 I didn't even test my sound are you good okay thank you oh I will I have no problems speaking up okay welcome everybody I am so glad to see familiar and unfamiliar faces here for our discussion at length about difficult clients not only about the difficult client but more importantly how to avoid getting difficult clients how you deal with them all those kinds of things I will talk forever I've asked my monitor over here to give me a 10-minute show down but I hope you find the information both helpful as well as entertaining by and large we have great clients for the most part right they bring interesting projects to the table we learn things from them they learn things from us it's a mutually respectful relationship for the most part but I've learned over years and years and years of attending WordPress camps and word camp meet-ups that the people we talk about when we get together are not those wonderful ideal clients who do we talk about we talk about these guys right the ones that cause us to pull our hair out and we just grown in agony you won't believe right so part of what we're going to do today is talk about not just talk about the clients we're going to talk about the personas that a lot of clients fit in with us and the reasons why we want to deal with online we want to keep our hair right we're talking about the situations that cause us a lot of stress the situations that rob us of the joy as to why we went into business ourselves I'm assuming that if you're in this room almost all of you are self-employed freelancers have some sort of relationship with clients right that's who I got right okay we're talking about the situations where someone is arguing with you all the time they're pushing back you say left they say right huh we're also talking about situations where you don't get paid either because payment is slow or because they refuse to pay this all sound familiar I see a lot of heads going yeah preach it lady we know yeah and then there's those situations where they just do the damnedest stuff don't they they just it's just crazy they do something but it makes no sense to us in short difficult clients are costing us money right okay let's talk about penny pinching Paul now I'm old and I know who this is a picture of I'll let me rephrase that I'm not old I've lived a long time okay for those of you who are a lot younger than I am this is Jack Benny a notorious well-known penny pincher and if you Google penny pincher as I did when I was looking for images that one came up okay now the face of your penny pincher might look very different but these are the situations that come up where every invoice is scrutinized I don't understand why you build me for three hours it was just a simple thing okay right I mean if you can read for yourself they argue about every little detail to do to do to do to do to do flip my notes over in the beginning Paul might seem very professional and well put together but over time that pushback becomes an irritant can I do what oh yes it is isn't it let's see what I can do with that I don't have a clue you'll just have to live with that it probably has something to do but it's not going to be important oh these are all available yeah it's I'll tell you how to find it yeah it's it because the screen is expanded here it has to do something with how the resolution I'm married and it would take me more time to figure it out then to just keep going okay so who has a penny pincher oh my gosh every hand is raised right all right there's some other types of folks we deal with there's one that I refer to as emergency Ellen yeah everybody has some of these my emergency Ellen starts every subject line of an email with urgent in all caps all the time doesn't matter what it is it's always urgent another example of the urgency is they give you a call on Monday to discuss their newest brainstorm of a project and by Tuesday afternoon they're sending you emails about the status of it right they tend to think not that they are your only client but they are in that urgent mode right they think I'm going to mention it to you and you're going to clear your calendar and I'm going to work right ahead right I'm having to read my notes today because my brain is shifting from having been an organizer to walking in this room so no matter how many times you try and set the expectations with emergency Ellen maybe I'll do this you know you email back I work this way and I work that way they just never hear it so makes sense is it sound like the people you're working with you know it's just yes oh yes yeah these are not mutually exclusive right right let's take a look at terrible Terry Terry is Terry is a bully likes the sound of their own voice they enjoy standing on the shoulders of other people to make themselves look taller this is the person if you if you have a team this is the person that all emails and phone calls are ignored by your team and deferred to you y'all got some Terry's in your clientele you and I work together I'm on your team I get an email from terrible Terry I forward it to you phone rings caller ID says terrible Terry I don't answer okay terrible Terry is the one who keeps you awake at night because you are in fear of their wrath you know it's not beneath them to belittle you and publicly and loudly and so a lot of your decision-making is tempered with what's he gonna say okay sound familiar y'all got some of those right okay this is this is a nightmare client not just a difficult client oh and my favorite stampede Sandy I'm sorry Sandy it's definitely not sure it's also not the name of the client that I had in mind oh my gosh this is a real segue have you ever sold a house that you spent a lot of time landscaping and it's gorgeous and three years later you know you've sold it and you drive by and they have mowed down every damn thing you put up okay that's stampede Sandy you have delivered the website to them it's gorgeous it's functional and then one day it's just not stampede Sandy leads us as designers and developers and very proud of our work to make them not an admin we don't give them the full rights to their website for fear of them going in and messings things up do y'all do that you keep total control of your website we can talk about the pluses and minuses of that but it's this character that that creates that in us right my stampede Sandy looked like the ideal client when we met we spent time in discovery and it was a paid discovery process I mean not $200 it was much larger than that and we spent hours and hours and hours scoping out the project and we were in agreement and we were rocking along and then we would present the functionality and then it wasn't right and we're miscommunicating it's like we're not matching up cut to the chase there's one of those clients that really thought that they wouldn't have to do anything I want this high-end functionality but I don't want to have to touch the buttons to put in the data entry okay yeah and some of that stampeding at the end was me on her here's my picture of stampede Sandy right one of our favorites how many people have a project they're waiting on the client for content oh yeah lots of hands more than a year anybody waiting more than a year two years yeah there was a little bit of this when I was talking in Raleigh the hands stayed up for a long time we got to three years they're still waiting on content uh-huh well there's something wrong with us when okay and we that's how we prevent some of this in the future I love this guy Waffling William Waffling William couldn't decide to go out the front door the back door if his pants were on fire you know you're trying to get feedback and input from the project and keeping the whole project in the middle of the road right well I kind of like red but then blue is really nice what do you think I think you want to make a decision is what I think right is they just won't agree or confirm to anything and we let until I don't know about child I'm good at passive aggressive I grew up in the south and so I make the decision yeah bless your heart for sure which is never a kind thing for those of you who didn't grow up in the south yeah we'll talk about what that really means later but with Waffling Williams I make the decisions for them well of course that's not right you have to go back and redo it but at least a decision had been made and I was doing something all right no matter which nightmare is in your client repertoire they all have some things in common they don't respect your time they constantly are checking up on you as if you're just going to take their money and disappear in the night sometimes with reason because you're their third person they've worked with and the first two did take their money and run off into the night but they might be expecting results you can't possibly deliver that was my situation with my stampede you know she was expecting a fully landscaped four acre plot of land and is paying for you know a subprime lot okay um how about this they believe that they could do a better job than you because they have a computer science degree from 1993 does that sound familiar you know those are and it goes hand in hand with the I don't understand why you build me for three hours it should have only taken 15 minutes okay well we all know that that doesn't work and of course there are those who haggle over everything regularly pay late or refuse to pay it all but no matter how they present the steps for managing them are much clearer let's see where I might be in my slides oh yeah here we go my own time okay the first thing is stay calm it is very hard to stay calm when terrible terry is blasting you as loud as possible but it is our job we're the ones being paid we're the ones who say we're the professional so it is on our shoulders to stay calm and set the tone of the conversation it is a well-documented fact that if you are calling and ranting at me and I begin to rant in return that is only going to escalate but if I begin to slow the pace of the conversation take pauses so that I can take a deep breath and listen carefully then the person who is on in communication with me if terry is ranting he eventually will start to mirror my tone and my pace of conversation if not you can always politely say this doesn't seem to be a good time let's schedule another call okay I'm not encouraging you to stay on the line with somebody who's being abusive okay my daughter gave me a call the other day now my daughter is a grown woman and she's been having to deal with a government agency for six months trying to get something resolved in relation to her dad's estate and at first tier we've all had this with customer service first tier is you know really putting her off putting her off well she sent me a text the other day said I got a verbal reprimand for my abusive language so you do not have to tolerate abusive language I'm not asking you to to put yourself in a relationship where somebody's abusing you but it is our job as the professional to stay calm and take control of that conversation okay we want to listen carefully to their concerns active listening which is a thing which means I am actively paying attention to what you are saying and trying to understand where it's coming from as opposed to immediately jumping into my brain how to respond and fix it which is hard for us we like to solve problems we're addicted to solving problems so slowing that pace down also helps us to listen listen carefully um not just difficult clients but people want to feel heard they want to feel acknowledged and recognized and in the process of me slowing down and paying attention I can hear what they are not saying does that make sense I'm reading between the lines I can come to understand that why they are reacting the way they are reacting it's usually emotion driven they're scared they feel betrayed they don't feel acknowledged I mean there's something think about your own personal life when you get when you become a difficult client none of y'all are difficult clients are you yeah right me neither okay um my client that starts every um subject with urgent is also prone to say things like nothing's working when you say nothing's working can you help me understand what that means everything's broken or when you say everything's broken can you show me are you in front of your computer now can you show me what's broken that also gives them something to do that takes them out of the situation and you begin to drill down because what everything broken means to them is certainly the whole damn website's not down it's not the white screen of death or they would have started the conversation different but I need to ask great questions and I can only ask great questions if I am listening carefully and being calm I also want my responses to be prompt now we've already talked about how nobody wants to handle terrible Terry he's our nightmare and so when that email comes in I save it for later and the next thing you know it's in your inbox and it's drifted down and it's been three days that ain't cool because what happens if I wait three days they get angrier uh-huh it doesn't fix anything so common courtesy of a prompt reply um our job in this conversation is to figure out what the hell happened where did this go so wrong this time what is it in this situation where I mean because I need to understand sometimes it's a technical thing right sometimes it might just be a bug but bugs don't make people difficult it's usually an emotional issue where somebody expected one thing and got something different it's a breakdown in communication so I really have to figure out where did it go off the rails what could I have said differently or done differently to prevent this has anybody had a relationship with a client where when it was all said and done and you wrapped it up tight and neat you went and revised your contract yeah yeah I give you a quote today but I don't put an expiration date on it and two years from now you come back and say I want to move forward on this quote oh man I certainly got to revise that stuff right so it's a learning experience for me as the professional as to how I need to change my behaviors in response to the work that I deliver um someone asked me earlier this week can you tell me about a project that went off the rails and what you learned from it do you ask that question of yourself when things go off the rails yeah it's yeah some of you do some of you don't if I am going to grow as a professional in my field then I need to take these circumstances and put them on my shoulders and evaluate it what could I have done differently we want to offer a solution not necessarily a quick fix and it's also not about admitting that you were wrong oh I'm so sorry that happened maybe I am but I need to understand what happened before I start saying I'm sorry in my first life I was a therapist and I would ask my therapy clients when they you know some people just apologize for everything you know they you run into them and they say I'm sorry right in order for me to be sincerely apologetic I need to know what I'm apologizing for what was the real offense so don't start out of the conversation going I'm so sorry this happened you want to go through this process first okay if you're in the wrong admit it you don't want to put the blame on your client even if they are the one who made the mistake tell them to do this write in the email back to this person they've said blabity blabity blabity blabity and you say I know that's because blabity blabity blabity blabity and you're trying to educate them you say and teach them what you really want to do is explain why you did what you did that they really are at fault but not me that doesn't don't play well don't play well you cannot change people's behavior unless they change the way they think it's one of the things that Chris said right off the bat this morning you know just because you believe it's true doesn't mean it's true I like to teach people and so a lot of times I find myself constructing an email response that is well I did this because that hooks to that that goes over here and leans on this and therefore clients don't care they just want their stuff to work right okay um again back to communication breakdowns and sometimes you can convert a difficult client to an okay client and maybe even groom them into a good client but that's not usually what happens okay sometimes you just have to fire the client and that's okay and there are ways to fire clients and I'm going to tell you some of them that you get really good first you want to check your contract to make sure you have a clause in there says okay for me to fire you it's okay for them to fire you oh yeah I see that face um it's just one of those things in there I am a business owner you are a business owner you are not a waitress at IHOP you want five or you want eight in that stack but when that first phone call comes in with your client and they're asking for a website way too many of the clients I work with my coaching clients that I work with start with how many pages do you want a slidey thing at the top you want to be a hero image do you want this do you want that and we start taking orders instead of stepping up but anyway um check your contract is it okay for me to fire you you want to not leave them hanging wind up the important work that you've got on the table and then refer them somewhere else okay it's hard to do that the first time it is really really hard to do that the first time one of my professional colleagues and I have been in communication for well over two years about a difficult client that they have and she has finally in the last two weeks gotten comfortable with saying I'm out of here okay let's take a look at some conversation starters we can use in our emails when we reply to them we're moving in a new strategic direction you own your business you do not have to explain to them what that direction is why you came to that conclusion you only need to let them know how it's going to impact them for example someone told me yesterday she said we've decided in our agency that we no longer offer one-on-one training to beginner wordpress users nothing wrong with that decision it's just a the decision they made for a variety of reasons and as a result blah blah blah I need to refer you elsewhere right does that make sense we've decided to move in a different direction we're streamlining our business and if does hide have decided to yeah pretty much uh-huh in a nice way we're going to say that it's I don't want to work with you anymore but again it comes back to you taking responsibility for your business and eliminating the difficult clients that are not converting that are robbing you of your joy here's a good one this is very easy we're increasing our fees some clients will choose to come with you at the new rate other clients will choose not to has your waste management company ever explained to you why your rate's going up you just get two sentences effective march 30th or 2020 your rates will increase by to this number love you missy but you know thanks regards but okay we don't have to explain our business decisions to our clientele and that is very very difficult for most every freelancer I have ever met ever whether it stems around I want people to like me I want them to understand I don't want them to badmouth me when they go away that's that's all do-do between our ears okay it's one of my favorites we're phasing out your service plan I wrote this email myself just before I came here don't need to go too far in depth about the circumstances except that it is a client that a year ago or coming up on almost a year ago um they pay their retainer a year in advance and off of that retainer I ultimately installed a whole new theme rebuilt their website didn't charge them extra but they ate up every minute of those 30 minute tasks that I was offering them as part of their service plan okay lady who's been on the outs of that relationship for a while comes back into it ready to work on the website wants to know how many hours she has left in last year's retainer I stipulated that last year you paid me this amount of money and then I did this which was a $2,500 value and then I did that which was a $1,500 value and blah blah blah and therefore there's no time left on that for tasks and it it expires July 31st okay and then I said since we negotiate since during the time that we last negotiated that plan we have changed our rates it now costs this and I outline what is there the response I got back was thank you okay now come July 31st I'm going to roll it out I'm going to say here's your new plan you either pay it or you go away I don't I don't care I don't care but it's hard just get that email started my friend who terminated the relationship the one we've been trying to terminate for her for two years started with not this one but I've changed my business plan okay the biggest takeaway in dealing with difficult clients is to begin to slow down the onboarding process spend more time in that first conversation in that conversation you want to be asking why questions why do you want a website today why didn't you do it six months ago what would happen if you waited six more months what you're trying to discover is what is the true underlying motivation for why now don't start with how many pages do you need ask great questions in the beginning and in order to ask great questions you have to be doing what less sunning carefully spend a lot of time it will slow down your cash flow in the beginning when you start transitioning to a slower onboarding process but you will get better clients the fact that I have difficult clients is my fault every time every single time it's my fault maybe you are a hanger on from when I started and was not confident and therefore I was charging you nickels and dimes and now I resent it whatever slow down your process change your pricing structure prioritize your list of clients call the bottom 25 percent every single year every single year take away those because the bottom 25 percent of your clientele is costing you 80 percent of your time energy joy and probably money that is a documented thing I mean you can find one of those curvy things and it'll have a fancy name that supports this this is a known fact get rid of the bottom people all the time do it every year because I am not the same woman that I was this time last year I am not the same business owner that I was this time last year my life has shifted the clients that I attract have shifted people that did not irritate me day before yesterday to spug the hell out of me today that weren't for y'all I mean life changes and you need to change your business accordingly that's all I got except to tell you how to find me that's all my things I do lots and lots of stuff but this is not a commercial about me this is just ways to follow up with me we've got a few minutes for questions yes ma'am two questions at one of your strategies for kind of deflecting right basing up clientele to say moving into a strategic direction and then you said it's probably good if we refer them to someone else what if you know this is such a malicious evil client that you don't want to burden other people that you know but we find that is there like another play okay okay let me stick with that one first yes I am uh-huh because I need to condense that question for the video and for the transcriptionist in short what you said was one of the comments that I had made in terms of terminating a client was to refer them elsewhere except when as you asked what happens if they're so horrible that you don't want to inflict their pain on anybody else and do I have a solution for that I do you stop the conversation right after saying effective this date we will no longer be able to work with you I wish you much success in the future really easy to say very very difficult to write it's I we're done is what you're saying in a more professional flavor does that help okay and you had a second question yes when you're deciding that increased your rates sometimes I have slightly failed depending on if they're a small person or a non-profit or if they're like bigger so if I give them tell them these are my new good grades does that have to somehow be the ones I fix on to because of that person is in my social community well they they might find out that I quoted someone else differently oh that's a great question what and when it comes to quoting rates tell me your first name Honnell is saying that she has a sliding scale depending on the client and the circumstances and budget and all those kinds of things but it raises the question of if I offer you a dollar 25 and I sell it to you for 250 and y'all talk what happens oops it's awful you got something Judy to add to that if they're the socials if they talk and they ask about it then there would be the the situation of your needs were different and thereby the pricing was different correct you can say say something okay yeah okay we got some great responses to that let me repeat it for the camera gd was saying that if those two people get in conversation and it's brought up it you emphasize that there was a strategy behind that decision okay um and tell me your first name and cliff says I like them better and there there might be some ways to incorporate that even I mean in a in a more professional tone but off to the side and maybe maybe we can chat after the session I'm not so sure that offering a sliding scale is in your best interest raise of hands how many people bill by the hour stop it just stop it it is not in your best interest and then it's not in the client's best interest and we can talk about that in the hallway okay just stop it um yes you need to have a sense of how much time it's going to take you to get something done but don't quote them a dollar and a quarter and then show them that it took you 50 hours to do it but just stop it okay uh make incorporating these changes is hard work it and I don't mean to imply that it is not hard work I know that I'm being very glib with my responses but you have to be introspective you have to figure out who you are and why you're doing what you do and what brings you the greatest joy and then attract those clients okay I have no idea what time it is okay yes ma'am okay I had to go back okay what am I yeah tell me your first name she almost know what are my top three CYA okay yeah ask yes okay how I protect myself um I don't know what my top three are but things like this proposal is good for x number of days okay in my retainer packages depending on what level they come in on now they're purchasing a package at a different level which is very different than a sliding rate okay at this particular package level I offer x number of unlimited 30 minute tasks and I define what I mean by task it means update your content not update edit your content I'll go in and change paragraph for you if you send me that paragraph okay or a technical issue so I try to be very very clear about what I will and will not do um how many times can somebody come back with change my logo yeah not too damn many right Judy that would be a scope creep and logo development thing yeah one of my favorite things to say when I'm developing out the scope of work is to say based on the budget we've discussed we will table that for phase two okay most of my contract is short and sweet nitty gritty it's there not to cover all all situations but to cover a lot of them and is to give the client a sense of no I'll need to there give client any damn thing it's there so that I can come back and later say according to the terms of our contract which you have signed blah blah blah does that help okay Josh you had a question yeah for what I do people then understand it the nitty gritty out there where does education come into play what I do I do Google advertising in the beginning it starts in that first conversation with your client where you are delving deeply and you're and I like to be honest with them I know that your expectations are different I know that you want to be on page one of Google day after tomorrow for 500 bucks I know that right well it it does go over people's head but you know what I take my car to a mechanic and I do not question what they bill me I might grumble about it I may shop for mechanics but now that I have found a mechanic that I know and trust over several years I don't care if they tell me this thing connects to that thing and how it works over here I know that I will drive out and my automobile will be improved clients don't care about what we do and how we do it they don't they never will you don't care how Amazon ships your stuff to you they you just want it on your doorstep day after tomorrow right you don't care what they do how they send it how they process it what truck it gets on do they ship it to Atlanta and then it comes or do they send it by carrier pigeon you just want it on your doorstep day after tomorrow right that's the way your clients operate too they don't care about you which is not the same as saying they don't respect what you do okay they don't care how you get the job done they want to solve you to solve their problem and in order to solve your problem the most efficient and successful way I need to do a lot of things and that is going to cost you a lot of things and stand firm behind that this is what I need to do to solve your problem and if you cannot live with that nicely then you need to go away you just I can't I can't work for you that is somebody expecting unrealistic solutions for something you cannot deliver at that price anything else I know I need to wrap up Judy yes it's very very easy um it's after after the whole thing after every talk we will post that stuff this happens to be a google slide presentation but I can't just say go to slides.google.com because you won't find me you know but they will be available because there's content in the slides that is helpful and and it will be attached to the website under my name so like if you uh-huh like if you go to this session don't go today because I will put my organizer hat back on right after this I will put that direct link in and it will show up that's what it's supposed to wear I don't know about that because I can't control everybody yes a lot of the speakers will tweet it out and I will do that and I I will tweet the direct link to these slides for you but I will also add it to the session there's a place to do that and it is supposed to then show up as a link when like you could go look at this session topic today and see blah blah blah and there's it should then appear a link somewhere the second question was about the contract uh-huh did you initially get your contract to develop and and maintain I mean that's a magical document it is a magical document and to be honest with you the the first contract I did um a speaker was talking in Birmingham Alabama and god Nathan what is her name Nathan it's not in the back anymore but anyway she was doing a talk on contracts and she shared hers and I took it and I ran with it and edited it over time I now have done that with various people who are in this line of business who will gladly share their contract to get you started you can also just google it uh freelance contracts and that will give you some basic clauses and things boilerplate language make a list of the issues that give you grief and then you will learn to write some some phrases in your contract related to that uh you can hear all this noise out in the hall that means lunch has started and I know we need to end and