 Hello, hello. Hi, everyone. My name is Louise Treadwell. I'm a web developer, and like many of you in here, I am a freelancer. But unlike many of you in here, I have been a freelancer my entire adult working life. I have never had a real job, not truly. Thank you. When I started freelancing, well, when I started building websites 20 years ago, it was very, very, very new territory. There weren't a lot of people to ask for help. There weren't a lot of opportunities for mentorship. I used to tell people I feel like I had the worst internship in the world because I'm not getting paid, and my boss knows nothing. And I was the boss, so that wasn't fun. But over those 20 years, I've made a lot of mistakes, and I'm hoping that some of those mistakes will come in handy for some of you. One of the biggest mistakes I made was always feeling like I had to succeed on every single project that I tackled. The reason why that's not really the right way to go about thinking about it is that sometimes projects really are just doomed, and sometimes you do need to walk away from a project. Not everything has a silver lining at the end of it. And that's what we're going to be talking about today, is that when everything goes bad and you have to actually get rid of a client, how do you actually go about getting that done? All right, first things first. How do you know when you have to fire a client? This is the part that most of us have the most difficulty with, because like I said, we want to succeed at everything. We're hardworking freelancers. We can tackle any problem that comes our way. But I have identified about six signs here that I think we can piece together to figure out when we should back off. The first one is silence. This is an easy one. You send a text message to a client. You send an email to a client. You call the client. You get nothing back in response. If you have levels that you've set together for your project, you have deliverables, you need feedback from your client, you can't serve your client if you can't communicate with them. It's just that's a very, very basic thing. You have to be able to have an open line of communication. The opposite end of silence would be hostility. This is the client that every single time something goes wrong and things will go wrong. Every time something goes wrong, they're either going to fire you or they're going to sue you. This is their immediate first reaction. If you're constantly living under the threat of litigation or termination, you cannot do your job. And you'll start making mistakes because you'll be too nervous. That goes into DRED. DRED isn't necessarily having to do with conflict. It can actually just be your personal feelings about the client. I had one client who I just didn't agree with her business ethics. I didn't like how she approached her employees. I didn't like how she treated her staff. I didn't like how she worded her contracts. It wasn't going to have any reflection on myself professionally, but I just didn't want to be associated with her anymore. And I was constantly having to reconvince myself that it was worth sticking around and doing business with her. And that's time that I'm not spending servicing the client. That's time that I'm not spending finding new clients. That's time that I'm not just, you know, spending my personal life. If you DRED dealing with a client, it's going to just tank your productivity completely. Confusion. Okay. Show of hands here. If you only have two options, how do you prefer to communicate with your client? If you prefer, the two options are going to be either email or in person. So who prefers email? If it's just a quick question, something that can be easily tackled, okay? And who prefers a phone call? It's okay. If you prefer a phone call, you can raise your hand. I know it's weird for some people. But imagine then if you were dealing with a client who every single time that you had a quick question for them or you sent them an email, they called you. Or every time a client emails you a question, you call them. At some point, you guys are going to start to really irritate each other and it's going to affect the relationship. You guys aren't communicating the same. You've got confusion going on. You're going to have to either figure out a way to resolve this or you're going to have to move on from them. Selling. Okay. So you went to your proposal meeting with this client. They, at the start of the meeting, they had no clue about your service offerings. They didn't even know they needed a website. They didn't know they needed marketing. Whatever the services you're providing, they knew nothing about it. But you sold them. You completely convinced them, you educated them, you got them and you locked them in. So now when you actually start the project on day one, you think that everything's great and you're getting all, you know, moving into the project and they say, I have a question. And they're going back to things that you thought you covered in the proposal. And every single time you talk to them, they always have a new question. I have a question about this. Well, I don't think I need this. Well, do you really think I need this? And you find that instead of providing a service, every time you talk to them, you're actually selling them all over again. You can see why this is a waste of your time because you can't move forward with a project if the client actually doesn't even understand the value at all. And you're constantly having to go back and redo everything. Chasing. Chasing a client is, they are more than happy to get back to you with a, you know, deliverables that you need with, you know, feedback, but when it's time to actually pay the invoice, they're gone. And you know they're still around because, you know, you stalk them on Facebook, you stalk them on Instagram. You know, they're taking their dogs out for a walk. They're just not paying you. You can spend a lot of time and energy trying to chase down clients for their money, but that's not really, unless your business is bill collector, that's not what we're in here to be doing. Now, I know for each of these scenarios that I, you know, presented, and these are all just, you know, very broad examples. We all, because we're go-getters, we feel like we can overcome each of these obstacles, but the reality is that you cannot. And I don't need to sound pessimistic about that, but there are a couple of inevitable conclusions we have here. We've got four basic ones. First one is that you get stiffed. That one's obvious. If you haven't had this happen to you yet, wait for it, it's coming. You're gonna have somebody who just completely vanishes on you. And you're gonna think that you won at first because you drug them all the way to the finish line and you just kept on pestering them and you did not let them go away. And finally at the end, the only thing that they had left over you was to just not pay you. And that's what happens when a client is upset. They have to lash out in some way, shape, or form. If you're lucky, it's not paying you. If you're unlucky, it's suing you. So the second one is ghost. You, this is the client who, like the other one, they just fall silent and they disappear on you. But what's worst about this one is that this ghost is going to come back to haunt you. Because you did not close out this contract, because you did not finish this business relationship, the moment you have something important happening, like at my wedding, at my wedding reception, I had clients texting me spastic about something that they had vanished months before. But now all of a sudden it was the most important thing in the world. It had to be taken care of today. And technically they were still my client because I still had an open contract with them and I was behind. So who's in breach here? Depending on how your contract is written, it might be you, it might be them. But either way, you left the situation open-ended and now it's coming back to haunt you. Okay, bad word of mouth. This is what a lot of us fear and why we try and hold on to things and we try and fix situations. So let's say you do manage to fix, I'm putting quotes on this, fix a situation. You've gotten yourself all the way to the end, you've got the, you know, you've delivered the project over to the client, you've sent out the invoice, you've collected on the invoice and you select your name right on the bottom of their website because you are so proud of your job well done. So tomorrow your client is out to dinner with their friend and their friend says, Bob, because it's always Bob. Bob, I saw that Louise did your new website. You know, do you think you could give me her information? I might want to link up with her and have her do mine as well. And Bob is going to look at his friend and he's going to say, Ah, yeah, it finished, but it wasn't the best relationship. It didn't really work out so well. I'm not really sure I'd recommend her. I think by my cousin's niece's uncle's neighbor can do a better job for you. So because you drug this whole thing out, you've attached yourself to a project that is going to reflect badly on you. The opposite of that is good word of mouth. If you have dealt with someone who throughout the entire process, you felt uncomfortable with the way they were doing business, you felt uncomfortable with the way they handled their invoices, whatever, multitude of reasons. But they promised you that it was all going to be worth it because they were going to send you lots of referrals. I had a guy do that where he took my price. He actually slashed it in half and said, I will pay you this because I'm going to send you a bunch of people. And he did send me a bunch of people and they were all exactly like him. So when you think that you're winning, when you think that you're winning by compromising your own standards and trying to force a situation that shouldn't be forced, you're going to pay for it in the end. And I paid for it because he sent me 30 people and I thought they were all qualified leads and I went through the whole proposal process with them and had to end up firing roughly 25, 26 of them in the end because you're chasing people. You're doing all these things. And if I had paid attention at the beginning, I would have realized these aren't qualified leads. I should have never went down that road in the first place. Okay, nice quote here just to keep this mood that when things are going wrong, it's going to be very obvious. There's not going to be a lot of question here. You just have to be willing to keep moving forward and trust yourself and to back off. So don't fight the process. And now that we're in the right mindset, we can go ahead and move forward and actually talk about actually firing the client. So we're going to prep ourselves here. First things first, unless you are in the business of being a life coach or a business coach, this is not the time to start handing out free lessons. I don't care what this client did that made you want to fire them. This is not the time for you to sit down and tell them, here's everything you did wrong and this is how you should be better and this is how you should handle it. They're not paying you for this. They're actually not paying you at all. That might be part of the problem. So why give them more services for free? Just back off. Next thing is don't fall for it because this is not going to be a comfortable situation. They're going to get panicky. They're going to start bargaining with you. If you've gotten to the point where you're firing them, keep going, don't go back because it's just going to happen again. When people show you who they are, believe them the first time. Next is the off-boarding process. This was just discussed in the last talk that when you're handing over a project to someone, you have to actually have a whole system in place of how you're going to hand over the project. There's a lot of information on the actual process of off-boarding. I personally feel that it should happen during the on-boarding process. At every stage of your project, you should be able to hand it over to the client so that they can hand it over to another person immediately. Anything could happen to you. You could get sick. You could get into a car accident. You could have to fire them. Anything could happen that could make you have to terminate the project in the middle. You should always be in a position to be able to hand something off. That also keeps you from making excuses because I have one friend who was hosting sites for 20 people and the off-boarding process was going to be so difficult that she had convinced herself to just keep these website clients that she didn't want anymore. She didn't want to do that business segment. But she couldn't get away because she hadn't structured everything in a way that she could get rid of things. So if that means making sure your clients have access to things, that you have admin passwords ready to go, that you don't have everything linked to your personal email, I'm sure some of you have built sites for other people in the past and you keep getting all of their notifications for every time they update their site because you forgot to take your admin off of the back end. So just being able to off-board the client. The last part of your preparation is the referral. The referral, most people think of networking as a way for them to get jobs. I think of it kind of the opposite. I think of it a way to hand jobs off to other people. The more people I know who have my exact skill set, they have my exact working style, they have my exact price range. When I get too busy or I think I'm kind of getting too busy, I feel good about handing a project off to somebody else and I don't end up taking on too much work because I feel like I can give it to someone else and they can benefit from it. If you don't know anybody else in your range, you'll start to feel guilty and feel like you have to help every single client. You do not. Every client is not meant for you. There's, you know, as many people are in this room, there's many more people in the world. Just hand things off to other people and you should know somebody in every single price point. You're too low, you're too high, I think you're gonna be too high needs, I think your project is gonna bore me, you don't say these things this way but that's the reality of it and you hand it off to somebody else. So make sure that you have a referral who's already prepped without giving them details that would break your nondisclosure agreement but make sure that you have somebody prepped and ready to go. So, little statement versus big conversation. The little statement is just basically letting them know that you wanna have a meeting. Letting them know that, hey, there's a big problem, I need to have a talk with you. Give them a couple of times, specific times that you want to meet with them, let them pick one, if you leave it open-ended, you'll probably never end up getting the meeting. This statement can happen on whatever is your passive mode of communication. So if you guys do phone calls for not important stuff or if you do email, then do it that way. The big conversation should happen in whatever you guys' most intimate form of communication is. For me personally, I don't meet with a lot of clients in person. So for me that would be video chat or on the phone. For you, that might be actually sitting down with them at Starbucks and having a conversation. I would recommend a public place just to avoid any possible outbursts and to make people keep themselves under control. Emotions in check. Okay, as we walk into this meeting, we are going to keep ourselves in the mindset that the customer is always right. And I know somebody else came and said the exact opposite that the customer isn't always right, but I don't agree with this and here's why. As a customer, they have only one goal in their existence and that is I have a project. I have money. I want my project done for this amount of money. The customer is sitting over there right there with those goals. If you as a service provider decide to walk over there to this customer with those goals and you don't want to meet their needs the way they want them met, you're the one who's wrong, not them. The customer will always be there. If they have bad ideas, they'll be sitting there with their bad ideas completely right, all on their own and very happy. And your job is to make sure that you don't interfere with that. If you have made the mistake of getting involved with someone that you shouldn't be involved with, you have to walk into the firing meeting of the mindset that I'm sorry. I apologize. This isn't how this was supposed to go and here's how we're going to resolve it without me in the picture. So first thing we're going to do is state our observation. Our observation has to be a very true, clear and direct statement. So Bob, again, Bob I've noticed that over the past few weeks our communication has been really, really poor or I've noticed that you've been really unhappy with the way the project has been going. I've noticed that we've run into a lot of roadblocks. Pick a statement, make it true, don't make it about you, don't make it about them, just make it about the project. And then follow that up with a compliment sandwich. So compliment sandwich. We start off with good news, bad news, the good news again. The good news is say something nice about their project, anything, it doesn't have to be true at this point. It doesn't, you have to remove yourself emotionally from this and remember that you're trying to make this as easy on them as possible because you are breaking their heart. They thought that they had this project was gonna go a certain way. You made promises and now you're breaking them for good reasons but you are breaking them. So I think that your app is gonna be the best thing since Instagram. Something that quote over the top but say something nice about their project. I really see that this project is gonna go great. This is gonna be a game changer, blah, blah, blah, say something polite and then say but unfortunately I'm not going to be the person who's gonna be able to take you to the finish line or I no longer feel that I'm the right fit for the next stages in this project. Again, make the statement true and make it direct. Don't be wishy washy at this stage because you'll just end up having to go all the way back to the beginning and the last part of your compliment sandwich is gonna be about your referral. However, I have a friend Jamie who is a great developer. I think that she's perfectly suited for your work style. You guys are gonna be great together. I would love to introduce you. And at this point you're gonna get some serious kickback. It's not going to be a pretty conversation at this stage. They're going to come back. They might either beg or threaten you or both depending on their mood might go back and forth but you have to stay firm. You got this far for a reason you can't turn back. If you do turn back, it's going to happen again and again and again and again and I would prefer to only fire someone once. The next part of this meeting is be reasonable and by reasonable I mean you have to put yourself in their shoes. Remember that they had a goal. They were sitting over there with their project with their money and their aims and you are disrupting that. They're gonna have to replace you. Replacing you is gonna cost them time and it's gonna cost them money. They're gonna have to pay a deposit to a new person which means you are gonna have to give your deposit back and I know that upsets people and you might lose on the project depending on how you had your payment structure set up but consider it tuition, consider it a life lesson learned. However you need to justify it to yourself don't try and hold on to something because there's a certain amount of money that you think that you're entitled to. You're not because remember you are wrong. You're the one who messed up in this situation. Whether that's true or not that's the mindset that we're gonna stick with because that's gonna make this end in the most peaceful way possible. There should be one more thing up there. It was supposed to say be final. As far as being final again this should be the final conversation. There should only be one conversation when you're firing someone that can't drag on forever because when it drags on lawyers tend to get involved. Oncles get involved. Somebody gets involved. Some other business partner who knows nothing about any of this gets involved and then it gets complicated. End it here, bring your termination agreement, have a copy of the contract, print it out, decide exactly how this is all gonna end and make that the end of it. So you have agreed on terms of what money you're giving back. You've agreed on when the project is gonna be handed off. You've agreed on anything that you need to piece together that's gonna make it easy for you to hand this project off to them. When it comes to your deliverables you are giving them everything. This is not the time to be cute and to hold on to files. Holding on to access to things to passwords. I know a lot of people have this as a business model that they feel they won't hand over raw files if they're a graphic designer. If you're firing someone, even if it's not in your contract that way, do it anyway. Save yourself the time and the energy and the trouble. If you don't give them the PSD they're gonna come back to you because they need one word changed on this flyer. And honestly, they can't change it without the raw file or they have to pay someone to redesign the whole thing again. Which isn't fair. They shouldn't have to. If they paid you up to this point, just hand it all over. Otherwise, you're just setting yourself up for a very, very long ugly relationship with someone who you tried to break it off with. Okay, how can we not get ourselves back into the situation again? I'll go very quickly over this. I don't actually know who said this quote. It's always quoted as being Albert Einstein but it's always either Albert Einstein or Marilyn Monroe, whenever it's internet quotes. So one or the other. But either way, we can all agree. Who is it? Oh, right, yeah. In Abraham Lincoln, he's the other one too. But I guess I can leave that out there. But remember I said no free lessons, that you're not a life coach, you're not a business coach. That's not what you're doing. If we do get into a situation where after everything is over and you have time to reflect and you're thinking about all those things that you really wanted to say to the client but you know you had no business saying, write it all down. Every single point. What about this client drove you nuts? What about the way they conducted themselves, didn't sit well with you? Every single thing that you can think of about this relationship that went sour is now gonna be information that you're gonna go into to decide what is actually a qualified lead. If they have any of those qualities, cut them off immediately. When you go into your sales calls, you'll be able to not approach it as selling yourself to the client or selling value to the client. You'll be listening to the client, hearing everything that they have to say and deciding for yourself, do I even want to work with them? If you can get yourself to that point, you'll have a lot less drama going forward. But as a new freelancer, I do have to warn you. You're gonna have a lot of bad client relationships, bad sales calls, things that you might have to muscle your way through just as a learning experience to see what you're actually able to deal with. And when you learn your working style, you learn what budgets you're comfortable with, you know what your value is, you'll be able to move forward and have much better client relationships in the future and only have to fire people maybe 1% of the time. So that's all. If anybody has any questions, I'd be, yes. Oh, what she's asking is about deposits. Basically, whether or not it's better to have a client pay you upfront to avoid being stepped on a payment, is that what you're saying? That's always the ideal. You should always always always have some sort of a deposit structure in place. That's not always going to protect you. PayPal in particular, people can dispute payments on PayPal. If you don't have the proper documentation, PayPal will go against you and actually send your money back to a client just because you didn't have your paperwork in order. So that should always be a part of your process is making sure that everything is properly documented, that you actually have, not benchmarks, there's another word I'm thinking of. Milestones, there you go, thank you, that you should have milestones in your project that are very clearly defined with very clear payment structures on them to make sure that if you do get stepped along the way, it's not that big of a hit to you. It's not that bad. But yes, having some sort of deposit structure in place is important. I mean, yes. Well, you know exactly. Okay, what she said for the people who are online, they can't hear her question. She said she built a site for a client, everything went great, the client paid her. You did a second project for him that he added on and she didn't get paid for that. But before he's wanting to finish paying, he wants to tag on another project. He hasn't been a great client. No, no, no, no, he hasn't been a great client. So ask yourself, why hasn't he paid you for it? Is it because he doesn't have the money? Or is it because he doesn't respect your authority as a service provider that you say you owe me money and he just says I'm not gonna pay you? The amount of money shouldn't matter. Exactly, the amount of money shouldn't matter. It's the principle of it. Wait, what did you say again? He doesn't have a lot of money in it. Right. See, the collections thing is tricky. Oh yeah, go ahead. That is, but make sure that you have that in your terms of service. No, you can't go back, but you can keep yourself from getting into that situation again with this exact same person and you can take it as a lesson learned. And that's what he was saying for the people who are online is that sometimes these things can be the result of a communication problem. And if that's something that you can resolve by either with this client fixing it, make sure that everything's clear. Timelines, actual debt lines, payments are clear. And if you do have to walk away, just make sure it's clear for the next client going forward. I personally would probably just eat it. If it was a couple hundred and they were trying to get me for something else just because it's time you're not spending on your next client. Find somebody better and just move on. Yes, you could if that's the route that you wanna take if you have time for that. Depending on the amount of money, I don't think it's usually worth it to go forward and try and suing someone. Yeah, sometimes it's better to let people just kinda, I know people are not gonna agree with us and of course you don't have to agree with me. Sometimes it's better to let people get away with their silliness and just move on with your life. It's not worth it to go through a lawsuit. It's not worth it to now have your name in a lawsuit and all that. It's just not worth the trouble sometimes. If it's a really truly financial problem for you then go for it, but I personally wouldn't. I'm running out of time here, but oh yeah, definitely. Because if you're out there providing services to people, there's always gonna be a high probability of you getting sued. I'll take one more question and then I have to, sorry, up here, up top. Well here's what I said. Remember I said that the customer's always right? There's a right client for every service provider. There is, there's some people who love arguing with clients, they like that energy, they like that aggression, I'm telling you. If you have a friend like that, hand them over. Enjoy, enjoy yourself. Okay, I'm sorry I have to stop it. If anybody wants to chat with me during lunch I'll be around. Thank you.