Breaking Up With Clients Is Hard To Do.. or is it?

Hi All,

 

Last week I stumbled upon an article on freelancewritinggigs.com by an inspirational writer by the name of Sue Poremba called The Luxury Of No.  In it, she spoke about how it is sometimes necessary for freelance writers to turn down work when it pays too low or the client is less than cooperative.  We all know how hard this is to do.  We would (especially when we’re just starting out) rather be working for very little, than nothing at all. 

 

But there comes a point in everyone’s freelance career when you get a client who is just unreasonable.  They’re not communicating with you in any kind of timely manner.  They’re being rude.  They’re changing deadlines.  Whatever it is that makes you loose sleep, have weird dreams and wake up mad!

 

Well today I was about to continue working for a client who took absurd amounts of time to get back to me about anything, never kept our phone-meetings and kept forgetting to give me essential information to complete my job.  But then I remembered Sue Poremba’s words and I decided that I just wasn’t going to take this laying down.  Here’s the email I wrote to her today:

 

“Was I supposed to get something that looked like this before?

 

I’ll be honest, working with you has been difficult.  There’s a real lack of communication to the point where I didn’t get my first assignment for almost two weeks after I was supposed to start working with you.  It seems that unless you need something from me, it takes anywhere from 2-10 days to get a return email or phone call from either of you.  I don’t think this is going to work out for me.  I write full time and I really need strong communication and follow through so that I can line up my projects properly. 

Thanks anyway.

~Colleen Ruggelo-Sage”

 

I have to say I’m pretty proud of myself.  My husband (who is always accusing me of letting clients walk all over me) was rather surprised that I finally “bucked up,” as he put it.  It wasn’t so bad.  Sure it’s scary to think: “Holy-moly, I just did all that work and now I don’t even know if they’ll pay me.”  But so what?  It wasn’t that much money anyway.  And you know what the icing on the cake is?  With the time I saved arguing and worrying about them, I landed myself a better job that paid roughly 8x as much.  How about that?

~ by thehardcorefreelancer on July 21, 2008.