 We're going to knock out some rolling projects. All right, everybody, for our last presentation for the day, we have Katie Lesvy. She is from Las Vegas, and she is a professional water working at the agency meal brand. And she also does some freelancing. She is here to talk about when you should not take on that particular client. Hi. Hi. Thank you. Thanks for coming to talk at 4 and 5 on Sunday. And this is usually when we're cams are starting to head back down. This is my only slide. So if you would like to take a picture of it, you're welcome to. It's exactly the same slide that I use in Alkerkeet, and we'll probably use it in most cams. It's a plus change to Ashtine. So there you go, here's the entirety of my presentation. I will not make it available online afterwards. But I'm going to hopefully give you a lot of information, so please take notes. I taught fast. I recommend shorthand. If you're having trouble keeping them with me, I'm sorry. Hey, pastor. It's just kind of the way it is. And I've had plenty of coffee, because I don't get enough sleep when I travel. So this is to talk about clients and freelancing and agencies and any kind of service job where you're working with other humans, which tends to be a whole lot of things where you're working with other humans, right? I've experienced with clients in both a freelance capacity and an agency capacity, although at the agency, it's not generally my decision whether or not we get to keep a client, although we have some very strong opinions on it sometimes. And we'll talk about what to do if you're in an agency and you don't feel like you can service a client file or you're seeing red flags, how to address that with a person who does get to make that decision. But that's a little far down the road. Let's start with a story. Once upon a time, I started blogging. And I started making money. And I was not very smart, although I thought I was. I tend to always think that I'm smart, but I'm usually wrong about that. So about six months into starting blogging for the first time ever, I was making enough money that it became my full-time career. This was after I sat down on a computer and googled how to start a blog and WordPress came up. And that is the extent of my knowledge about blogging. Six months later, it's a full-time career. I had a client list of people who were not top-level clients. They were certainly not paying the rates that I get today from my consulting and my client work. But there was enough of them giving me regular work frequently enough that I was able to quit my job and move. Now, as a blogger, 100% promote, I could live anywhere in the world that I wanted. And the tacos were pretty darn good in Las Vegas, so I moved there. And the decision was very quick. I did a road trip from Richmond to LA. I liked it around New Mexico and Arizona. I did another Google search about tax laws and which states were most business friendly and which states had the best cost of living. I chose Las Vegas and two months later, I moved. Well, this is now about eight to 10 months into my blogging career that have been supporting me very comfortably. And I had a client issue. The issue was one client. They ran a blog about craft beer. They were paying me $50 a post, which is not very much. I will not work for $50 a post anymore. It's a very, very low amount of money for me, but I thought that was normal in the industry based on the postings that I was seeing that were most common, right? Well, this particular client decided that they did not want to pay me for the six blog posts that I had done all in a clock for them. They ran some internal issues. They didn't know how to organize their freelancers. They didn't know how to edit their own content. They didn't know how to take content off of a Google doc or a Word doc, which is how they asked for their content to be submitted and to put it onto their WordPress website without having formatting issues, despite the fact that it was formatted correctly in the original thing so that it shouldn't have been copied and pasted. I have no idea what they were doing. They weren't organized enough when they assigned topics to keep track of which writers they had assigned which topics, at what time, and what they had agreed to. So working with them wasn't super fun and they now owed me $300, which is less than I get for one blog post now, but at the time it seemed like a lot of money because $300 was about a week's worth of income for me. And so I was like, well, you know, I gave you six posts and you really need to pay me. And I did not know how to be tactful. So working on that by way, tact is a thing that should probably develop. Maybe we'll do some WordPress talks on that. So I asked them to pay me for the work that I had done and they said no because they decided not to publish it. Well, we had a contract. And the contract that they insisted I signed, I usually don't sign contracts as a freelancer, but their contract said that once work was approved and then submitted with the approved topic and they had said, yes, I received it, I accept this. They had to pay me. It didn't say that they had to publish it. It said, well, stay accepted if they had to pay me. So I sent them the contract that they had written and said, well, look, according to the terms of your contract, you owe me $300 and I kind of insist that you pay it. So they didn't. And instead what they did is they went back to my resume, which I don't send resumes anymore either. And they contacted every single reference that I had given them, all of my other clients, and said, we're considering that Kiddy Leslie is plagiarizing and we recommend that you don't work with her anymore. My other clients started calling and they said, look, we know your work isn't plagiarism, but we also know that these people are really sketchy and they're gonna make it difficult. So we're gonna drop you as a writer because we don't want your name associated with our stuff if you're gonna take a flight with these guys. So I went from making about $2,000 a month, which was a living income to making 40. After I had moved 2,565 miles away from everybody that I knew into a city where I had no support, no infrastructure, nothing, two months into it. And it was an oh crap moment. Oh, I can't say crap. It was not a good moment. And I was scrambling to get new clients. Anybody ever did in that situation where you're scrambling to get new clients, you're like, oh my God, I have to pay my bills. It did not get better very quickly. So here's what happened. Let's imagine you're in a bad situation. Let's put it in physical terms. In the picture, you are standing on the ledge of a cliff. And it's really windy. And you know you're in a dangerous position. And one good gust of wind is gonna knock you over that cliff. And you're terrified. You really wanna move. And the only way that you see that you can move is to step out on a rickety board over the chasm. Are you gonna take that step? Generally not, right? Because now you're in more danger. Well, that's what happens when you're in a, oh crap, I need some clients so I can pay my rent and not be homeless again, moment. And you take another bad client, which is what I did. I was desperate for a client. I spoke at a meetup group in Las Vegas. And an older gentleman approached me who said, hey, I'm launching a new business. I need somebody with your skillset. I would love it if you'd do some writing for me. And I said, great, you're in my crisis. And he said, well, I'm not gonna pay those. But I'll pay you this and that. And I was desperate for work. And I was like, okay, I'll write for $30 a lot of those. And English was not his first language. This becomes important later in the story. English was not his first language. And he also asked me to copy and edit the work that he had already done to make it sound more like I made an English speaker. And he offered me $15 a post for this. And he said, I'll pay you promptly. I'm only going to pay you a maximum of $60 a week. And to me, $60 a week was a lot better than $5 a week. So I was like, you know, there's some red flags here. This guy's behavior seems a little bit borderline and appropriate. But I'll give him a benefit of the doubt because he's done nothing overt. He said some things like instead of a business meeting, he would refer to things as a date. And I'm thinking it's a little inappropriate, but he's also not from the United States. And his English is not very good. So maybe it's a language barrier thing. And I'm always correct and say, you'll go to a business meeting. And he would say yes. So I didn't think much of it. He wanted to know my physical address, which was the address that my business was registered at. Don't do that for your answers. Don't register your business at your physical address. Go to a co-working space, go to a UPS box. It's such a bad idea. But he wanted to know my address so that he would send me business documents. And I said, okay, and I gave him my address. He said, oh, I don't have to work near your house. Maybe one day, when I'm out checking out the property, we can have another business date. And I was like, we can have a business meeting if you wanna have a business meeting. If that's your thing. Some clients want more face-to-face contact, right? That's okay, that's still a normal thing. So this borderline and appropriate behavior, I decided to overlook because I was so desperate for money. And I was so desperate for clients. And it looked like an okay opportunity even if it wasn't a good opportunity. He always paid on time. Things went okay. He insisted on having a lot of meetings. And he started to behave a little more strangely. Now here's the thing about men if you like people. They're very, very good at doing things wrong and then making it your fault. Anybody know someone like that? You call them on that behavior and they're so hurt and they're so betrayed and it was completely innocent. And how would you think that about them? He was that kind of person and I saw the red flags and chose to ignore them. And then one day he said, I'm going to be in town. Let's have a business lunch. Didn't actually use the term date. And I said, well, I'm kind of busy. And he showed up at my house with wine and flowers and wanted to buy a hooker with me. I looked outside of Las Vegas in the town that is nearest to Las Vegas where you actually can buy constitutes. Not something that I've ever priced yet. I assumed that it was going to be a lot of money and he probably thought he was being very generous. But at that point I could not ignore how inappropriate it was anymore. And I said, you know, this is really not okay. I think we're going to end our business relationship. And that escalated his behavior and he ended up stalking me for three months. He was outside my house. I had to call the police on him. He would show up anywhere that I was going to speak in Las Vegas. He started calling people that knew me and asking inappropriate questions. He started sending me pictures that he had taken of me as he was out following me. So I took a bad client and ended up at the police station asking, do I need to file a restraining order? How much information do I need to have to file a restraining order? What can I do about this? He backed off before I officially filed a restraining order, which I couldn't afford because he wasn't paying me enough. It was a really bad experience and that was about three years ago. To this day, he turns up sometimes. And it's terrifying. I don't want to discourage you from taking clients. And that's not the point of this. You should not take clients at all, but you should be able to recognize the red flags. There's also some business lessons to be learned there. As I was taking these low paying clients, people who were paying $30, $50, $60 per blog post, I couldn't even afford to give them good work because let's break it down. How long does it take to write a blog post? Anybody in here right? If you're a good writer, you can maybe get a blog post in an hour. If you know the topic and you have resources. If you're going to do quality work for somebody else's business that you're not familiar with and you need to do research and you need to find images and you need to optimize, you need to get it on your site, it's not an hour of work, it's four or five hours of work, at least. And that's for a proficient writer. If you're still learning blogging, it's even more than that, right? That's if you can sit down and turn on your grade and crank out some words. Words are hard. Words are not easy to do. And at $50 for a blog post, if you work out how long it takes to do good quality work, you're making like two bucks an hour. That's not economically feasible. I cannot work that many hours in a day in order to get work done. So you take these low paying clients and you can't do the good work to show your portfolio. So you can't get the higher paying clients because you don't have good work to show them and your name is attached to a bunch of N work. So you become an N person, an N provider. You don't want to be N, right? So not economically feasible. And I had a mentor who kept telling me, you shouldn't be charging these low prices. You're worth more than that. You know you're worth more than that. Charge more than that. People will pay it. And as I very frequently do, I didn't listen to them. And I did some stupid stuff and I was like, oh, you can write all along. And that's kind of our whole process. But during that whole thing, I was doing bad work and I was attaching my name to bad work and I was stuck in this cycle of, I have to work my way up. And that is a myth. You do not have to work your way up because you won't work your way up. There is no working your way up. If you start at $25 and $50 in the low cost and competing for that stuff, you're with all the other people who aren't confident in their skills. You're in a position where you're still not doing good work. So you can't work up from that. And what you do is you start charging what's your worth from day one. My client list I imploded at that point. I was working for no one except my mom. And my mom was also kind of broke. Otherwise she wouldn't have been sending me money, right? So that really low income kind of set me a place where I'm like, well, you know, I'm not actually spending time doing work for people because it's really competitive for the lower levels. Really competitive. Especially with things like fiber and Upwork and these freelancer sites that have overseas labor and content spanners and all this cheap stuff that you're competing with, you're getting clients who don't understand the value of the work that you're doing and you don't see any value in the work that you're doing because if they saw value in it, they'd be paying for it. And you're competing with all the people who aren't confident in their skills because if they were confident in their skills, they'd be charging more for it. The first day I was like, I'm never gonna do another $50 blog post. My work starts at $150 for a blog post. I thought it was so much money. And I put it out there. I spoke somewhere and I said, I am not a bottom tier freelancer. I do premium work because I only work with people who see value in what I do and wanna get value out of it. I can't give you value for 50 bucks, but I can give you value for $150. Three times as much money means I can spend three times as much time, right? It's not three times as much value, it's 10 times as much value. So, at that point, with that attitude, I started to get better clients more quickly. There is less competition at those upper levels. And the only thing you need to do to be in those upper levels is announce that you are and then back yourself up with the work that you do. You will ruin yourself really quickly if you say, I am a top tier freelancer and I charge $500 a blog post and then you copy and paste with a PDF article. Don't do that, I've seen that happen. But if you actually do the work, well, at that level, you're gonna get referrals. My waiting list for clients to work with me is four years long right now. I hand off more work to other freelancers than I used to get in a year. And I'm not taking clients anymore, I wanna transition out of freelancing. But the thing that made it, maybe get to that point when you get to that level was saying, no, I'm not gonna do that work anymore, I'm gonna do good work and good work cause good money. And just the attitude change got you there. So here's some red flags for clients that you don't wanna work with. You say, here is my fee. If you're building a website, you say my website start at $5,000 for a simple website, you don't get to design it. You don't get to be part of that process. It's a template site. You get to pick which one of these templates it is. It's $5,000 if you know what's gonna work out. If that person sits down with you and haggles over pricing, this is not asking about pricing, this is handling over pricing. Say I'm probably not the designer for you and move on. Somebody who haggles over pricing is very likely down the road to try to nitpick and take that price down after you've done the work. It comes up a lot. Somebody who sits down in a meeting and falls at the price and they're like, oh, she's, I don't know, I want this, but could you cut out this? And could you give me that? And they keep picking. Those are people who are looking for something that you're not gonna provide. They're looking for some kind of bargain and they don't understand the value of what they're buying and they're going to rip you off later. It's not they might, they're going to. Somebody who's super disorganized, remember my client that accused me of plagiarism? The biggest red flag for them was that they would approve me to write a post. I would finish it in one day and send it to them and they'd be like, who approved this? You, literally, in the email, the chain is in. Like, roll up two inches, it's right there. There's the approval. There's the outline. Here's everything. Here's the pictures you sent me to write this post about. And I don't remember that. I don't care if you remember it, it's right there. It's in writing, like I took a picture of it. They're so disorganized. These are people who are not trying to rip you off, but they're probably going to by accident. Because they don't have their stuff together internally. I'm doing so good, I haven't said that in a long time, it's a long time. They don't have their stuff together internally, so they're going to accidentally not pay you. They're gonna say, well, wasn't so irresponsible for sending your invoice, or wasn't so irresponsible for getting it, hold on, let me check with somebody. And three months down the road, you haven't gotten to work for them. They've lost the work that you did. You're gonna have to resubmit stuff and then you're doing their bookkeeping for them. And that's a nightmare. So you don't wanna work with those guys either. Any kind of comment, this comes up with men and women, especially young ones. Any kind of comment that seems outside of the realm of professionalism do not give people the benefit of the doubt. You would think I would have learned my lesson when I got stopped. So I don't give out business cards anymore, ever at all to anyone. I don't even need to print it. If you wanna work with me and you come up to me at a conference and you say you have a card, I say just pull out your phone and go to my website. That's how you can contact me. Because if you're not actually gonna take out your phone and put my website into it right there, which is so easy, your phone's probably already in your hand, you're not gonna contact me later. So at some point, why would I print a business card? But here's why I've stopped printing business cards. I don't speak anywhere. I would go to an networking event. I would do anything where my face was in public and I would have business cards and somebody would come up to me and say, okay, that was great. I would love to work with you. I gotta run. Can I get your card so I can contact you tomorrow? I say, okay. I give them my business card, they give me theirs. I wake up in the morning and they would get a picture of genitalia in my inbox. It happened a lot. I don't know what it is about men at business conferences that makes you think that some girl who talked about building a website wants to see your junk. Why is that a logical? Anyway, I'm not gonna go on that one. But I guarantee you are not the only person at this conference who's experienced that. And you think maybe if I'm a little less friendly, maybe if I dress differently, maybe if I wear all business suits, maybe if I frame things that no, it's not something that you're doing. It's just that you're accessible. And that happens a lot. So okay, don't work with those people. There's a rule for you. If a client sends you a picture of genitalia, there should probably not be on your list of people to work with. But also any kind of off-color comments because if somebody, all right, look, I have a lot of information in my brain and so I had to take out some of my social skills to fit the rest of it in there. So I totally get it if you're looking weird. I'm a little weird, but there's different kinds of weird. There's the weird kid where you're nice to them and it's a really kind of positive experience and you're connecting other stuff. And then there's the weird kid where you're nice to them. They stalk you for the rest of your life. Don't be nice to that weird kid. So watch out for anything. If you feel even remotely uncomfortable, you're gonna have a relationship with the client or you have to work with them frequently. You have to talk to them about things. You have to have trust. If they don't trust you enough to tell you if something's wrong, they're just gonna drop you and you're not gonna know why. If you don't trust them enough to say when you expect something of them, you're not gonna be able to perform a good work. There has to be a two-way relationship with the client. So if anything feels off to you, if anything makes you feel uncomfortable, it's okay to say, you know, I just don't think I'm the right fit. And I know how hard it is to say that. I know how hard it is to say that. I've made that mistake a bunch of times. And sometimes you just gotta do a gut check and say, this is really hard for me to say and I would really love to work with you and the opportunity looks great. I just don't feel it's the right fit and I would love to refer you to somebody else that I work with. And if you can't refer them, then don't tell them you're going to because that's not okay. But if you can, then do. And if you don't say, you know, here's where I find people or go to this meetup or maybe you want to ask somebody in this community, try to provide any kind of value you can if you have something to provide. But don't go into situations that don't feel right. I have never, never started a relationship with a client where I was like, something's not quite right, but I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt that didn't go sideways at some point. You always feel that for a reason. Even if it's a little bit, you always feel that way for a reason, so trust it. And sometimes it's just a personality conflict and that's okay, that's a perfectly valid reason not to want to work with somebody. So I just really don't like you. I think you're kind of a jerk. People think I'm a jerk too and they're not wrong. But if that's who you want to work with then work with them, but if you don't then no, that's okay. Now in an agency setting, I'm going to tell you a story about a realtor. Anybody a realtor in this room? Okay, I'll try to be as flattering as I can. So there is this realtor. I kind of don't want to tell you his name but I also might say it in my accident. So, Troy Burns, if you go to his website, he still has the Hello World WordPress post and I think the slogan for their realty company was we do real estate. Like that's the slogan that they thought was really we do real estate, so okay. Obviously not the most tax savvy people in the world, not the most marketing savvy people in the world. They came to the agency where I work, Neon Brand, because they're not tax savvy and they're not marketing savvy. You don't have to know everything. That's why you hire people who know things, right? So now I don't expect that to be brilliant. I don't expect them to be great marketers. So okay, their site's horrible. Whatever, we see horrible sites every day. So we have a meeting with his whole group and they sit down and the first thing that they say is, you know, we just have a lot of bad experience with marketing companies. We work with five or six of them and they're all awful. So, anybody think that might be a right flag? Yeah. You're like, okay, well, six marketing companies, wow. Have you stopped to think about what the common denominator is and all of your bad experiences because it's not marketing companies? And I'm like, I don't work with these guys and they're like, let's just normally have a rule. We don't work with a lot of people in real estate at a marketing agency because of really bad marketing, sorry. And because in the real estate industry, ooh, talk about a 40-inch lift. In the real estate industry, it's very competitive. You're generally on your own and realtors very frequently, the first thing they'll cut when they're not doing well is their marketing, which is competitive. So they're difficult people to work with and it's a difficult industry and if we can't confidently give you results, generally we'll not work with you. But these guys are like, we're so motivated, we're a brand new real estate firm, it's not just a single realtor, you can be working with a whole firm and we've got a point of contact in here for you to work with and my bosses talk me into giving them the standard chance and they're like, sit down with them, what a brand consultation. And all we'll do is we'll send them a ridiculously high price proposal that they can't afford so we'll say no anyway. That's right, by the way. I thought that was where some people pay it and then you still have to work with them. So we sat down with Troy Kerns Realty and this guy, you know somebody who has that, I have to be the smartest guy in the ring complex. He had one of those. And we're like, you know, it's your business. Yes, you are the most important person in your business but you're coming to a marketing company because you don't know anything about marketing. Your slogan is, we do real estate. I don't think you should be arguing with the marketing company, but okay. And in this conversation, he talked about how many people he fires in a year, how 96% of the people who work with him get fired in the first two months. And he's really proud of that because he's super exclusive and how he likes to go out at night to his properties in Las Vegas when they're sitting empty and beat up hobos. You know sometimes somebody will get talking and they just start going and they start saying things because you're listening and you know that they didn't mean to say that. He was saying a bunch of stuff like that and he went on for about 15 minutes about how maybe it'll be a social media strategy. One of you guys can get a camera and come follow me because I go out where there's squatters and then you just get the hobos and we get the crap out of them and we're like, yeah, we're an aunt, no. I don't think that's a good thing for your brand. But you know, if you really want an agency that's good at doing that, maybe we have some recommendations. No, so I was like, no, I can't work with this guy. And my bosses are like, well, you did that thing where we gave him a really good proposal thinking that he would turn it down and he accepted it. So I'm gonna have to work with him. So here's a situation where now I'm in charge of the branding strategy for the guy that beats up hobos. I'm not really okay with the situation. And my bosses are like, I think you're blowing it out of proportions. And I'm like, yeah, you know two years ago when that guy was stalking me, I don't think I'm blowing this out of proportions. So finally, we all kind of had a meeting internally. And here's how the subject was broached. I was a fairly new employee at the agency. I have not yet built relationships with the bosses like I have now where we have a lot of trust between us and we can kind of say anything. They didn't really know me very well. I didn't really know them very well. And they were in that situation where like, we're not really in a position to turn down a good client. So we sat down and I was like, hey, we need to have a large heart. So me and the two bosses sat in a room and I was like, look, I've been freelancing for a long time. It's not my place to tell you how to run your business. But I gotta say that I'm really uncomfortable working with this guy. So I'm not gonna say I flat out refuse to do it because it's your company and you're my boss and technically you can tell me what to do. And if I choose not to listen to you, I don't think that's good for anybody. So here's what I would like to do. Can we do a 30 day trial period with this guy? There are a lot of red flags already. We know that there are a lot of red flags already. And I know that you really need the money. So can we just have a meeting and say, look, heart to heart, we don't know if we're gonna be a good fit. We kind of think we might not be, but we're willing to give it a chance. Let's do 30 days non-commitment, either party can back out if we feel like it's not a good fit. And they said, yes, that's exactly what we're gonna do. We think that's a good solution. We all sat down together in another meeting where we're like, we would like to do a trial period where instead of jumping in headfirst and doing all this stuff and really getting involved with your business, we'd like to start with your social media presence and maybe make some tweaks to your website for 30 days just to see how well we work together. Make sure we can work with the liaison and your company really well to make sure you're happy with the work we do, especially because you had so many bad experience with marketing companies. And 15 days into it, Troy Kearns fired us. And they're like, it's been a night for me to work with you. And we're like, we've got four Facebook posts. And the fakes of broken image on your website was literally the extent of what we've done to work with you. But I'm telling you what, if we had gotten fully involved and started his brand consultation and he had spent that amount of money on us and decided 15 days in that he didn't wanna work with us for whatever reason, that could have been a lot worse. So if you're in an agency situation and you're getting some major red flags, hopefully not like beating up hobos red flags, but like just a few things, see if your company will let you agree to a 30 day trial period where you're not getting fully involved just yet. Because that way they are not for fitting any money. They're still getting the client, they're still getting the potential, but you're limiting your risk and you're limiting their risk and everybody's kinda happy. So that's a good way to handle that. And if you have to fire a client, there are right ways and wrong ways to do this. I have far more experience with the wrong way because of that aforementioned tax deficiency I have. But I've gotten way better at doing it the right way. So let's talk about that. Anybody know how to drop a client? It's a breakup and it sucks. It's the same thing in a relationship if you're not happy and you both know you're not happy, the breakup still sucks, right? Firing the client always sucks. And it's not because you're scared of losing the client, it's because you're scared of the actual breakup, right? Tip number one, they know what's coming just like you do. They know what's coming, it's not gonna be a surprise. There may be situations where they're gonna be blindsided, if it's something on your end and they're just really enthusiastic and it's a personality conflict, but for the most part, don't stress because they know what's coming. Tip number two, everything you've ever learned about breaking up with your boyfriend or girlfriend tactfully applies to breaking up with a client. It's not you, it's me. It really does work. So don't blame them for things. You don't want it to be adversarial. I really added that. I've done the phone call where it's like, I hate you, working with you sucks, I'm firing you. No, that's not what they do. Don't do it that way, don't do it that way. I was really bad freelancer when I started. I'm much better now. I also don't fire people very often because I don't take new clients very often. All the clients I have now have been clients of mine for years and years because we have that great trusting relationship. But the way that you start a client helps with the way that you leave the client. My most recent client breakup, and they are breakups, I'm gonna keep saying that. My most recent client breakup was very amicable. It was a situation where they started asking for more and they wanted to pay less. Their business was not going as well as it had been when I first started working with them. I was working with them in a very limited capacity. I was doing some content for them for search engine optimization about twice a month. And that's what fit in my schedule and so it fit for them. What I was doing was still getting results but they had some things breaking on their website, their web developer left them in a really bad situation. They tried to hire somebody overseas to fix the things, cheat because their cash flow wasn't where it needed to be and then they ended up with some of their products held hostage by a disrupting old designer. It was not going well for them and they wanted me to kind of step in and pick up the slack. They're like, well you generate a lot of leads with what you do so we're gonna make quadruple the amount of work that you're doing and I couldn't. And then they started to get more demanding because things just weren't going well in their business. Situations change, right? And I had to say, you know what? I don't think it's best if we work together anymore but this was also somebody that I was going to see regularly within the community in Las Vegas. So I wanted to end the relationship face to face. I knew we were both going to be in an event. And I had to decide whether I was going to go through the whole event knowing that at the end I was gonna pull them aside and say I'm not gonna work with you anymore which is super weird. Or if I'm going to talk to them at the beginning of the event where I'm going to see them and say I'm not gonna work with you anymore and then deal with the whole rest of the event after a break up, I chose to do it at the beginning. I contacted them and asked them to meet me 20 minutes early. We sat down together at my computer and I said I know things aren't going well in your business and I'm sorry, I wish I could help you but I don't think we should continue to work together. It's not a good fit anymore and I can't provide the value that I need. Here are five people that I think are a better fit for what you're looking for right now in this phase in your business. We talked about, we talked about some of their issues and some of it was really emotional. They just needed to get some stuff off their chest. They needed to talk about the problems that they were having and they did. And they called the five people that are recommended at the next day and they're still working with one of them and they're recovering. They're still no longer my clients. The relationship is still good. We are still friends. I had another situation where a client of mine that I've had for a long, long time with a great relationship professionally, I worked with several of his brands. Well, my schedule got a lot tighter because I'm launching a new brand and I didn't have time to work with both of his main brands that are both very large, national brands that are very labor intensive and I have to say I can only work with one of your brands, please pick which one you would like me to step away from. That was also a hard conversation but here's why I worked so well. Start by acknowledging what they're having trouble with already, understand, empathize with them, say, give or you're coming to them and it's not your fault that you're in this situation and here's the reality of the situation right now. We have to end the professional relationship. Here's an alternative. Rather than just breaking it off immediately that gives them closure and that gives them something valuable or they can move forward without you. The recommending something else for them to do is really, really important. Even if you don't have something you can refer them to to do your job or whatever you were doing or you feel that you have a role you need to fulfill, find some resource that they can use to find somebody. Maybe you're working with them for developing an app and they're not in the phase in their business where they need to be developing an app and you realize this halfway through development. Maybe you need to hand over the keys to their code and say if you need another developer I'm gonna refer you here but I kinda think you don't wanna finish developing this right now. Give them something where they can move forward and it'll work out a lot better. If you have to end things with somebody who's being inappropriate or where you don't have a good relationship and you need to end it very decisively that's a little different. Some people you're gonna have to end it really, really soon if it starts to get inappropriate and it's perfectly reasonable to say hey I'm uncomfortable with this arrangement I don't think it's the best fit but good luck with your future. If it's somebody where you feel uncomfortable and you think that there may be problems in the future don't continue to help them because it's the same thing as somebody who's manipulative in your life. Like if you've ever had to dump an ex it was like super crazy and I always wanted to be there. If you keep giving them avenues back in then they're gonna claim and you have to kind of go with your gut on this one. Same thing as if you're feeling uncomfortable at the beginning, step back. If you're feeling uncomfortable in the relationship and you need to end that, be very clear. It's difficult. You wanna be kind. You don't want to have situations where you're hurting somebody's feelings on purpose, right? It's really hard to tell somebody that something's wrong, isn't it? It's really hard to tell somebody your business sucks and I don't wanna work with it and it's really, really hard to tell somebody you're making me feel uncomfortable but sometimes you have to and if that's a situation if you're not feeling kind of okay be very, very clear. Don't waffle about it. Don't try to save their feelings and if they start to get kind of manipulative but you said and just two more weeks just finish up this project then you have to have the guts to say I'm not going to work with you from this day forward. Good luck with your future and that doesn't make you mean. It doesn't. It doesn't try to make you feel like you mean but it doesn't make you mean. It makes you pragmatic and you're doing something good for them too because those sorts of relationships where you're working with somebody you don't wanna work with, they don't go well, you're not doing good work for them. Anybody ever done bad work because you hate your job? We've all kind of been in that, well I'm gonna give this like 20% effort but I'm gonna have Facebook over here and I'm really thinking about what I'm gonna do. Those are the kinds of things that happen when you're in a client relationship that's not working out. So don't do that to somebody. It's a lot worse than just being like, you know, I kind of don't like working with you. Let's not do it anymore. So sometimes being kind takes a lot of guts. Sometimes it's one of the hardest things that you can possibly do. And sometimes you're gonna have great clients that are gonna be friends for years. Sometimes you're gonna have jobs that don't suck. Wouldn't you like to have a lot of jobs that don't suck? Wouldn't you like to be in a situation where your clients email you every day, hey I've heard about you from so-and-so. Do you have any more room in your schedule? And you get four or five days in the middle of the day? You don't get that from low paying penny-pitching, hitting on you and sending appropriate pictures of clients. So we have about 10 minutes. I'm gonna take questions. I know I'm a little heavy. Go ahead. Okay, that's very, very interesting. What I'm wondering is you kind of skipped over, I mean, I get what you're saying but you kind of skipped over the part about how do you, what I'd like to know more about is how do you actually, when you're in that position where you're deciding to go from low pay, low charge to high charge, what did you do to actually get from there to where you were, because you kind of, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, that's because essentially what I did was announce it. But I mean, you must have done some kind of mark. Can you give it like any details about what you did? Well, my first real high playing client came because I was invited to speak somewhere. And somebody asked what do you charge for a single blog post and I said $150, which I had never charged in my life. And they said, okay, I'd like to hire you. That's it, that's it, that's all. And then they referred people to me. Now my marketing is a little different because I actually money to market. But really what it was was I had an opportunity where somebody was like, I would like to work with somebody with your skill set. I had just spoken so they kind of knew what I could do with content marketing. And I asked for that price and they did it without ever having one. And actually they said to me afterwards, you did some sort of work. I was expecting you to charge a lot more. By the way, now we do. I think the last blog post I wrote, I had $750 for it. Which- How big of a plot? It was 800 words. You know what I mean? Yeah. But that one was a rare case. I don't usually get some $150. I usually get between 300 and $500 for blog posts. But I also do more content marketing. So I will do a broader, rather than charging by single blog posts now, unless somebody comes to me and says, I really just need one post. Then I'm doing a campaign for you. And I'll say, okay, here's what you're gonna get this month and here's how much a month costs. So it's building on all the research and the promotion and all the other stuff that I'm doing. But an average is up to about $300 per blog post is how I calculate it. And there are other average about 800 words that I'm doing? It really depends on what I'm doing. I like longer content. So I aim for between 1,000 and 2,000 words, generally for most of the types of stuff that I do. But I also research the industry. I use a tool called BuzzSumo. And BuzzSumo will help you see what's trending. And it'll tell you things like the average length of content that's getting a lot of shares on LinkedIn and the average type of content that's getting a lot of shares on Twitter and what other keywords are, it's a very powerful tool. So I go by that. So it's less about how wrong the content is and more about how effective it is. Do you have any suggestions on how to handle that client, a potential client that's a friend, that you know, somebody, well, and you sense that they want to get it out of, they want to get the work out of you for this cheaper price or, you know, because they're telling you certain things like that. Yeah, working for friends. Ooh, that's a whole lot of wax. So sometimes working for friends is okay and sometimes it's not. And some people have a blanket rule, I don't work with friends and it works for them. And some people say I will work with friends but I will only provide free work for friends because here's what happens when you're gonna charge somebody or you lend a friend money. It's a situation where you lend somebody $5 and you say pay me back next week and then they forget. Then three weeks later they remember they owe you money and then they start avoiding you because they owe you $5. They got $5 in their pocket and I was like too late to pay you and it's weird. And then they pay you, it's gonna remind you that they forgot to pay you and you can lose friends really easily over $5. So a lot of people just have a blanket rule. If I do work for friends, I'm not gonna charge. I have some friends that I do work for that were friends first and I do work as needed for them and I charge them for it but they were business friends. So these were people that I met in professional settings and we started socializing outside of the business setting but we kind of have that foundation and actually the agency that I work for, I was friends with the guy that started it and we got offered a job at a competing agency and I said hey I would feel really weird if I took this job over there so do you need somebody that does what I do? And they said yes. So I've been working with this agency now for more than a year and it's a very satisfying job. I think there's different types of friendship and different levels at which it's appropriate or inappropriate. Best friends, I would never charge for work but I also don't necessarily do work for them. If I decide that it's a good idea for me to do work for them, I'm not going to charge them. That's my rule. People who are in that work friends enough that I would invite you over if I was having a barbecue but not friends enough that I'm going to tell you about some really personal stuff. I generally don't do work for them at all and the people where I kind of know you were appointed. We are cordial with each other. We have rapport but we don't really know each other really well. I wouldn't just call you and be like hey I'm in the neighborhood and we come over. Like that level of friend where there's some distance between them. I will just quote my crisis and if they're like yeah but you know me and I'm like well yeah a lot of people know me. And you gotta eat. You can't. Okay I'm not going to eat this week because I'm going to do a cheap job for you. Right. So pay attention to how much time you have to. Plus most of the people in kind of my circle that are at that level of friendship that might ask me for work, they know that my schedule is a little bit insane when it comes to work and that I'm always doing projects and that I'm at the office 12 hours a day because I'm working on my office appliance and I'm working on my clients and I'm launching this website and I don't know how to build a website. So they kind of know not to ask for favors but it's been a while. In the beginning people would ask me for favors and it's okay to know. And again if they haggle, they're not going to be a good client. They kind of follow the same rules at that point. Is that an adequate answer? Yeah I could go on other questions but there's other people in the room too. Okay well come back to me. Give a question. I'm guessing you don't know everything about everything but you know. I mean I might. You might be. You probably have other, you have a certain graph of whatever it is that you write about. Is that, do you think that's a large? So essentially do I specialize in certain topics in my freelance and any kind of work? Yeah. Well when I started I did because that's where my contacts were. So I've worked with a lot of non-profit organizations in certain industries because of my parents contacts and they paid me to do it because non-profits have to send their money. So they're gonna. So that's a good place to get into if you're new especially in writing and I do things like sales and there's fundraising too. So that's a good niche for that. But my skills are really in research more than anything. I went to pre-law and the only thing valuable I learned in pre-law was how to do a really good Google search. But now in an agency I don't get to pick who I work with because it's whoever the agency is working with and my research skills have gotten better and better and better over time. So if I don't know about a topic now I'll learn about it. And if I'm having trouble then I will tell the client, hey I'm having trouble and I'm not really getting this waste and just be honest about that. And they're usually okay with it. An example is I work with a portion of dealership in Las Vegas through the agency and I'm not a car person. And the technical side of car stuff doesn't really stick in my brain really well. So I started working with other writers and saying are you okay with this? Because I'm not gonna give you the best quality work it's gonna take me a long time to get up to speed. So how about I work with some car guys they'll give me their raw data and then I will turn that into something with my editing skills. And that's how I worked around that in the agency. But if it's like a personal relationship with the client I generally don't say this is outside my expertise I will tell them I haven't done this before let me do some research and do a project for you and see how you like it and then if you wanna keep working together we will. Make sense? That's why I have so many facts in my head not a whole lot of social skills. I guess that might not be the same if you were not in an agency but you were on your own and you were looking for particular kinds of work you might wanna do the most work with the stuff that you know the best because it's faster, right? Right. It's a good starting point to work with what you know but it's a comfort level thing. If you're not great at research and learning quickly and then assimilating that they've got reading comprehension as a skill. Remember in middle school and in high school when you read a book and then you have to take what's in the book and actually think about it and turn it into something else and write an essay. If you have trouble with that then stay in your wheelhouse and that's okay there's lots and lots and lots and lots of work in your wheelhouse but if you like to expand out then do it. It's really a personal referencing. I just have to be good at research it's a skill that I've built over time. Thank you. I saw a question over here. Go ahead. I wanted to ask you. You mentioned that you're getting ready to get out of freelancing if you say. I'm curious what your thing is. I've been freelancing for a long time and it's parts of it that I enjoy and parts of it I don't and the parts that I don't mostly have to do with scheduling and dealing with other people's deadlines and other people's schedules. And freelancing is very, very lucrative but it's also not very passive. So I'm focusing more on building my own brands that I've been neglecting a bit in favor of freelance work because it pays so well. And building my own websites and monetizing them myself to focus on a couple more passive income streams that I have but have neglected a bit. So instead of building other people's businesses I'm like, well, you know, if I had just done this amount of stuff on my businesses then I probably wouldn't have to work at all right now. Which I don't know if I will ever not work at all because they're gonna a couple of times where I'm like, all right. You know, I'm making enough money that I can pick up two clients a week and do like five hours work and I'm fine. And I get so working bored. I took a job at an agency not because I needed the money because I needed a body but also because they were finance education for me. Makes sense? Do we have other questions? We've got like one minute left so we can fit one question if anybody has something. All right, well thank you guys. Let's go Christian. Oh.