What’s the deal with clients?

They expect you to drop what you’re doing and fix their issue and they can’t understand why you’re sending them a bill for your time spent.

They assume what they are asking is easy – but they can’t do it, if it’s easy or hard it doesn’t matter, they can’t do it, hence they are asking you, your time is money so charge for it.

My usual rebuttal is ‘if you called a plumber to drop everything and go fix your issue, would you expect a bill?’

Why should designers or developers be held to any fewer standards, time is money no matter what industry you’re in. You will find designers and developers’ time is often worth more.

Fortunately I haven’t had this issue for a long time, I learnt all this years ago, you need to bill for your time and in the end your clients will respect what you’re doing more, I always let my clients know up front that every bit of time I spend doing any work for you will be billed (unless its super tiny), and it’s not out of greed or anything, but if all my time that I spend on client work is billed for then my hourly rate will be less since I’m not running around doing errands for clients that are asking stupid questions. If you pay for my time I’m going to deliver the best quality work I can.

The other thing is you find clients ask for lots of other things done out of the scope of a project, since your already billing them for a project they expect the extras free. If a client pays me for time spent, no matter what I’ll work hard and deliver a quality job, if they don’t pay for that time all I’m doing is neglecting other paying clients so I’ll spend 0 time on their out of scope task and end up doing a poor job. I don’t want to deliver a bad solution and they don’t want to receive one, if they understand that they’ll pay the money.

The simple answer to all this is to deliver them a bad solution when they want free work done, when they bitch about it say well, you paid nothing so I spent nothing on it, I have 8 hours in the day that are full with paid work, if you need me to spend hours on your task then you could wait until I have free time in the next few months or I can invoice you and I can put it into a task list to get done today. If you were one of my other paying clients and I wasn’t doing you work because I was too busy doing free work for someone else, how would you feel? Paid customers always come first. This is a business not a charity.

I’ve done this a few times before, works 90% of the time, the other 10% of the time the client never used me again, but that worked out well anyway because they were the clients that always paid late, always bitched about their bill and always wasted my time. Of course what I said above I articulated better to the client, I sat them down and explained everything and I always try to use their business as an example, if I was a client of theirs and always wanted free work done how well would it get delivered?