FS 301: Chaos Clients

Panel:

• Reuven Learner
• Jeremy Green
• Erik Dietrich
• Jonathan Stark

In this episode of the Freelancers’ Show, the panelists discuss chaos clients. Chaos clients are long-time clients who are disorganized, reactive, and constantly wait for things to blow up before “pulling the fire alarm.” These types of clients are disruptive to any business, and so the panelists discuss some things you can do if you have chaos clients. They also touch on how each of the respective panelists deal with these clients and their thoughts on the best and worse ways of dealing with a client’s self-inflicted problems. In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• What is a chaos client?
• What can you do when you have a chaos client?
  • Decide whether or not you want to keep the client
  • Maybe fire them if you can’t see them changing
  • Have individual fire-drill pricing
  • Wait to address the situation in a low-emotion time
• Try to become more proactive in the future with them
• Higher price tags for these clients
• Price tag for your misery vs getting rid of these clients
• Be careful with just raising prices
• Push back in ways that make the client revise their priorities
• Understanding that not everything needs to be done ASAP
• Part of your job is to calm clients down
• Helping a client with an actual emergency vs helping a client who self-inflicts problems
• Chronic chaos clients
• Preventing these “fire drills” in the future
• Only push off other projects when talking with the person of authority on the project
• Pricing can be used to discourage clients from doing things
• And much, much more!

Sponsors:

• FreshBooks
• Linode

Picks: Jonathan

• The Expert Video
• Flawless Consulting
• The Freelancer's Roadmap by Jonathan Stark

Reuven

• Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
• Weekly Python Exercise

Jeremy

• Remarq
• The Key to Increasing Your Consulting Fees

Erik

• Horkey Handbook