Why I’m assertive with clients
After my “Freelancer’s Manifesto“, I noticed a couple of comments on reddit, suggesting that I came off as arrogant. I can assure you, that I certainly wasn’t trying to come off that way, but I make no apologies for what I said. Text is an imperfect medium, and tone is not always conveyed as it was intended when written.
As I said in the footnote, I’m quite forthright with my opinions, which is something clients in the past have told me they appreciate. I’m just a no-BS, call-it-how-I-see-it kind of person.
I think part of the reason the manifesto sounds arrogant to some is the fact that I am both opinionated and assertive with my clients from the get-go. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing mind you… you don’t have to be an arsehole about it, you can do it in a professional, friendly way, which I try to do.
Maximising value
One of the things I learned when I started is that, as a freelancer, you are both the “CEO” and “your shareholders”. This means that YOU have a responsibility to YOURSELF to ensure you are “maximising shareholder value.” If you don’t stand up for yourself, no one else is going to.
This is a business, and the price in a business transaction is a trade off of two things: that the client will want to pay the minimum they can, and the supplier will want to charge the maximum they can justify. Value for money vs. fair compensation. The free market economy is built on this concept of market price.
This is why I try to be assertive. If I’m not, if I bend over backwards for clients, I’m sending a signal that I’m weak and they can extract more value by pushing me. Before you know it, I’m working 80 hours a week, but only getting paid for 40 of them. Or worse still, I’m missing deadlines and disappointing clients who are willing to be fair and reasonable in our dealings.
Learning assertiveness
I learnt this lesson the hard way, before I even became a developer. When I was younger, I had a job doing technical support and setting up new PCs for the local franchise of a national computer store. I was part of a company that contracted with several of these franchises for the work. It wasn’t rocket science, but it was a good gig to help pay my way through uni. I met some nice “clients”, but I also met some not so nice clients. The not so nice ones were essentially leeches, who wanted to suck you dry.
The company was paid a flat fee by the franchise for a basic drop off, set up, “this is how you log on” spiel. Supposed to be no more than an hour visit, the idea being that if they wanted more help, they would call us back direct to come out and provide further support and training.
The bad clients however were the ones who frequently caused me to spend more than my allotted time doing the setup and install and did not understand that they had only paid for an hour. I would offer to come back at another time, but they would frequently become rude and threaten to call the franchise manager when I politely tried to explain that I had to go as I had other clients.
Sluuuuuuuurp!
With these clients, it was always just “one last thing” or “five more minutes” or “could you explain it one more time”. Once you successfully detached them from yourself, you were running late for your next pickup and copping an earful from the franchise for keeping the next one waiting. Then invariably, they would call you in the middle of your next job to ask you something you just explained to them.
Where’s the harm in that you may ask? Well, part of the initial spiel was to suggest to the client that they may like to have a pen and paper ready in case they weren’t sure they could remember everything. Many were happy to do so, but the ones who told me (often quite rudely) that they weren’t stupid and they’d remember were, you guessed it, the leeches who were on the phone, not an hour later, asking you how to log on again.
The dilemma
This is the point at which we were actually supposed to be making money. The company charged a discounted setup fee (not quite a loss-leader, but close enough) to the computer sales franchise, in exchange for getting the client as a lead for further work. So a call back from one of these clients was supposed to be good… Yay! Repeat business!
uh uh. Not in this case. It was “oh, I don’t need you to come out, can you just tell me again how to…”
Great, what do you do here? You either
- insist that you can’t do phone support with the client, and pretty much kill the hope of future work from them, or you
- spend 20 minutes of your time when you’re supposed to be on another job, giving someone else something for free.
Being all naive and happy to help as I was then, I started off doing 2. Don’t they say the customer is always right?
That was until I realised two things: I was reinforcing the message to the leech client that they could call me and get free support, and at the same time, I was keeping potentially a good client waiting, which lowered their opinion of me and decreased the chance that they would want to call me back in future.
We were a small operation, we had no way of doing billable phone support, so the correct answer in this case is 1.
You have to be willing to piss off these bad clients, albeit in a professional way, by politely refusing to give them something for free. If you don’t, they will cost you more than you will ever make from them.
The customer is always right - except when they’re a parasitic organism
The lesson I learned in that particular job is twofold:
- There are some clients that no matter what you do for them, you can’t please them
- Spending time trying to satisfy them anyway can impact badly on your relationship with other clients
Standing up to bad clients and “firing” them is not always pleasant, but it’s in your “shareholders’” interests to do so. Better still is to set expectations up front, draw the line before you get to that point.
Bonus: “Oh my god, you called your clients leeches, you’re so unprofessional!”
Errr, no, not quite. I called ex-clients from 8-9 years ago leeches. They weren’t the majority of my clients, many of whom were quite understanding of the “no phone support” policy. But I’m not going to sugar coat it or be all politically correct about the other 5-10%
Freeloaders exist in this world, as do people with an exaggerated sense of entitlement (”I paid $50 for you to deliver and install my computer and show me how to log on, you should stay here for the next 5 hours answering every last obscure question I have about Microsoft Word 97!”).
If you don’t have plans and policies in mind to prevent these people from taking advantage of you, they will and you’ll be out of pocket for it.
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February 23rd, 2007 at 2:46 pm
You are my hero, thanks for writing this. Computer techs are way underappreciated, and we help cause that with the ‘one more thing’ support approach.
Keep it up!
February 23rd, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Dave,
It amazes me the way people get upset about these things when computers are involved. I’ve just built a house recently, and talked to plenty of builders, plumbers, electricians, etc.
All these guys would literally laugh in the face of customers and tell them where to go if the customer tried any of the stuff I heard in my time as a tech. I don’t know why it’s different when it comes to computers - maybe the clients are stuck in that high school “push the nerd around and he’ll do my homework” mentality?
February 24th, 2007 at 12:41 am
Great article series, Warren! Re: “push the nerd around”, one mentality I’ve come across is that people associate sitting in front of a computer making things as non-work. I think this is because they assume that it’s a push-button world, and that we must have the “fancy” software that they don’t have. We just push buttons until the design comes out, right? Another assumption that’s sometimes made is that the stuff we do seems more fun than what they’re doing, and therefore must not be as hard…when I worked in the video game industry people would always comment, “It must be nice to sit around playing games all day.” If the person asking is married I sometimes say, “yes, it’s fun in the way that planning a wedding must be…such a fun time had by all, right?”
February 24th, 2007 at 1:30 am
Thanks Dave (number II)!
Totally agree with you on the button pusher thing too… people just don’t see the mental processing that goes into the button presses…
In knowledge work, I think the rule is flipped: what we do is 99% inspiration, 1% perspiration. (Well as least during the winter months… Summer here means that even typing produces more perspiration than average. )
As for fun, well the next person who says that it must be fun to stay at home all day and sit on the computer can come and help me debug memory leaks in multithreaded C++ code running on Windows! In exchange, I’ll help plan their wedding too! (Hope they like the registry office…)
February 24th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Rules For Self-Employed People
February 28th, 2007 at 1:01 am
Warren,
There’s nothing wrong or to be ashamed about debugging multithreaded C++ code under Windows. I’ve in as much done the same myself in the past. It’s a beautiful thing my friend. Also, it doesn’t hurt to have a profiler or a good heap analyzer like Automated QA around. I highly recommend it. There used to be another excellent tool for that called AQTime but that company went belly up back in 2003 ( a shame, really ).
April 5th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
I look at your experience totally differently.
I am sure that the customers were given (by the salesperson) the false impression that they were paying for (directly or indirectly) someone to come and set up their new computer and that they were not told that there was a time limit for this service.
You were set up for failure by your company — the customer did not having a clear idea of what they paid for.
You were further set up for failure by your company having no way to monetize your time on the phone.
Imagine if they customers were clearly told that the first hour of setup / technical support was free and additional support was available for $50 (or whatever) / hour. I bet this would have eliminated almost all of the problems — allowed you to increase billable hours & keep you customers from feeling like they got bad service.
Why I say this: I used to work for a retailer who sold TVs. It was soooo easy for the salesman to promise the world to the customer re: delivery and setup. The delivery / setup guys were on a crazy tight schedule and resented the customers who asked for anything special or had a few questions. The system was broken - there was nothing wrong with the customers.
I am surprised that you blame the customers even in hindsight.
April 5th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
No Mitch I’m sorry, but the customers were given very clear and specific information as to what the service did/didn’t entail.
Maybe I didn’t make it blatantly obvious in the initial post, but they _were_ told how much time was included in the delivery and they _were_ told that additional support was available at a set price, by both the sales team, and myself at the start of a delivery/installation.
The fact that most of them understood this and had no issue with it says to me that on the whole it wasn’t the system that was broken, just a select few clients (and really, it was a small percentage) who believed that for some reason or other, I should treat them differently.
If this weren’t the case, then your analysis would make sense, but I’m sorry to say that the blame did indeed lay with those clients who didn’t respect the terms of the service that they’d paid for.
I wish I could have just put it down to a broken system, an unwinnable game or whatever, but the sad fact is that there are people who will try to take advantage of you in business whatever way they can. My philosophy is to avoid doing business with these people wherever possible.
April 5th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Thanks for the clarification.
Now, I’m glad that you stood up for yourself.