7 Tips For Freelancers: Spot Bad Clients Who Waste Your Time And Don’t Pay You

The best perk about being freelance is that you don’t have to work with jerks. Of course, jerks are often sneaky. You only find out they’re jerks after they’re stealing your time and money. It sucks. Let’s commiserate and share our tips on identifying bad clients. on freelance job sites. Always be on the look out for bad clients — rate them low, refuse to work for them, tell everybody, force them to quit, or, better yet, change and get better. For context, my experience is on Upwork.com in the niche is fiction ghostwriting.

Always be on the look out for bad clients — rate them low, refuse to work for them, tell everybody, force them to quit, or, better yet, change and get better.

You can determine if a client sucks by studying their job solicitation. They’ll trick you by promising such a great rate! Nope. They won’t pay it.

So here’s some quick rundown of bad client characteristics: Bad clients like to…

Bad Clients Ask for Overly Specific Samples

When a client says “they need really specific sample to prove you can do the work” or ask hyper-specific interview questions “How would you solve this exact scenario, write it or code it or mock it up”, what they really mean is, do work for free. They’ll use the sample as a proof of concept for their boss, they’ll show it to the other person they hire for inspiration, and if they’re real slime-balls, they’ll just publish the sample itself. The good news is, the client is subtly telling you, right from the start, “Hey, I want to exploit you, don’t work with me.”

Good clients will simply look at your portfolio. If they like you, they’ll tell you what they saw that made them know you’re the right fit. If the client needs a specific sample to fairly judge between a stack of applicants’ ability, they’ll commission a token-payment trial job, perhaps an hour’s work for $10. The expectation is, that work thrown out and not used in the final project.

Bad Clients Remind You of “Freelancing’s Many Benefits”

Is your client mentioning the “great benefits” their work provides, like “freedom to set your own hours” and “freedom to express creativity.” These are perks provided by you, through choosing to work freelance. Not the client!

Every freelance job offers these perks! Clients are subtly twisting “perks” into codewords: saying “setting your hours” or picking which hours you’ll work, instead of setting reasonable deadline expectations influenced by how long the work takes and the worker’s schedule. “Freedom to expressing creativity” means “Figure out my vision for me,” or for a ghostwriter, “I don’t have an outline for you, write one for free.”

A similar bad-client-troupe is reminding you that they’re “interviewing many applicants” or “looking to hire the best in the field.” Great! They’ll be happy to fire you because it’s cheaper for them to hire labor that’s desperate or unaware of the industry norms. Red flags that this will not be a long-term, high-profit client.

Why do they say crap like this? I speculate that this problem often manifests at pluck-and-chuck content farms — in trying to discourse “very professionally” the clients sound confusing and rude, vague about expectations because they have no idea what they want/what they’re doing/etc. . These people sound like contented-out-husks who need every word checked by the boss first. Don’t work for this person, pity them.

Bad Clients Insist On Strange Deadline Schedules

“I need it done 14 days after assigning the work, NO EXCEPTIONS!” This one is tricky, because sometimes it can actually be a sign of a good client. Meeting a production schedule is the only way to get out a lot of content. However, what does 14 days have to do with anything? Is there a timeline for you to send in work and milestone payments for each marker? Will rushing impede quality? “What’s the reason behind the deadline?”, is the main question to ask.

Simply, if a client is determining deadlines before they even find a person to do the work, then they don’t know what they’re doing. Their business is bad and it’s not busy enough. Not your problem. Obviously, deadlines should be set directly with the worker in mind.

However, once you do set a content deadline calendar, also set a payment deadline calendar. If the client expects you to stick to a deadline, expect them to pay you promptly.

Bad Clients Make You Sign Complicated Contracts

Sometimes, signing a contract is fine. If the client clearly outlines what they need and what you’re getting paid, great. They don’t actually need to do this. One of Upwork’s primary purposes is handling exactly this. By using the platform, this is all taken care of — but sometimes, businesses need to file this separately, want a good record, etc.

Other times, the client is stupid, devious or both. Stupid clients are afraid you’ll steal their idea (an idea they’re paying you to develop for them). Devious clients will try and put hard to fulfill stipulations in the contract so they can try and not pay you. Really awful clients will ask you to sign a non-compete contract! As if a freelancer could afford to have only one client! Remember, if a contract isn’t written in plain speech and you don’t understand it, Do Not Sign That Contract.

Bad Clients Insist on Setting a Strange Communication Medium

“What’s your Skype handle?” “Let’s move this over to Slack!” “Have you tried Google Hangouts?” All of these are great red flags clients throw up to say “Hey, I’m gonna waste your time, make things way more complicated than they need to be, and possibly try to scam you.”

Here’s the scam. The client could be trying to trick you into taking the job off the Upwork, and thus forgoing the pay-up-front, Escrow payment system (the main perk Upwork provides you by insuring your work and guaranteeing your payment). The upside is, you pocket the money that’s typically Upwork’s commission. The downside is, the client can stiff you (though, they usually don’t). Always though, the client can’t rate you, easily refer you in-platform for future jobs, use Upwork’s file hosting, or be apart of your Upwork tax income.

“I only communicate over Upwork.com and email as per stipulated in the Upwork.com Terms and Conditions. At risk of damaging my relation with Upwork.com, I must report all clients soliciting work through use of non-acceptable communication channels. So to clarify, are you saying I can only do this job if I use a terms-of-service violating software arrangement?”

Is this actually in the Upwork’s term’s of use? No. Something similar is. Basically, threaten to call the mods and see if they don’t change their tune.

But maybe they want to pay you through Upwork, they just need you to chat on their communication mediums. This is less shady, however these clients are still trying to squeeze free work out of you. They want you to be an unpaid content manager and do free labor fitting into the company’s production flow (ostensibly, the exact job of the person who hired you). These companies don’t need freelancers, they need employees. Try telling them

I’ve caved before: I’ve joined Slack channels, Gchats, Drive folders and Dropboxes. It sucks. You get your personal accounts forever tangled with some guy who hired you to write about skateboards for a month. I’ll probably join someone else’s dumb, anti-productivity software again though, if they pay extra for it.

EXTRA TIP! BAD CLIENTS LOVE TALKING ON THE PHONE.

Very related to our last subheading, but eed my warning, reader: if there’s one thing I’ve learned freelancing, there’s nothing is worse though than phone call clients: The Masters of Bad Communication. Always old, lazy, lonely, non-native English speakers, often all four — these clients want to chat it up over webcam or phone, in-spite of time zones, audio quality, and good common sense. For ghostwriting, this makes zero sense, as for most of human history, publishing was done entirely though the mail. With exceptions for calls of gratitude, collaboration, or intense clarification, calling (or worse, webcamming!) a stranger is at minimum a huge waste of everyone’s time or worse, an incredibly creepy way to interact with a person. You don’t even know how I am as an employee and you want to watch me on my computer’s build-in-camera that I hide with a piece of duct tape? Get outta here! If the client wants to kick things off with a phone call, they’re telling you they will be a major pain. Nix them.

(Ghostwriting Specific) Bad Clients Conflate Writing with Editing

When a client asks for work to be 100% perfectly proof-read and edited, this might mean they’re expecting a professional level of quality from your manuscript. Or, more likely, it means they do not understand how writing or publishing actually works. They’re trying to get free work (decent proofreading is a low, but added, expense). Maybe they don’t even want to actually read through your work! Hell, maybe they’re publishing your writing in a (for them) foreign language market and can’t read it!

Any writer knows that editing your own writing is much harder than someone else doing it because if you’re a halfway decent writer, you’ve already checked through the work for mistakes. That’s enough! Together, we’ll stop the clients saying, “Do my job for me for free, while I sit here and rake in the cash!” by collectively promising to never work for them.

(Ghostwriting Specific) Bad Clients Misunderstand Word/Page/Character Count

“I need a 100 page ebook” “I want 100,000 word book that’s upwards of 1000 pages” “I want the book to be 20,000 characters long, not including spaces or indentation”

All of these stipulations scream, “I’m very unprofessional and don’t understand the agreed upon metric for buying text.” It’s word count. Typically, 500 words fit on a single-spaced paged, but no one should be dealing in “page count” without a bunch of other information. Pages depend on the displaying device. After 140, counting characters is a real hassle. If a client is asking for anything other than words, I suspect they’re reading submission guidelines and arbitrarily asking you to adhere to them. Word count is reliable and fair, so get the client to figure out that number first.

In Conclusion, Bad Clients Suck, Don’t Work For Them

REMEMBER! Bad clients offer good rates because they’re very confident they won’t actually be paying them. With a myriad of stipulations and communication problems, they’ll make you work for free. Once you know you’re working for a bad client, end the job as promptly as possible and rate them low. I mean, 1 star. If they rate you low, appeal it and always sure you save receipts — mods are more likely to delete a bunk review of a good freelancer than an accurate and honest review of a bad client. Bad clients are bad for the platform: they’re trying to spend as little money as possible, cheat people out of the work Upwork gets paid to facilitate, and make the site a worse place to work. Report them and don’t work for them!

Want to hear more thoughts on freelancing? Ask a question in the comments and I’ll answer it or write a post about it.