If you missed yesterday’s #FreelanceChat, you missed a good discussion on client boundaries. (Head over to Twitter and check it out.) It brought up a serious issue we freelancers have to deal with — how to know when a client is treating you like an employee.
It’s certainly happened to me. One of those occasions was about 16 years ago, I had an encounter with a new client that pretty much cemented the fact that they were about to be a former client. It went like this:
My daughter was graduating. I had out-of-town guests staying with me and her party planned. I completed this client’s project three weeks prior as agreed to (even earlier, because I was always trying to work ahead of the deadline back then). The client knew about my time constraints — I’d talked with her about it and had sent a written reminder before the project began. With that follow-up, I heard nothing. A week after I’d delivered the project, I sent a note to the contact — did she see it? Yes, she said. She’d look it over and get back to me.
She did. The weekend I wasn’t available. The one I’d told her about, the one I mentioned three weeks prior, reminded her of in that follow-up email. She knew I wasn’t around.
Ah, but that didn’t stop her, no no. She emailed me three times in one day. I know because I decided to check email after she called my house repeatedly, leaving messages I couldn’t answer because again, I was busy with company and a freaking party. Apparently, her deadline was Monday morning. And here she was, Friday afternoon into Saturday.
She even lamented that she wished she had my cell phone number so she could reach me. That’s when I was extremely glad I’d never shared it.
That’s a client who didn’t respect boundaries. That’s sort of the reason for this post.
If you’re a freelancer who worked as an employee at any point in your life, there’s a good chance you’ve felt a bit befuddled about whether your client has the right to expect certain hours, want to call the shots in ways other clients don’t, or generally expect you to serve at their pleasure.
Befuddle no more. You, my friend, are not anyone’s employee. You are a small business owner.
My example is just one of the ways we freelancers have seen the lines blur and have had clients expect behaviors that employees can expect — frankly, some of them expect things even employees would balk at.
[bctt tweet=”Are #Freelancewriting clients treating you like an employee?” username=”LoriWidmer”]
How do you know when the line has been crossed? These are some of the more common boundaries that clients cross, either inadvertently or deliberately.
Clocking your hours.
Whether they’re asking you to keep a timer running, stay on video while you work or making you punch in somehow, don’t. That’s a low-level client anyway (and one you should just dump outright, for they will never pay you well) and that amount of control over your business movements is not happening. No one has any say in how many hours you put into a gig. That’s one of the reasons why I stopped billing by the hour ages ago.
On-call availability.
This is just as bad as the client expecting you to be visible. There have been clients who try to get their freelancers to be available from 9 am to 9 pm or some such ridiculous thing. That means you’d have to have your email open and your eyes glued to it or your phone on at all times. Screw that. No employee should do that and neither should you. If they’re trying to hire you because it’s illegal to demand that of an employee without paying overtime (it is), that’s not your client. They don’t value you.
Issuing directives.
All clients have some idea of what they want you to complete for them, but some take this to the extreme. One client I had would send meeting invitations without asking if I was available. Every time, it was assumed I was waiting breathlessly for the work. If you’re like me, you have more than one client. While it’s nice to let them feel like a priority, it’s not nice when they take advantage of that. Clients do not have the right to tell you on Friday that they expect this by Monday morning. That’s when you can say, “Well, I charge double for weekend work.” Or hey, you can say “No.” And should.
Requiring meeting/phone call attendance.
Your time is money. You are not — repeat, NOT — required to attend anything that you are not compensated for. Remember, you are a business owner. If you attend a client meeting, it is with the understanding that your time is covered under your contracted fee or an additional fee. I made that mistake once. When I skipped a meeting (because honestly, nothing was relevant to the one thing I was doing and again, no payment was forthcoming), I got multiple texts and calls — are you joining the meeting? That’s a big hell no. If your client asks you to join a call and you have time and want to do it for nothing, by all means. But let them know it’s a one-time courtesy or honey, you could find yourself being “invited” to participate in several unpaid calls.
Questioning your time off.
I had this happen to me just twice in my 20 years of freelancing. Both times, I dropped that client immediately. One actually said, “Didn’t you just have a vacation?” It is not your client’s business how many vacations you take, how many days you work, what hours you work, or how responsive you’ll be. Never. They don’t pay your benefits, so your vacation time is yours to determine. So is your time away from your desk. It’s none of their damn business. It’s yours and yours alone.
Expecting you to accept scope creep.
I included this one because it happens to nearly every freelancer. Clients expect endless revisions or, in some cases, complete rewrites of the project for the original price. Hell no. If it’s not in your contract to limit revisions to two rounds (it should be), be damn sure to tell that client that you’ll give them a free revision “this time” but any further ones you’ll happily do for the price of your per-hour fee (and charge $125 an hour for this at minimum). If you don’t, you’ll have what I had about 18 years ago, when the client was still pondering “said” versus “replied” twelve rounds of edits in. You’ll find that most of the nitpicky edits disappear after you attach a monetary value to it. Honestly, a lot of clients don’t realize that unlike an employee, your time has a per-hour value that they need to pay for.
Writers, what behaviors have you seen that blurs the line between employee and freelancer?
How have you dealt with it?
2 responses to “Freelance, Not Employee: A Quick Guide”
Those are sure some doozies, Lori.
I’ve shared this one before, because it went beyond overstepping right into creepy cyberstalking.
A few years back, I landed a new-to-me client. The first red flag was they called short posts sourced only with celebrity tweets “articles.” Um. No. Just no. Those are regurgitated social media comments posing as a two- or three-paragraph blurb. I had a REAL article (you know, with original interviews, lots of research, transcribing, revisions, and a heck of a lot more writing than ten of their “articles” combined) due, so I put off a call to discuss their overly-complicated system. (Basically, they expected the writers to be web editors and art departments, too, for no additional compensation.)
I was already wondering if those hassles were worth the not-great per-word rates they paid for what amounted to quick blurbs. But I was willing to give it a shot, since it could have been a few hundred extra dollars per week, and it never hurts to learn new skills.
Anyway, I told the would-be client I speak until the next business day because I had a big deadline. Like most human beings do, I took a brief lunch break. Not a full hour. Just enough time to make a bite to eat while perusing social media and take my dog out. I didn’t post anything, but I liked or retweeted something. When I got back to my desk there was an angry email from her saying, essentially, “You don’t have time for a call, but you have time to tweet?” She then added, “I don’t see why it takes you so long to write an article. Most of our writers can write five or 10 articles per day.”
That’s when I schooled her on the difference between ARTICLES and “articles,” and told her — not that it’s any business of hers — that I’d been on my lunch break. And we parted ways. I let her think it was a mutual decision due to what she called our different working styles. But it was because she was a cyberstalking micromanager who I didn’t want to do business with.
Oh, I remember that client, Paula! You were wise to turn your back on her, too. No one gets to micromanage like that. We are NOT employees. I wonder how she, such a busy person, had time to stalk you? If a client doesn’t show trust and respect, it’s a non-starter.
Tweets are “articles”? Really? Jeez.