My Stumbling Adventures in Web Design and Development
This article was originally written by Max Voltar and is available on his blog at maxvoltar.com. Its a really awesome article that in turn also points you to another article for a good contract for freelancers. If you are a freelancer this is golden advice.
Yesterday, I kicked out a client. He refused to pay, and I was sick of it. Ripped up his invoice and let him know he wasn’t allowed to use any of the designs I made for him. Here’s what I learned the hard way, and how I’m going to prevent this from happening ever again.
First off: It doesn’t matter who this client was. We both agreed on keeping this between us. Although a bad experience for both of us, ruining each other’s reputation wasn’t going to help either of us. And besides: It could be anyone. Maybe you have a shitty client, maybe someone you know is complaining about shitty clients.
The first thing I’m going to do, is write a contract based on Andy Clarke’s Contract Killer.
If signing a contract I didn’t fully understand made me a stupid son-of-a-bitch, not asking my customers to sign one just makes me plain dumb.
If the clients refuses to sign it, we’ll either a) make some minor changes to it, or b) end our relation here.
After the contract has been signed, the client will have to make a deposit based on my estimate. This can vary between 25 and 50% of the total estimate. No work starts before that deposit has reached my bank account.
This isn’t just a matter of trust, but also of cashflow. Sometimes, I go as far as writing the client an invoice on a weekly basis. If you deliver quality work, the client won’t mind paying you the way you want.
I’ve written about this before, but seriously: Stick to your schedule.
Don’t think a 1-day project in the middle of a 2-month project won’t do any harm. It will. Taking on projects in between will cause all your other projects to suffer. It’s very simple: First come, first served.
Set a standard for the kind of work you accept. This isn’t a strict rule you should stick to, there will always be exceptions. Once in a while, you get offered a project you’ve always dreamt of. If that’s the case: Break all the rules and go for it, head first.
I’ve decided not to take on work that requires less than 2 days – I don’t really have a maximum. The reason for this is that each project involves a bunch of paperwork, emails, meetings… and for really small projects, it’s just not worth investing that effort into it.
Everybody has a certain style, an area of expertise. You shouldn’t be scared to step out of that safe circle and expand it, but you can’t constantly be doing stuff you know little about. This would result in you looking like a douche and delivering half-assed work.
If you happen to get requests for projects that do fall outside of your preferred choice of work, don’t hesitate to forward them to befriended companies that might need some extra work or are just more suited for the projects in question.
I’ve done this plenty of times, and they started doing the same. This resulted in a small network of friends all forwarding each other work. When one of us is low on work, we’d just say so.
These are all precautions you can take to make sure a project goes smoothly, and that you get paid in the end, and are able to feed your cat and partner.
Remember that these are all written from a one-man company’s perspective. Also remember that not all clients are shitty, there are some you just want to kiss.