Response to Clients From Hell

Recently Carl Smith did a video blog entitled “Clients From Hell? Blame Yourself!” (If you’ve not watched it, you should.) It’s something I agree with and something that my mind ended up thinking of again today as I read my feeds and read the new Clients From Hell. This one in particular:

A client wanted an e-commerce store designed. We asked if she had a budget, and she said, “No; it…

A client wanted an e-commerce store designed. We asked if she had a budget, and she said, “No; it costs what it costs.” My partner and I proposed a very reasonable price and in the proposal, we stated that additional hours would be billed at $60 per hour. She refused to even look at the proposal, handing it off to one of the interns to “deal with it.” The project wore on for about three months and we still hadn’t been paid for our initial invoice. We called the client and she assured us that her intern was handling it and that we would get a cheque in the mail. About a week later, we hadn’t heard from her. So we did what we usually do: halt work and send them a message. The client phoned me after receiving the message, basically screaming at me that it was too expensive. She said, “spend no more than 10 hours designing and programming it; I don’t want to spend more than $600.” We had spent 10 hours in meetings alone.

See, in this post the person is blaming the client. Saying they are “from Hell.” When truthfully there were red flags from the beginning. The first, of course, being that the client did not read the estimate. Secondly, not only did they start the work without receiving the initial upfront deposit, they carried on for three months(!) without stopping work to receive the payment.

So many of the posts on there are in this similar vein. If you are not smart about your clients and about the money, then you can not expect them to go smoothly or to go correctly. If you feel a client is “from hell” at the beginning, then go with your gut feeling and try to move on to another project.

(Looks like I am not the only one either)