Do you sometimes fall out with the occasional client ?

[stevesideas]

Maybe its just me...I just wondered if others have dropped clients because they seem to take advantage of the situation of being a freelancer and think they have you over a barrel because of the money side of things.

[dlparisi]

I don't think I've ever dropped a client but I have changed how I work with a few clients, i.e., a larger deposit up front, ALL changes are extras, full payment before image release, etc. If they don't like it they can drop me as a vendor.

[glorybound]

I have, but just one.

[Sawyer]

In 5 years of working for myself I fired one client. He was a nice guy and had a lot of work but he was very unreliable about the work. I found it was never worth the effort, basically I would schedule other clients around him and he never came through.

[MoonDoggie]

Yeah, I've had a falling out with a client who was unbearable to work with. He drained me of every bit of life in me. It was a huge relief off my chest to stop working for him.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Ouch dont tell me... Last 1 was in January, he was unbelievable ! Work for him was something like... 16h a day for some lowest pay I ever was offered lol... Nice projects tho ! Only thing that keep me with him was that he had good contacts and good projects... other than that nightmare.

[BBB3]

I couldn't take it any more and fired all my clients the other day. They were beginning to get in the way of my personal projects. Life's much better now.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Can i have your clients Bertrand? )))

I once literally almost kicked out a client form my office. He was such a pain in the ass...i told him to stick his money upto his bum and leave immediatelly....you should see how fast he left
Anyway, one has to be hard sometimes...especially these day when clients are very demanding....you have to let them know youre not their slave.........but then again.....whos gonna pay all the bills )))

[MoonDoggie]

The client I'm referring to wanted to have 3 hour meetings everyday over skype, wanted them pro bono, and micromanaged me and what I was working on for him. I was doing a project for him and when I didn't get to it one day due to other projects I literally got an email to the tone of "I expect an explanation why you didn't work on my project yesterday..." (almost verbatim...).

He paid late, half my usual rate, and I don't do work for him anymore obviously. Good to hear other people's horror stories on this subject.

[glorybound]

I am sure this client probably treats everyone as poorly as he/she treated you. Those kind of clients are not worth it, was it a developer?

[MoonDoggie]

No, not a developer, though they can get bad. He was just an individual. You gotta get good at saying "Not enough time" and "No" when you're freelancing

[Alan Iglesias]

Here's a recent one - I did some product visualization work for a client that wanted renderings for stills for brochures, web sites, and such. I agreed to deliver the image files and nothing else and did so after some modeling and extensive color and light work.

Months later he calls me and in a somewhat demanding tone says he needs the Max files immediately - seems he has someone in-house and needs more renderings for more magazine ads or something. I politely told him that our verbal agreement, which is a binding contract in this state, was for images only and if he'd like more, I can render them out for him quickly and relatively inexpensively, but under no circumstances would I simply hand over the Max files as they contain modeling, color/light, and rendering techniques, etc. If he would like to buy them, then we could talk about that, too.

Well, this guy completely flips out on the phone, yelling at me about how broke he was, and what a horrible person I was for not just giving him the files. Then he threatens to sue me and at this point I just broke out laughing and said please do - give it your best shot and we'll see how that works out for you! Then I told him to never call me again and hung up on him when he started yelling again.

After well over 20 years of freelancing, I've got plenty of other nightmare client stories, too...

-Alan

[stevesideas]

Thats kind of a relief...I thought I was maybe overreacting or something. The guy I worked with was kind of volatile with his emails. One time he would be saying, "this is great" and the next moment he would be emailing me, "why havent you done what ive asked". The job came half finished from another freelancer he wasnt happy with so I kind of thought that maybe this client was a bit hard to work with anyway. I guess some people are people people and some are not. I even stayed up till 7 oclock 2 nights and 3 oclock the following to get his job done and he starts moaning about the fact im more expensive than hes other freelancers. Hard to please people some time !

My philosophy is that I decided to turn freelance because of the BS and limits of working for the wrong type of company...so I dont expect to have to deal with crap like this from someone..especially when my other clients are happy. Im not driven completely by money which this type of client seems to think is the case.

[glyph]

I had one client repeatedly phone me at end of the day and give lectures on how much more work he was going to be giving me and how important his job was and how his future depended on it - at that time of day all I wanted was to work in peace and not spend the time yakking - so I made a sarcastic comment about his lecture and he went psycho, said he'd never work with me again and slammed the phone down
I still do work for him but it has made him more careful not to abuse my time

I have another client - a really nice guy - but he sends emails about nothing and 'what did I think about the last job' - I still have to reply ..
and he's a very slow payer

and there's the client who asks the identical technical question every few months
and ones who never read the emails you've carefully written

phew - I must learn to love my clients

[Morne]

and there's the client who asks the identical technical question every few months
and ones who never read the emails you've carefully written

I had that call this morning. After emaling a client some WIP shots to show geometry and explained that this and that still needs to be done and color corrected, he flipped and now they changing all the finishes. Never reads my mails, only look at the pictures