I love how you say "I learned the realities of writing life and revised my philosophy accordingly."

I'm framing that statement. 🙂

The minute a potential client starts trying to tell me how much time something will take, I correct them. Sometimes I'm polite: "That's not a realistic time frame". Sometimes, it's more along the lines of, "oh, if it's so easy and it doesn't take any time, then you'll be able to do it yourself and save the fee."

Boundaries are difficult in the beginning. They can also get difficult in long-term situations where the client knows you well – -and starts asking for favors.

One of my biggest pet peeves (and I'm sure many of you will agree) is someone telling me the work is "easy" and "shouldn't take very long" to justify their low-ball offer. Some clients even say that when the rate is fine. I have much more respect for clients who don't tell me the work is easy because they tend to have more respect for what I do and value my work more.

I'm two weeks into working with a new-to-me client who initially said he'd assign a block of blog posts about two weeks out, and he's already saying, "How soon can you get this turned around. I need it in three days." Um. No. You don't pay enough for me to drop everything to write your promotional blog posts. Instead, I told him when I could get it done.

I had one non-profit representative who was passionate in what she did. I love that because it makes my job (and it is a job) so much easier. Creating content that shared her passion was easy – and, yes, fun. But when she started pushing me to share her passion to donate my services (with promises of great things to come), I said No, I could not do that, and we soon parted ways.

Great "seeing" you here again, Devon.