Cutting ties with a paying client
The courage to walk away from a difficult commercial relationship that was no longer satisfying
It’s difficult leaving a paying client but that’s what I’ve just done, and the ending represented many of the reasons I decided to close my software consultancy after 6 years.
For three years I had been single-handedly developing and supporting this client’s business-critical finance application they relied upon each month and in two different countries/currencies. Even though they were a decent sized business, they seemed to lack any retained technology and operational expertise in-house and so that aspect fell to me as well.
18 months ago, given the maturity of the application and few changes being made, they felt my small monthly retainer wasn’t worth the cost and decided to move to commissioning work on a quarterly basis. The rate card looked good for a steady stream of work, but ultimately it became a zero-value contract.
The last two quarterly meetings were cancelled at the client’s request due to no work required but over the same period of time, I was still expected to provide ad-hoc critical support when necessary, answer user queries, submit designs and various proposals etc. But probably the real nail in the coffin was the drying up of day-to-day contact and the transition to (what I felt to be) a one-way relationship initiated by emails.
One weekend I opened my accounting package and was shocked to see that I had earned an average of £188 per week over the last 12 months from this client, and so with some regret over saying goodbye to the hope of future work, I decided to serve notice having satisfied the contract in full.
The client then seemed to become quite upset when I was unwilling to quote for work, and when I did, queried my higher prices and wanted them itemised. They actually seemed downright insulted at times because my quotes weren’t the same as the previous rate card. Ultimately it just wasn’t a viable relationship to maintain and I couldn’t keep shouldering that level of around-the-clock responsibility for such little income.
I came to the realisation that over the entire time of working together, the client viewed me as just a ‘developer’ and by bundling all of the analysis, design, testing, security, hosting, deployment etc as part of the software development process, I did myself a huge disservice in terms of hiding the real value of my work.
Unfortunately, I feel the real shame here is that in 12 months time, my higher prices will actually look very attractive given the real cost they now face in sourcing, upskilling and retaining a C# WPF .Net Framework 4.8 SQL full-stack developer to support their business-critical application.
I’m Frank, an autistic software engineer and owner of Better Software UK, a software requirements consultancy.
