What happened, and was it our fault?
It was definitely a “it’s not you, it’s me” situation, and it almost always is when it comes to business relationships. Unless you do something unhinged (unlikely) a client probably won’t fire you for reasons you could have prevented.
When you have a product and you run a B2C business you have a customer defined by your target group. That customer does not really change much. Target groups are often defined as a certain demographic, being either an age rage or a type of person with specific interests. All your customers will have something in common and your product is one of those things.
Doing B2B creative work is different. It is an interesting dynamic, because your customer is a company and your client is probably more than one person at that company. You are going to be working with lots of different personalities. The thing that connects you is a common goal that you are all working towards. Those common goals are the business requirements defined by your client. While yes, your client may not change (as in the company), the people within the company do change. You might start work with one person, and end it with another.
We were hired for a website and all was well. The team was happy. But then new people came in and replaced the people we had been working with up until that point. The introduction of new people to the team changed the dynamic, and introduced new and different goals and requirements.
All this boring business talk to say: we were not the right fit for the new team anymore. Does this mean our work was bad? No. Does it mean we could have done anything differently? No.
Getting fired by and firing a client is not a bad thing
It was a blessing that the client decided to pull the plug in this case, because it was a dynamic we were already struggling with prior to their decision.
There will be people you work with that you don’t vibe with. The B2B nature of creative business services is that you are working closely with other people everyday. That dynamic needs to be positive for it to be productive. We prioritize our boundaries (which everyone should btw) and when we feel like they are being crossed we will stand up for ourselves.
We have fired clients before. That sounds super dramatic and no we weren’t like “we don’t want to work with you bye”, instead we implemented other strategies to “get rid of” clients that weren’t the right fit for us anymore.
One example of this is when we raised our prices. When we started out we priced our services way too low which meant we had a lot of clients come to us for cheap follow up work after completing the project we were originally hired for. It was easy to “let them go”, because we told them our new prices and they declined the offer and never asked again.
Any time a scope change (in our eyes) would come up, it made us feel like they did not appreciate how much we had already invested in their project. We were like “how can they seriously be asking for MORE after they have already gotten so much for so little money”. I know this was not the client’s fault, and that it was entirely on us. We failed in two regards. We failed to define the scope and we failed to ask for the correct amount for what our services were worth. These two things made us feel resentful.
A client buying creative services should not be expected to understand the value of the effort you put into your work. Instead they should be told the value by you asking for an appropriate amount of money for your work. If you offer your work cheap you can’t really explain to a client further down the road how much the work is worth since their understanding of that value has already been defined by a low initial price.
You set the foundation of your value through the prices you offer, so you cannot be surprised when a client ends up not valuing your work because you sold it for cheap.
Are we hard to work with?
Tbh I have reflected on this many times in Same Same’s lifetime, because people have made me feel this way. The thing is when you draw a boundary with someone, who does not expect or want you to draw that boundary, they will make you feel like you are the crazy one and that you are overreacting. And in all honesty we have been gaslit like this by many clients in the past.
Also I think that as soon as you start drawing boundaries and are not willing to bend over backwards to accommodate someone else, you will get written off as: hard to work with.
Little detour here to add some examples of gaslighting/manipulation from someone buying or seeking creative services:
“This is a quick task it shouldn’t take you long since you know what you are doing” – in other words: if this takes you long you must not be good at what you do, so you better not bill me too many hours for this or I won’t respect your expertise anymore
“This should be an easy fix” – making assumptions about the level of effort
“This shouldn’t require any dev work” – making assumptions about the scope of your work
“I don’t see why this would take more than an hour” – setting expectations on how long your work should take
“Can you get this done by tomorrow at 9am?” – disrespecting your time, and making assumptions about the level of effort
All of the above examples undermine your expertise and experience and this type of manipulation in the worst case will make you question your value.
There will be people who share similar values to you and there will be people who do not. This is true of all relationships including business relationships. If you operate similarly to your client, e.g. you both value similar things and have the same goals in mind, there is a very high chance that the business relationship will be successful. If one of these differ greatly, it might become increasingly difficult to maintain a good business relationship.
There are clients out there that respect creative work, creative processes and your personal boundaries. I know there are, because we work with them everyday.
Knowing that we are not the problem when someone tries to cross a boundary or disrespect us makes it that much easier to stand by our values. If anyone ever tries to make you feel like you are the problem remember that you probably are not. If we were the problem then we wouldn’t be in business anymore. We also wouldn’t have clients that have worked with us for years and continue to book us regularly.
I would say our personality type is hard to work with if the person who is booking us is looking for a cheap deal, does not value creative work or does not respect and/or understand creative processes. We are experts in our field and expect to be treated that way. It is not too much to ask.
We respect our clients deeply, and we expect the same in return. This isn't about pointing fingers, it is about accepting that not every client/service provider is going to be the right fit. If we realise down the line that we are not compatible, we part ways – and that's not only okay, it is also the best solution for everyone involved.