First, the Great Resignation. Next, the Great Client Firing
Many wage slaves have been quitting their shitty jobs during Covidtide. Perhaps it’s now time for freelancers to start bailing on their crappy clients?
For at least a year now, the Great Resignation has been A Thing. Abnormally high numbers of Americans aged 30-50 in mid-career roles have been throwing in their jobs. To a lesser extent, the same ‘Big Quit’ phenomenon has played out in developed European nations and, more surprisingly, even developing countries such as China and India. And employers in Australia, Canada and the UK are worried that once Covid finally recedes many quietly disgruntled current employees will become loudly disgruntled ex-employees.
After four long decades of capital mercilessly cornholing labour, it’s lump-in-the-throat inspiring to see millions of workers decide they’re not going to take it anymore. And no cohort should be more inspired than those who have themselves escaped wage slavery to become micropreneurs.
But why stop at being impressed? If so many individuals with a single source of income are prepared to ditch their employers, come what may, why aren’t more freelancers with multiple sources of income willing to get rid of that client who makes their life miserable? Given the balance of power appears to have shifted from the bosses to the workers for the first time since the election of Thatcher, why isn’t the gig-economy precariat becoming more demanding?
In my experience, there are two reasons: financial fear and Stockholm syndrome.
Why bad clients happen to good people
Gig-economy types spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about bad clients.
Yet if you ask a gig-economy worker – especially one new to the game – why they don’t fire their ulcer-inducing clients, you’ll typically get two responses.
Initially, the freelancer will point out firing the client will result in a hit to revenue. If it’s a big client – as it often is – it will be a big hit.
But dig a little deeper and you’ll usually find that concern over taking a haircut is not the sole or even the main reason the freelancer is hesitating over pulling the plug.
Probe expertly enough and the freelancer will confess they feel a sense of duty toward the client. They are usually unable to explain why they feel this sense of duty, but they do.
The mindset, especially with rookie freelancers, appears to run something like this: ‘Sure, the client failed to provide a clear brief, didn’t respond to emails and phone calls when I tried to seek clarification, chose not to address my concerns or listen to my advice when I did manage to discuss the project with them, bombarded me with snarky emails late at night when I failed to telepathically intuit what they wanted before supplying the first draft, then made me jump through endless hoops to get paid. But I can’t terminate our business relationship – that would be unprofessional. I guess I just need to harden up.”
Feel the fear and fire them anyway
In the middle of 2021, I was contacted by an agency that desperately needed tech content. I was offered $1000 for a weekly 800-word article, plus the opportunity to make lots more money producing other forms of content as required. All up, I was set to make $5,000 - $6,000 a month for around two days’ work a week.
If you think that sounds a little too good to be true, you’re less blinded by avarice than I was. Without thinking too hard about why an agency with such deep pockets had been reduced to ringing me out of the blue and begging me to urgently help them out, I signed on the dotted line.
Almost immediately, I discovered that getting any content written, let alone signed off and published, was like trying to run a marathon in neck-deep wet cement. Confronted with more red flags than Tiananmen Square, I begged off after the first month.
Did another lucrative client soon thereafter materialise, thus providing cosmic confirmation of the wisdom of my decision?
No. Completely the opposite.
Seemingly moments after I freed up two more working days a week, all the long-term clients that had been deluging me with work for many months went quiet. Just to rub a little more sodium chloride into my wounds, no less than five businesses that had previously insisted they were gagging to work with me the moment I had any spare capacity available brushed me when I contacted them to say I now had spare capacity available.
I endured a grim fortnight of self-reproach. But then my established clients began asking me to do jobs for them again. And potential new clients began emailing me lucrative – albeit not spectacularly lucrative – offers. I ended up making plenty of money in 2021 and did it while working for agreeable clients.
The moral of this interminable personal anecdote?
Whether they fire you or you fire them, the loss of any one client rarely makes much of a difference over the medium to long term. If you’re good at what you do and you’re selling something there’s market demand for, you’ll eventually land fresh clients to replace the departed ones. That was true pre-pandemic and I suspect it will be even more true in the post-pandemic Roaring Twenties.
Loyalty is for losers
While freelancers often develop a sense of loyalty to their clients, this loyalty is nearly always a one-way street.
However solicitous they may be while you’re of use to them, ultimately your clients see you as eminently disposable. When they do decide to dispose of you – and, trust me, that day is coming sooner than you probably imagine – most of them won’t even take thirty seconds to send you an email thanking you for services rendered and wishing you all the best for the future. They’ll simply stop taking your calls and replying to your emails, even if you’ve had a years-long business relationship with them.
After the requisite amount of ghostings, most freelancers learn to be as unemotionally transactional with their clients as their clients are with them. And a transactional businessperson doesn’t ever agree to a win-lose deal, which is what consenting to keep doing work for pain-in-the-arse clients amounts to.
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