Take Back Your Time by Ditching Bad Clients | Hacker News Reader

Take Back Your Time by Ditching Bad Clients

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14 pointsspiky_simon11 comments

Been there. Done that twice. Highly recommended. I've never regretted "firing a client". In fact, my only regret the first time around was not having done it 6 months earlier.

Everyone has their moods and passions. Any non-trivial project will almost inevitabley take a few unplanned paths and hit a few bumps in the road. Mr. Murphy never takes a day off.

Alas, when performance demands keep reliably falling well outside the boundaries of the available (budget,staff,time) work-potential triangle, it's time to move on.

Life is too short. It's simply not worth the wear-and-tear on one's health, staff, family, and the company's bottom line, to deal with consistently unreasonable people on a continuing basis.

"It’s often the case that the clients that pay your lowest rate are the biggest pain and the least loyal."

Boy ain't this the truth. I had a client last year that nickled and dimed me and every other vendor they have. It's their way of doing business. Then they stopped paying on time, claimed it was due to the economy. Thing is whenever they got a new sale they would ring a bell, once for every $1000 of the sale. We had several days each month where the bell did not ring less than 10 times. On top of this they expected me to perform duties that I was not contracted to perform i.e. man customer support phones, I'm a developer. I ended our relationship at the end of the year and haven't felt better about any decision. Good riddance.

speaking as someone who plays in that end of the pond, I don't get it. I mean, if I'm underpaying you, isn't that enough? I mean, I know that eventually you are going to get a better job; if I didn't think you were valuable, you wouldn't be working for me. Why would I want to hurry it along? or make things so unpleasant that you quit and go work retail or something?

I find that often the sort of people who are working for below market rates are used to being treated badly, which seems backwards to me. I don't know about you, but the more you pay me, the more unpleasant bullshit I am willing to put up with.

The thing is if you pay people enough to cover the bills, even if it's not "market rate" you can keep people for a while if continuing to work for you is more convenient and generally less pain than getting a better paying job, so it seems like it is in the employers interest to avoid unnecessarily antagonizing employees.

I'd guess it's a psychological thing. If a person is willing to work for below market rates, they've decided how much their time is worth. In other words the employer may very well look at those employees as below market quality, rather than getting a great bargain on high quality employees.

There's an old story, I think it was Buzz Aldrin was giving some sort of talk. They changed the entry price from free to $5, and more people came after the price was increased. That may be a similar situation.

so the employer is being irrational? how are they not punished by market forces? I mean, it seems like an opportunity for arbitrage to me.

Sadly I have few clients like this. Even worst are the ones who always want you to be ready to drop whatever you are doing to take care of their projects, but when it's time to pay their bank is always late or have problems to send out checks...

Amen! I had one exactly like that.

My attitude is that such clients perhaps knowingly put you in financial peril with this behavior, possibly because they believe this is effective motivation to get their project done on time and/or to spec.

Since this can have a broader effect of rewarding unscrupulous behavior in particular freelance market, I try to be prepared to absorb the costs of walking away from a nasty client at any time. If this puts the client in jeopardy because it blows their schedule, that's precisely what they earned, and perhaps they shouldn't be contracting freelancers in the first place.

I learned about that type of client the hard way. She was the poster girl for a bad client, and I finally got rid of her by pricing her out. It was a big lesson, and I will never make the mistake of giving such a client the benefit of the doubt for a couple of months again. Ha! I was burned out for months after that nightmare.

Be on the lookout for such clients and cut your losses early fellows, it is simply not worth it unless the client in question is paying three times your rate, which bad clients never do anyway . . .

The practical problem here is that, in a lot of industries, clients talk, even when they're supposed to be in competition with each other. Getting rid of the problem client isn't what's hard; getting rid of them without losing others is the problem.

yeah, there's no reason to burn bridges. I know I often take a loss when I want to fire a customer (this is a lot easier for me, as it is a product business, I'm not getting paid by the hour.) and I'm pretty up front about what I provide (E.g. I'm not really, ah, 'full service') so it's pretty easy to pass off the customers requiring more help on the competition. For me, this is one of the primary reasons why I like being a product business so much more than contracting or being an employee.

"Here are the things I can do for you" - and if you want something else, the extent of my responsibility is to give you a refund and a recommendation.

I still work to develop new features, but nobody gets particularly mad at me if I flake out and don't get them done within my estimated time frame, not like contracting where if I don't get the thing done on time, sometimes months of my time become valueless to the client.

It was harder when I was primarily a contractor. Man, I was a horrible contractor. Giving away half a months work is much more painful than refunding someone for a fairly high margin product.

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