If you meet a potential client and you identify red flags, but you still proceed. Anyway, those people often end up becoming clients from hell. I think just about anybody who's been a freelancer long enough has had at least one or two clients from hell. These are the people you should have never worked within the first place.
Clients from hell are the ones who don't listen. They aren't polite in their speech emails or text message. They don't respect you your profession and the skills you bring to the table. They treat you like a peon or a slave rather than a talented professional. They think they know better than you, or they wanna tell you how to do your job.
They want to use you as a tool to get what they want, like a hammer or a saw. They assume you exist to serve them. They think you should drop everything and focus on them when they call or. They contact you at inappropriate times of the day or even days of the week, they make you feel bad about how much you charge, even if they end up paying it with clients from hell.
The problem is with them. But a lot of times they have a weird way of twisting it around to make you feel like the problem is actually with. , I don't want to go on a long list of talking about all the clients from hell that I've had, but here are a couple specific examples that I think are particularly egregious that explain exactly what I'm talking about.
There was one client I had in particular that I took on because I was desperate for money, but I knew that he was going to be a bad fit. We had a personality conflict. He thought he knew everything. He did not listen to me. And he was a very creative person with a lot of opinions. At one point, I didn't quite understand what he was saying, but he told me to do it anyway.
He looked me right in the eye and pointed and said, I'm not your boss, but I'm just like your boss. wow. That was a terrible relationship. I ended up quitting all together. I told him you and I cannot work together. So here's my final invoice. Here are your files. Take these and go find someone else. I am not going to work with someone like that.
I'm a freelancer. The whole point of being a freelancer is we are free to work with whomever we want. Or not want to, so to get people, to screw with your brain and make them think that you work for them like a slave and you have no autonomy or choice, that's a terrible thing. And it should never happen because that's why we're freelancers.
I had another client who hired me and I knew I should not have worked with him. He was very Curt and extremely opinionated. Didn't listen and told me exactly what he wanted. And I explained what I could and couldn't do. I followed everything that was outlined in my contract. And at the very end, he said, I don't like it.
I'm not paying your bill. That was it. He just decided he didn't like it. And he didn't wanna pay me. As I'll explain later in this course, I employed some tactics so that I wasn't burned financially the way that I could have been, but that was a terrible relationship. And because I knew a whole bunch of people in my industry at the time, what do you think I did?
I went and told my friends, just so you know, this guy had a contract with me and he didn't pay it. And that helped later on when one of my friends called me and said, this guy just called me and asked if I can build a website for him. And I said, what would I like to explain more about my experience? So that was another bad client that I saw coming, and I knew it was going to be bad.
And I regretted, I let a red flag client become a client from. One final example. I had a client that I was working with on and off in a sort of hourly consultative relationship over a period of weeks and months. And it was fine, but I never felt that he valued my time because he always wanted me to drop everything I was doing and come down to his office.
I finally drew the line when on a Thanksgiving morning at seven 30, am he called me and asked, can you come down to my office right now? I let that phone call go to voicemail and I didn't return it because I thought that's ridiculous. And the crazy thing is the next day, when I returned his phone call, he said, wow, you're hard to get ahold of.
Sometimes clients are just crazy. Their expectations are ridiculous, or they treat you without any respect. Clients from hell are like being in a dysfunctional relationship. They don't value you. They don't care about you. They're using. You've got to get out. That's really the only thing you can do.