with them on the important pieces just like I would with my own clients. Needless to say that this partner of mine has burnt a significant bridge with me and has lost a good friend.

The moral of these stories is treat your clients with respect. Be transparent and open with them. Help them understand how their money is being spent and deliver a quality product in the end to them. Sometimes dealing with clients can be hard. Trust me with my short temper, there are days that I just want to freak out at them but then I remember that they aren’t doing the things they are doing to be mean or screw you. Most of the time, it’s because they just don’t know any better. Spend time with them. Guide them by the hand especially if they haven’t created a new website for their business in over 7 years. Work alongside them, help bring them into the process and help them be a part of the whole creation. Your end products will benefit from this and you’re career will too.