When I first started working for myself I had a dream, I wanted world peace, an end to poverty…..nah only joking. I wanted the freedom to work on what I wanted to work on when I wanted to. Work freedom I thought of it as.
The problem was that in order to get through the first few months I became reliant on client work. Now don’t ever fool yourself, doing client work IS NOTHING LIKE WORKING FOR YOURSELF. Rather than working for a single employer with all the perks of being an employee you’re simply working for a great number of bosses, all of which tend to be more demanding than any employer you’ll meet!
Over time I’ve managed to lose them (in the nicest possible way) one by one until as things stand today I’m left with one real client and one half client. The half isn’t an issue, I host a few services for them on my infrastructure. It’s only pennies but it’s completely hassle free. The other client is a little more involved. Well it’s a lot lot more involved. The money is ok, certainly no great shakes but it made a big difference when I needed it. The trouble is I don’t anymore. For the amount of time it takes (I spend as much time on their site as I do my own) I’m probably making about $5 an hour!
Even worse, they are prone to being quite for weeks. Understandably they see quite time as me not doing anything. This is OK but of course whilst they aren’t wanting updates I’m still very much doing all those SEO things for them (link building, optimizing, adding new content) that they don’t really see, the extra traffic and enquiries happens by magic 
Then every now and then comes a huge request. Next week I’d planned so many things, not least starting on PPC again and I need to be able to commit 100% to it. That was until today. I’ve got a choice here, I can either stick with my plans and say goodbye to my last real client, or change everything last minute and spend a week completely re-doing their website?
I think for one of the first times in my life I can hand on heart say I haven’t got a clue what to do.
2 Responses to “When Is The Right Time To Drop Clients?”
Chris
August 30, 2008
If you don’t need the money that comes in from that client and you spend so much of your time doing work for them then it makes sense to consider dropping them and giving yourself more time to work on your own projects.
Chris’s last blog post..Getting Back Into the Zone
|Paul B
September 1, 2008
If it was purely money I’d have dropped it. There is also a sense of loyalty involved and that’s why I’ll be spending most of this week doing their updates
I guess it’s all part of life, you can’t always do what you want when you want, my own plans can wait. Of course part of life is also being paid a fair wage for your efforts but heh-ho…
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