You Can Go Fuck Yourself. An Ultimate Guide of Choosing the Right Clients
Working with clients
Working with clients is vital for a freelancer, since we don’t rely on agents or managers. The idea behind writing the Working With Clients series was to share my experience starting from scratch as a graphic design student and becoming a freelancer, lacking the experience and expertise at first, but gaining trust and client-base in the end.
Freelancing Sucks
Being a freelancer doesn’t mean freedom, at least it doesn’t mean freedom for those who pay us for the work we do. You can blame the low rates or the ever-increasing amount of designers working in the field, the story is the same: most of the clients would treat you as a slave.
Freelancing in Numbers
Now when saying “most of the clients” I’m talking numbers. Around 70% of people are greedy and those people will eventually need a logo or a business card done. When they go out into the World Wide Web and put something like “logo design cheap” in Google, they are struck by the amount of cheap stuff, being the freelancing pages I talked a bit before or other sites where you get cheap stuff and I mean cheap in both ways.
Unfortunately people who proudly call themselves businessmen don’t need a good logo, all they need is a .jpg to put at the top of their word document or something to top their webpage. What I’m trying to say is that those people are okay with a crappy design that costs nothing.
For some time I tried to reason with those people, tried explaining them why a design should be at least okay, until one person told me the following:
“Dear Ivan, thank you for your concern about my business and the time you’ve spent. One thing you should understand is that I need a logo, not a selling tool”
The thing is that people don’t understand how their logo can be selling their products or how the logo can bring them new customers. At that time I decided never to reason with clients, usually all I say is “if you need a good logo, contact me”.
Freelancers are No Slaves
I was contacted by a person recently who needed business cards designed. The man contacted me through Skype at 2 am, seeing that I was online. After a brief talk he asked how much the design would cost him. After hearing the price he sounded as if it was bigger than he expected to pay.
He said that he will transfer the money in the morning (I work with 50% prepay) and that I can start working. I said I will, meaning I will start the work in the morning as I was going to bed.
But before I switched my laptop off the man told me that he needed the cards designed by tomorrow’s evening. After that I kindly turned down the offer and went to bed.
Conclussion
Here is a tiny list of freelancing don’ts a client and a freelancer should understand before working together. I highly suggest everyone working in the freelancing business to write it down and include it into your proposals.
- Freelancers don’t work 24/7, nor are they available
- Freelancers don’t provide extra work (and i mean work) without extra payment
- Freelancers don’t provide mockups for free
- Freelancers don’t rate your task higher than any other work they’re working on right now
One more thing is that a freelancer should not be treated as a person who works for you. A freelancer works with you. If you’re a client and you disagree, %title%.
This was an article written after a frustration of finding a freelance gig and deciding to leave it. Hope you enjoyed it, see you next time.
We all have story very much the same, in the case of freelance designer i have found that people thinks that we only “spend” time to do the jobs and our time cannot be so expensive, and because of that if we don’t get paid we lose nothing but time, most of the time these people says you have no machinery and use no raw materials, but we do use our computers our kind of machinery, and we have our some times expensive software and we have electricity to pay as well as accountats, pay taxes and everything that big companies do, in a smaller scale but the same. This week haven that I go to a workshop and has a paper in every wall and above every door that says “Ín this workshop we pay electricity, water, telephone, salaries, social security as raw materials for your work, so leave your prepay” (was in spanish sorry if th traslation is not accurate)and that same day an arge with a client make me tell them about that pieces of paper with the writen above, and that with the bouncing checks, the common practice here in El Salvador of the “Quedan” a piece of paper with no legal bound that almos everybody here uses that is justa a paper that says “We have the invoice #xxx for $xxx and we will pay in DD/MM/YYYY that in many cases is just a “will pay you someday” and take you as a third class employee and many other abuses that makes you raise some rates ask for a prepay even for the smallest insignificant thinks as change the contact info on a web site, and ending up doing a latinamerican saying “No buscar a quien la debe, sino a quien la pague” that means “don’t seek the one that owes you, but the one who pays you” and someone of freelance folder is partly right in saying that we attract the kind of clients we have, but with a twist “we must attract the client we want and evade the ones we don’t want, I have done that this week to a client he don’t want to pay and was very hard to make him pay the last job, and he asked fot one more job, the consecuense now is double fee period, with the prepay the job will be paid, then if he don’t want topay the rest will be no lost, that’s the price bad clients have to pay, hopefully he will go away by himself because he knows i’m charging him double fee.
I really like the “don’s seek the one that owes you, but the one who pays you”. I guess sometimes you just have to isolate yourself in a way, I mean there are millions of clients out there, feel free to choose! :)
Eduardo, thanks for your comment.