Comments on: How to fire a client

By: DesignGal

DesignGal — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 07:58:45 +0000

Hi all,

I currently have a client that is my worst nightmare. I have a contract, did a time line, to which he agreed and then blew out of the water 2 months later, stating that there was no rush on the project (maybe not for him). He has paid on time but now after not hearing from him for 1 month he calls out of the blue and expects me to just drop whatever I am doing (and now I have more clients and a full schedule) and do his job.

I want to fire this guy so bad but I am halfway through the project which by now has gone over the hours initially bid on it and is going into the red.

He has not responded to my emails - has not given me the product info which he hass ben working on (supposedly) for 4 months - oh yeah this was suppose to be a 2 months project and has turned into 6.

Now some other developer calls me because they are hiring him to do the 1000,s of products (great if he would call me back now)

I a at my wits end - I don’t know what to do - this is a simple shopping cart selling knives - they can’t agree on the design - I don’t know.

I have been designing sites for over 13 years and have never had to fire a client nor have I really had any I don’t like - but this guy - I don’t know what to do. By the time I am done with this project I will be in the hole about 1,500

Help what should I do?????

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 16:52:11 +0000

Thank you for your comments. I came across your blog in need of advice on this very topic. I am currently struggling with firing a client that has been with me for 10 years. He is just mean and unappreciative (once he actually instructed that I should lecture one of my designers for a typo on a proof - typo ended up being in his client supplied copy - of course, no apology for his rant). He has caused a lot of anxious moments in the studio and one designer to quit mid project. The work is basic and not very creative… nothing that would make the portfolio. He pays slow and demands his work be started as soon as he requests it, we have to pull information from 4 different odd past projects and hope it is what he wants, and expects it finished at unreasonable rates. He insists on using his own printers and expects the studio to review and communicate with these printers at no charge… I have tried raising his rates and he is still around. I can’t refer him to another designer - I would be hated for life. I have decided to tell him that we are restructuring and in doing so we are unable to continue to serve his graphic needs. Wish me luck!

By: Phil

Phil — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 07:16:20 +0000

Always, repeat always have a scope of project and cost associated with the project. Furthermore, do not spend time on any change or variation until the client agree to the cost implication. Trust me you will be more professional and save yourself unpaid bills and disappointments. A client not agreeing to this is not worth having anything to do with. So it is better to fire him even before the job begins.
I have used the second option several times especially to close friends and relations as they are the most difficult client to work with. Whatever you do is just not good enough for them as they know your potentials but you are timid in billing them. Most of the time I just send them to someone else capable of handling the scope of work and everyone is happy at the end of the day.

By: dcb77

dcb77 — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 23:46:37 +0000

How about when you are planning to fire the client and they beat you to the punch, using a really lame excuse like, “It’s better for everyone on the team if you aren’t a part of it!” Not to mention the after hours phone calls, weekend communication, etc. All the while they play it up like you are really doing a great job and they just need to tweak things ONE more time…

I just spent 18 hours (count ‘em, 18) putting together a SINGLE landing page for a client who refused to use html and the entire doggone thing had to be graphical. Fussing over color hues, fussing over type sizes, fussing over hyphenation.

I sent them my invoice and was going to politely excuse myself from the project upon receipt of payment. Well, they beat me to the punch, and still have not paid my invoice.

What recourse do I have?

Call me a dummy now :-(

By: Kris

Kris — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 23:56:19 +0000

Best Way to fire a client,

Everytime you talk to them send them a bill.

I had a crazy client that wanted a simple website with paypal and it turned out he wanted Bluenile.com. The jerk expected me to come to his office everyday with no rembursment for gas or pricy parking.

He claimed he did not read the contract after he almost bankrupted me.

JERK

By: ADACProgramming

ADACProgramming — Sat, 27 Aug 2005 21:43:27 +0000

In response to Fenrir2
Always have a written project scope before you start work, outline the work to be done and the agreed price. For my ongoing clients I accept a emailed OK but I will not start before I receive this.

When the project changes, as it seems it always does, write out the change and how much the change will cost and once again do not do any work on that section until you have an OK.

This works well with ongoing clients you trust. Otherwise have a written contract for each job and change orders for each change, also include payment schedules, part at the beginning and payments through out the project if it is large.

On the client firing, I like the referral method, Often you are really the one to blame. You may have needed the work or you were careless, and allowed the client to start running how the job goes. They get used to that and it continues to get worse. Yes I’ve done this too. Sometimes it just goes better for them to start fresh with a new developer, there’s no reason to have hard feelings, it just doesn’t always work out.

By: llarensj (I don't sure I suscribed...)

llarensj (I don't sure I suscribed...) — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 16:47:21 +0000

In my particular case, ALL jobs are whitout contract, even bigger ones (involving all pharmacies from a state, for example). I’m just the analyst/designer/coder/maintainer/shoulder to cry on etc… and I don’t negotiated the job fees (Im TOO BAD negociating, so allegedly, anything that my partner negotiated in behalf of my is fine… well most of time). And I just cannot refuse to do insane things to get the work done (for the same money) because Im stick with people acustomed to pay ’small’ and require ‘big’ and the things just go crazy if the system don’t support in some way the administrative mess that have nothing to be with technical reasons.
OH, I forgot to mention that this happen in Argentina, where SIXTY (60) percent of the employees/ contractors have NOT any kind of social care nor laboral assurement nor even being acknowledged by the state authorities.
SO if you refuses to do something, someone else just take the number to do the same job for less money, no matter if the job is done WORST but is done.

By: Clenard

Clenard — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 22:04:38 +0000

“Do I read this right–you would intentionally pass a difficult client to another freelancer in order to harm that freelancer’s business?”

I don’t think he meant doing it purposely - I believe he meant “Why *ME* deal with this?” and send them off to another (which is obviously going to be a Competitor) Deseigner/Developer to deal with.

It’s the art of Business… nothing personal.

By: brothercake

brothercake — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 13:46:39 +0000

ideally competitors that will suffer by having this client

Do I read this right - you would intentionally pass a difficult client to another freelancer in order to harm that freelancer’s business?

By: codeninja

codeninja — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 15:47:05 +0000

I ran across this just the other day with one of my clients… I had agreed to maintain a very inefficiently designed and ultimately unmaintainable shopping cart system with the agreement that we would work towards a full re-design of the system… This never materialized and even minor textual changes to the existing system took 2-3 days because changing displayed text would break functionality site wide. Major changes took upwards of 2 weeks and broke most of the functionality.

The compensation for these projects was low because the client saw these as “Simple fixes” that should not take much time.

This distracted my attention from ALL my other projects and was costing me money.

I had a conversation with the client and simply informed him that I was far too busy to maintain a system that cant be maintained and one that I did not create.

The client was quite receptive to this and admitted that he had expected this and was surprised that it hadn’t come earlier… so all in all we parted on good terms.

Had the developer who built this site in the first place designed it right Im sure that I would not have had to take this action… so for god’s sake people… separate your core logic from your display logic, code with objects, and normalize your databases!

It will make everyone’s life easier and you will appreciate getting a system designed this way.