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In about my 2nd week of being self employed I got an inquiry for a PSD to xHtml job. I charged too little, I worked too much, and I generally should never have taken on the work in the first place. The client had high expectations, no budget, and claimed to know a lot more than he actually did. It was a harsh lesson in knowing when to walk away from a paying job.
How It Started
So I got this inquiry along with a request for a quote, he showed me the design (which was very simple) and I told him I’d do it for £50. He replied saying that he was on a very tight student budget and asked if I would be able to do the work for £40. I’m always annoyed when clients do this, if you’re going to ask for a quote, then why quibble when you get one?
Mistake Number 1: I agreed to his price of £40, and made it clear to him that it was a price non-inclusive of revisions, only for a single page, and that it would only include work outlined in a specification document that he should send to me. Of course he sent through the specification document wanting the design to be coded ready for a style-switcher which he himself would implement because he’s “a developer”.
In addition to that little hiccup, he hadn’t prepped the PSD file properly so I had to come back to him 3 times to actually get a complete set of image files to use. That, along with the style switcher meant that it took me 3 hours to code the whole layout – baring in mind that his payment of £40 covered less than 2 hours of my time.
Mistake Number 2: Once the work was completed and sent back to him, he (of course) had some revisions, he wanted a javascript text scroller to be implemented and an addition section of text added. Instead of quoting him for the additional work – I just did it, and sent it back to him, making it clear that I would not be able to do anything else on the project. He barely thanked me, and continued to email me (about 8 times) asking “how to change this part” and “that part” with the CSS.
Mistake Number 3: I’d forgotten that I’d just registered for VAT, and didn’t charge him VAT, so I had to take it out of what he’d already paid. To cut a long story short I made about £34, which for the amount of hassle that this guy was – totally wasn’t worth it.
Needless to say, I was glad to be finished with the job – and vowed never to do it again.
Keeping My Promises
A couple of weeks ago, the very same guy got in touch again with this fantastic opening line (not an actual quote) “Hi, I want another site but I want it to be a full custom blog this time, and another web design company have quoted me £80 for this, please could you give me a quote”
That got my back up right off the mark.
So I replied saying (very simply) that my custom design and development work starts at £400. He replied once again showing me examples of the site that he wanted and saying that his parents could only afford to pay £200 (turns out he’s 17 and wait, what happened to his budget of £80?), he also gave me links to 3 sites which he wanted it to be like. So I replied and told him that for that amount, I could customise a WooTheme for him.
He got back to me telling me (no joke) that he thought I was being “a bit tight”, and thought that I was overcharging him. I explained that every single one of the 3 sites which he had linked me to were modified WooThemes, that is what I would be giving him. His response was that he had chosen another web design company to complete the work as they were able to meet his budget.
Other than banging my head repeatedly against my desk, I did 2 things. I sent him an email wishing him the best of luck with his site, and then immediately called up the web design agency who he’d told me he’d be using. I told them what sort of a client he was and just how much hassle they were about to let themselves in for, and the owner thanked me profusely for letting him know. I wasn’t trying to sabotage the client, I was trying to prevent a fellow web design agency from making a serious loss.
The Moral of The Story
Yes paid work is good, and yes at the end of the day the client is paying the bills and you have to do what they want.. but there’s a limit. I should have seen this guy coming a MILE off. Someone who wants to argue about £10, is someone who wants to argue about a lot more things.
Don’t do what I did, learn from my mistake and just say no. What nightmare clients have you had in the past? Did you successfully walk away?
This has happened to me way too many times. For some reason I get more of those types approaching me than anyone else. In some cases I was able to walk away and lost a job. Other times I took the client on but felt under paid. Either scenario is a losing one as far as I’m concerned though.
There are a lot of these type of posts but I’m glad you gave an actual example of your experience and not just the oh avoid this situation. Sometimes you don’t know your in that situation until your in it.
So great post it’s awesome!
Why do people think that web designers shouldn’t be paid well for the work they do? Would they haggle that much with a solicitor or an electrician? No.
Good article.
R
I have one of those clients sitting in my inbox now. I am still trying to think of how to word my response to keep from losing the job (should she accept the proposal), while not promising the to rope the moon for C100 (£56.34).
Excellent, excellent article and echoes what happened to me a few times before I woke up.
It is unfortunate that Web Design is constantly undervalued. I know I’ve unfortunately been approached to do work for 1/10th of what it should have cost.
I’m sure you’ve already read it but this was a good post on the subject as well. http://www.sazzy.co.uk/2009/04/why-i-cant-build-a-website-for-500/ It is nice to see that other designers are taking the high road and continuing to respectfully treat clients.
I did read that article actually and actually used her “methods” just last week with a client, explaining that with his budget we’d be working for £2.19 per hour. Didn’t work (I didn’t expect it to) in terms of getting the client to raise their budget, he just decided to ‘keep looking’.
“Someone who wants to argue about £10, is someone who wants to argue about a lot more things…”
that sir, is my quote of the week :) great article.
I’m very heartened when I read articles like this – I need to see them because from time to time, I forget that I’m supposed to maintain my boundaries when it comes to clients & it’s good to hear it’s not just me that experiences problem clients.
I have a client a little different to your example – agreed to the price we quoted but I’m still waiting for the last portion of the payment, 10 months after the site was delivered. In that time, I’ve redesigned the site to salvage the relationship, and I have to say I’ve learnt an enormous amount about my business processes that I am implementing to prevent this from happening again.
Helena :)
@chlorinekid – Glad you liked it! :) I think it’s a pretty good rule of thumb!
@Helena – Thanks for commenting, always good to hear from other people in the industry who’ve been in a similar position. It annoys me because as Rob said above, you don’t find this sort of money-dodging in other industries nearly as much!
Nice story and I feel for you about the client, maybe I should post sometime about the other angle paying 500$ for a custom WP theme and getting a modified template with very little of the original functionality promised.
Clients have their nightmare stories too ;)
They certainly do! I’d definitely be interested in reading that story Roger – though for $500 you’d only get a modified template from me too tbh, real custom WP themes generally start at around $1000 if you look around!
I’m just starting up and already ive encountered a few, i’ve put up with them though purely for the money. Its difficult when starting and only getting a few clients, especially where there all what you decribed.
The Web design and development industry is SO VASTLY undervalued. I wish I could find the cartoon of the car salesman & web designer that @pixeldeath linked to on twitter ages ago because that summed it RIGHT up.
Being just a developer, for me nightmare clients are the ones who sign off a spec without reading it properly and then demand you implement additional features. For the short period that I did designs too, I got sick of clients who thought they knew how to design better than me. It’s why I don’t pursue designing for clients, it seems you can’t do it without selling your soul to the marquee-tag devil so I just stick to designing my own stuff :)
Um, I think you’ve got something wrong somewhere.. I’m getting these at the end of the article.
Warning: include(/home/eggmande/public_html/john/wp-content/themes/john/) [function.include]: failed to open stream: No such device in /home/eggmande/public_html/john/wp-content/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/magic.php on line 300
Warning: include() [function.include]: Failed opening ‘/home/eggmande/public_html/john/wp-content/themes/john/’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/eggmande/public_html/john/wp-content/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/magic.php on line 300
Now, In response to bad clients, 6months work, which got cut down to 3 months, for a quote of 300$AUD. Bad mistake, but client loves the site.
Thanks for letting me know Micheil – looks like a plugin author stuck a broken update in the WP respository. I’ve deactivated it for the time being so you shouldn’t be seeing those errors anymore!
Definately seen a few of these clients in my time. I think it’s something nearly every designer goes through at one point or another. Hopefully articles like these will help save a few people in the future.
Very good article and your quote about the £10 is totally true. I also hear many clients: “Why are you charging so much, I know a student/a guy from india/a hobby designer he charges way less?”
My reply:”I play soccer 90 minutes, David Beckhams plays the same time. I get a beer at the end of a game, if I’m lucky. He get’s $100.000. I guess you know what I want to say.”
That works most of the time and they understand, quality has some value. But that doesn’t mean I’m a bad soccer player. ;)
Clients who are fighting for every Cent, they fight for every pixel to be at the right place they want it to be! Much work will be ahead of you!
Love your work John and I wholeheartedly agree with @ErisDS that the freelance web development industry is vastly underpaid.
Three years ago I moved to a small island in the Gulf of Thailand, not really much chance of picking up local work so I force myself upon the freelance markets to make a living. The projects on some of these freelance forums range from $50 to $5,000+ with the majority of the full-site-projects posted to accept bids under the $250 mark. This sum is quite pitiful when you consider the time, effort and the years of education that go into making a decent designer/developer.
As is the norm on most freelance forums the bulk of the work goes to the Indian freelancers who do the job for a fraction of what a westerner would charge. This in turn means that the clients all seem to think that this is the norm when deciding upon a budget. I see many projects that clearly state that any bids from India will be deleted (for any number of reasons, unfinished work, low quality, extended timeframes), but they still post a project with a budget that only the Indian freelancers will submit bids for.
Personally I always over-bid for jobs within the freelance markets as you know they will come back to you for a slight reduction, often this reduction is what wins you the project.
@Helen commented that she waited over 10 months for the final payment after delivery, the easy solution to that is to insist on the final payment BEFORE the work is transferred to the clients server, possibly even allowing them a 10% retainer until the FTP transfers are completed.
Thanks for the in-depth comment Ray! I too require final payment before moving work to the live server :)
My company includes hosting, support, etc with site design. We take very good care of our clients. Since we host the site, failure to finish the payments results in failure to have a finished site. We have never had to resort this, fortunately.
We did have one nightmare client, who we really wanted to help because she needed a site for her African orphanage. We ignored the obvious warning signs and offered her a great deal simply because of the site going to a noble cause.
She strung the project out over a year, continually failed to communicate, and tried to take advantage of us on a number of occasions and we were already doing the work for next to nothing. We lost thousands of dollars worth of time and effort and dealt with a great deal of stress for that client only to have to finally terminate the job for our own well being. We refunded her the little money she paid us in full and explained that we probably weren’t the right company for her since we were unable to meet her expectations. We had completed some smaller jobs for her (Custom email campaigns) and refunded those as well, even though we had done the work and sent the promotional emails out to her lists.
She received the refund, cashed it the day it arrived in the mail, then proceeded to immediately start calling our other clients to complain about us. Fortunately, we had kept a complete paper trail of each attempt to communicate and her “responses”, the amount we charged her, the refund, etc. When printed out, it was a stack about an inch and a half tall. We offered everything (with the client’s personal/private information removed) to any client she contacted. She did, after all, bring them into it, so we had no problems sharing the details with them.
In the end, everyone sided with us and the clients that had referred her to us apologized profusely.
My very first freelance client should have off red flags immediately. It was “routine” changes to text and swapping pictures on an exisiting site. The inital consult was close to two hours (for text/image swaps!). She was really intense and pushy.
I WAY under charged as the code was a mess and I spent a few hours sorting out what what what, then the client didn’t have the original .psd for treatemts to images. I had to recreate that. I only charged $150 for 5 hours of work.
She then came back to me (after I had to ask to be paid repeatedly) and wanted a change that “would only take about 5 minutes to do”. I realized that she was deciding what I should make based on her idea of what the job entailed. I replied that I was not the person to help her out and if she knew how long the job would take it sounded like she could handle it fine on her own.
She also complained about the sites creator endlessly, but I can see why he dumped her.
I have a day job in a web department and now all of my freelance is through friends and friends of friends so that I can get a feel for the client before I commit.
I feel for you windee – I think we’ve all been there. The most important thing is to recognise what went wrong and make sure you don’t do the same thing again next time around!
The key factor is that if you ask most web designers, they’ll be able to give you several examples of nightmare clients, not just one, it seems we have trouble learning from our mistakes and turning down work when we should! :)
Thanks for sharing.
This kind of thing makes me feel nervous. As I’ve said I’ll likely start working for actual clients in about a year’s time when I finish college (okay, a year and a few months) but I’m trying not to let this sort of thing put me off and I’m learning a lot from other folks’ experiences.
Oh how I empathise with much of what you’ve written (and in the comments). I’ve not been trading long but have already realised a few things I really need to watch out for.
I am glad that I’m not the only one :-)
I just clicked here from your new post http://john.onolan.org/the-problem-with-selling-web-design/ and this is very fitting, as well. I’ll have to keep your action point in mind for the future and your moral of the story is spot on.
Excellent writing, by the way.
Great article – glad to have found your site via Twitter follow. Good work!
HAHA – I know these kind of people very well – nice article, well written
Salutary lesson for all of us and I would like to add another.
Guy came of the phone wanting a web site. Was offering £300 for the work. Said he was working as agent for a US company. Directed me to their site and talked through saying “I want this page but with this change and that change, and that page with some other change”.
Did I walk away – No!
I quoted for the work, I laid out quite clearly what he would be getting and then pointed out in our terms and conditions the parts that said “the client will indemnify us against all breaches of copyright and licence”.
Guess what, I didn’t hear from them again.
I have been in the same boat too. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for the inspirational post