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How to Spot Nightmare Clients

So nightmare clients, listen, if you've been on fiver for any stretch of time, you've probably came across a couple of clients that have been a little bit challenging to say the least. Now nightmare clients come in all sorts of shapes and forms. And ultimately, I think nightmare clients are a great test of your patients, but they're actually really good to help you to understand how to deal with travel situations because it is never easy to deal with a nightmare client. That is why they're called nightmare clients. And if we can help it, we should avoid them at all costs. So what I want to share with you in this video is what I found over the past decade of working with clients, how to highlight the ones that you shouldn't work with and who you should steer with from at all costs. Now, the first type of nightmare client is the one that wants it fast. And you can tell these types of clients from a mile off because the first thing they ask you, how soon can you get things done? Can you g...

et it done in two days when your gig says it takes six days. Can you get things done today or tomorrow? I'm in a rush, I have a deadline to hit with these types of clients, what I found personally. And obviously, you know, you can do whatever you feel is best for your personal situation. But when I first started out as a freelancer, I really tried to get as many clients as possible. And if a client said to me that they really wanted to, you know, get stuff done in like two days, I would accept that and then I would take that deadline as my deadline. And what I mean by that is I would kind of absorb the pressure that they were feeling and I would take on that was responsibility. Now, just speaking from the heart here between two freelancers, this is not good for your mental health. It's not good for your stress levels. It's not good for your mind. It's definitely not good. If I obviously live with my wife and I'm expecting my first baby boy in the next couple of months, imagine if I took on a client like that, who added that pressure into my life and my energy and then I took it out on, you know, my my wife by maybe being not as loving and supportive as I could be. Now, you know, if you're single and you just live by yourself, then it's, it's different, but it's still very important, your well being and your mental health is more important than any amount of money. And I would rather not work with a client and let the project pass than take on this unnecessary pressure of someone who is in a rush. It's their problem. It's not mine. You know, it's only my problem if I take on the project. So usually in my experience and I just want to pass on what I would do in my situation if I was you. And obviously, I just want to give you the best advice possible. So you can handle any situation in the best possible way. Always think about these particular instances as you bringing on the pressure into your own life because that's ultimately what it is. So you can make whichever decision you feel is best for you. But that's just my opinion on the matter. Now, the next type of clients that I generally like to stay away from is clients that like things cheap. So how do you spot these clients? Now, I can say that sometimes I have had clients that have initially wanted to really negotiate hard with me and then they ended up actually paying me quite a lot afterwards. They actually gain my trust. So it could just be a trust thing in the very beginning where they don't really know what they're going to get. So they just try and get the best deal possible in the beginning. But if a client is trying to, to haggle you and try to get the best possible price, maybe they're just like negotiating. But in my experience, if someone isn't willing to pay what you're worth, then one of two things is happening, either number one, you're not actually worth the amount that you're charging, which could be the case. It certainly was for me in my early career when I tried to charge as much as I am now before I was ready. Or the second thing is that person just doesn't value you for the amount that you think you're worth. So it's kind of a fine balance, right? You really need to kind of find the middle ground of what makes sense and, and and ultimately, the market is gonna tell you how much you're worth. That's the most important thing with freelancing. The market is always gonna tell you how much you can actually charge. And the only way that you find out how much you're actually worth is by charging the amount and having someone actually pay until someone pays you, you're not worth that. So keep that in mind. But if someone comes up to you initially and starts saying, oh, can I get a discount on this or, you know, for example, we do brand naming services and you know, our cheapest package is like $1195 at the moment. I think something like that. If someone comes up and says, oh, I only have a budget of $600 say, oh, you know, that's fantastic. There's gonna be plenty of other services out there for you that charge $600 or even $200 for, for brand naming. And they said no, but I really wanted to work with you. Can you not just give me a discount? And I just um politely say, listen, you know, we get 30 people getting in touch with us every single day asking you know, us to name their brand. And the reality is that we say no to, you know, 90% of those people, we only actually accept maybe two clients per day. Sometimes we don't even accept any if we're not interested in the projects. So it would be unfair to every other client who's paid the full amount if we start handing other clients or new clients discounts when some clients have been working with us for 12 months, 24 months to build their brand and you know, market their brand and you know, really manage their brand properly. If we should be giving anyone a discount, we should be giving them a discount, which we do. We do actually give loyalty discounts to clients who have worked with us, you know, over two or three projects. So that's my opinion on clients who want it cheap, handle them with care. And that is actually a really great way to handle the situation. Just put it back on them and say, listen, I would love to do that, but it wouldn't be found on our other clients who have paid us fully and usually they'll either go away or they'll actually pay the full because they understand that. Obviously it isn't really fair. So, yeah, if I'm a nice person, they'll just pay in full. Now, another type of nightmare client which you may come across is the client that knows everything already. Now, these types of clients come around in the early days of your time on fiver or when you don't really have as much confidence in your expertise within a particular subject. So for example, when we first started brand naming around eight years ago, nine years ago, now, probably we weren't as understanding of the science behind brand naming and the numerological factors that go on when you're developing a brand name. So when a client comes back to us, you know, eight years ago, for example and says all these brand names are terrible. You know, I hate them all, you know, they're, they're no good. I can't believe I paid you. You know, I don't know, probably like $ at the time or something. Way back when I can't believe I paid you $200 for this crap. Back then, we didn't really understand how to deal with that. It was a learning process. But now if this never happens because we fine tuned our process and you know, we actually say to clients now with the first set of names that we send you, we're not because obviously we've learned the process and how things work with the brand naming process. We don't want to put the pressure on the client to find the perfect brand name in the first initial presentation. What we say is it's a journey we're wanting to learn as much as possible with the initial presentation so that we can move forward effectively. So this is the whole process, right? And you learn how to manage clients in a way where it takes the pressure off them and it allows them to trust your expertise. Because now if a client says that name is complete nonsense, I don't understand. It's completely off brief. I know that every single name that we develop has a strategic approach. It has multiple scientific and neurological factors that make that name relevant to the objective, the strategic objective that that brand is trying to achieve. And once I explain that in a little bit more detail, they're a little bit more receptive. I'm not just backing away anymore and just kind of, you know, just kind of taking their, you know, their, their, their punch in the face. If that makes sense, I'm I'm taking the impact. But then I'm saying, listen. So what I can say is these are the reasons that we're doing it subjectively. You're more than welcome to say that you don't like the name. That's your opinion. OK. That's fine. But from an object, active standpoint, strategically, that name makes sense because XYZ and that level of expertise, which if you don't have it already, it will come eventually can really help you to handle these clients with a lot of finesse, which is going to come in super handy throughout your entire career. Now, another type of client which is always a little bit concerning to me and I'm always a little bit dubious when I'm thinking about perhaps working with them is a client who doesn't want to jump on a call with me. Now, you may like talking to people on Zoom. I actually really enjoy talking to people on Zoom and, you know, discussing their project in depth and really, you know, understanding what they're trying to achieve. But if a client isn't willing to jump on a 15 minute call with you to discuss their project, maybe they just have not so great English, which is sometimes the case. I worked with a company in South Korea before. And the guy who I was working with wasn't the best in speaking English. So he preferred writing because obviously he could translate and use different software to understand exactly what I was saying. So that's understandable. But if someone just doesn't want to communicate and they're not willing to actually put in the time to get the results that they need and they just expect you to pull a rabbit out of a hat without any information that can be a little bit concerning. And I like to work with clients who are 100 per cent committed to the project and 100 per cent committed to the process our process. And then I can get the results that they need. What I don't do is I do not accept clients who do not follow our process and then expect us to get the results that they want when they haven't invested in the process. And they just expected results without putting in any effort whatsoever. Yes, very fine line. And it's a very fine balance, but that is something I've learned over time and I would really suggest that you take that approach as well. Now, lastly, one of the things always kind of highlights a little bit of a concern for me when it comes to working with new clients, is them asking how many revisions are included? Now, this could just be kind of a basic question that they just ask everybody. But the reality is that there's two reasons why that concerns me. Number one on fiber, there are packages where it literally says how many revisions are included so they can check that out. If they still don't know, then they probably haven't checked your package out and they're probably just hunting for prices, which is just a waste of their time in yours, right? You should select someone who you like work and you want to get the value that they can provide instead of just price hunting and just trying to get the cheapest possible price. That just makes zero sense, at least in my opinion. And the second thing is if they're asking how many revisions are included, what they want to know is how many times can I get you to do this job over and over again without paying any more? And that's always a little bit concerning because if there's one thing that really annoys me and it will annoy you as well, I'm sure is someone wasting my time. You know, if someone wastes your time, you know, you've got a million things that you want to be doing as opposed to doing jobs over and over again with every project, you want to be really focused on getting as close to the finish line as possible and then just pushing it over the edge with a revision, what you certainly shouldn't be aiming to do is do the job three times over or twice over. That doesn't really work. It happens sometimes on the very, very rare occasion, maybe one in 300 projects results in redoing everything over and over again. If you really missed the mark or maybe a piece of information wasn't understood correctly or something like that. But ultimately, if someone's asking how many revisions can I get you to do? It obviously depends on how they word it you need to really understand and why they're asking and make sure you actually follow a process where you create milestones. So what do I mean by milestones? Well, within our naming process, when we're finding brand names for companies, we have one milestone at the very beginning where we confirm the directions of the brand name. So for example, what do we want the brand names to communicate? What do we want to try and achieve with the brand name? Once they confirm those directions, there's no going back from that, if that makes sense. So once we confirm the directions, then we have the next milestone throughout the process, which is the actual initial presentation with the initial names. So within that milestone, we are discussing, OK, what are we learning from these names? What do we like? What do we not like once we understand and confirm what they like and what they don't like? We put another flag in the process, that's another milestone that we've passed. So when they get to the next stage, they can't then say, oh, I, I don't like this because of this and I don't like this because of that because they've already confirmed that they liked it in the second stage of the process. So adding milestones throughout the process is really, really important if you want to manage the the process effectively and also make sure that you don't have clients, you know, just using revisions for the sake of it over and over again and just wasting your time because that's just gonna add stress. You've got other projects to worry about and it just isn't an efficient way and an effective way to run your business. So hopefully those tips help you to spot some nightmare clients that pop up in your messages or try to hire you. But ultimately, it's a learning process and you're going to get better at spotting these types of clients from a mile away. So let's continue with the course and to the next lesson and I look forward to seeing you there.