Why You Can’t Afford Cheap Clients
Right out of the gate: there is a service for every client budget. I’m not here to shame anyone into spending more money than they think they need to.
But I’ve found a very backwards, unintuitive, and at times disturbing pattern among the cheapest clients I’ve worked with in my career. And even the business owners I work with have found the same thing to be true in other industries.
Cheap clients are bad clients in countless different ways.
And I want to argue why you shouldn’t take them on.
Defining What ‘Cheap’ Means
It’s important we lay out the parameters of our discussion.
I might consider a client’s budget cheap, and you might consider it exorbitant. This will be determined by a few key factors, including and not limited to:
How long you’ve been in business
How quickly and easily you might be able to solve the problem your client faces
Thus, how much profit you stand to make on the sale
How much you enjoy the work being done
How skilled you are at the work to be done
And, most importantly, how badly you need their money.
No blog post can answer these questions for you. A client you consider cheap today might seem handsome tomorrow if your workload dries up overnight. Things change, and you can too.
So in the context of this discussion, I will give you the power to name what you currently define as “cheap”, and convince you that it’s probably even worse than anything you should consider by the end of this blog.
Here are 4 big reasons you should turn down cheap clients before getting into bed with them:
1. You Waste Your Time
If you’re in the early stages of your career, with a light workload and you’re desperate for all the money you can make, this is going to seem like the least relevant argument. But I assure you it’s true.
Every minute you spend working for a cheap client is a minute wasted working for a better one.
If you don’t have good clients breaking down your door to work with you (who does?), understand that your time could be better spent at least trying to attract them by working on your own brand.
Cheap clients waste your time when they demand things on weekends or multiple variations of something you only promised 1 of. Cheap clients are slick and will weasel their way into wasting your time. Be cautious. They are cunning.
2. You Earn Less Money
Let me say this, and try not to miss me: You are worth more than you are currently charging. I have found this to be true with 98% of business owners I’ve ever worked with.
When you take on a cheap client that’s less than what you even currently think you’re worth, you rob yourself of even more money than you ought to.
Time is finite. When you eventually run out of time by wasting it on cheap clients, you’re going to be depressed you can’t take on the good ones that come along with much bigger budgets.
It is a discipline to say no to cheap work. It is hard. But if you are wise and strategic, it will be infinitely better for you in the long run.
3. You Burden More Stress
~Cheesy announcer voice~ Is your work life just too perfect? Do you need to take things down a notch and come back to earth a little? Work with a cheap client today!
Working with cheap clients means you’re going to be more stressed out. When you say ‘yes’ to one-too-many crappy requests they have just to keep them happy, you’re going to resent the client, the entire situation, and your job altogether.
You won’t be able to punch out at 5 o’clock and leave all you worries there until 9am the next morning.
You will have frequently more off nights because your cheap client has got you filled with a sour cocktail of bad feelings.
Longevity in business is built upon a healthy work-life balance. I know of no other way to leave your work at work besides only working with good clients.
4. You Start Hating Your Job
Want to start hating your business as fast as possible? Work with cheap clients.
Their thoughts become simple ideas they bounce off of you. Then those ideas become something they want you to explore. Those explorations become something they expect you to execute. Those executions become revisions. Those revisions become frustrations. Those frustrations become dissatisfactions. Those dissatisfactions become increased pressure on you. Pressure on you becomes why-the-heck-am-I-doing-this; which becomes burn-out and abandonment.
Cheap clients will snowball something seemingly innocent and minor into a big catastrophe that they aren’t paying you enough (if anything extra) to deal with.
They are skilled at snowballing; whether their intents are malicious or not. It’s bizarre.
I don’t mean to sound like a Negative Ned over here, because in general, I always, always want to assume the best in everyone and give them the benefit of the doubt.
But cheap clients will ruin your business whether they are good people or not. And that’s not something you should give anyone the power to do.
Here are a few more consistencies I’ve found with cheap clients over the years:
1. Cheap Clients Don’t Respect You
Cheap clients will walk all over you. They will demand the world of you, and expect it on their terms. They don’t value what you do and they think almost anyone could do it.
Cheap clients will ask for your advice and then throw it out. Or, they just won’t ask at all. They aren’t looking for a business partner: they’re looking for someone to execute their fully-formed idea; no matter how terrible.
Cheap clients will berate you, make you feel small, and otherwise demand apologies for things you shouldn’t apologize for. You should never work with someone who doesn’t treat you properly. Period.
2. Cheap Clients Don’t Respect Your Work
Cheap clients believe your area of expertise is one that requires little experience or knowledge.
You’ll often find that the cheapest clients focus exclusively on the time it takes you to complete a project, but not the years of experience it took you to learn how to do it so quickly.
They see what you do as interchangeable with any number of other vendors. They don’t really know why they chose you in the first place if it was anything other than convenience.
3. Cheap Clients Believe They Own You
Mark my words: cheap clients will come to you in the eleventh hour, blame you for something that’s not your fault, and then demand it be fixed yesterday for little to no extra charge. They believe that, because they have their hands on the purse strings, they can order you around in any way they see fit.
Cheap clients take all the power in the relationship and leave none to you. They essentially treat you like a slave to whatever it is they need.
4. Cheap Clients Behave Like They Are Your Only Client
Hand-in-hand with the last one, cheap clients always want to be pushed to the front of the line. They will expect that you can—and should—drop everything you’re currently working on for everyone else, and fix their problem immediately.
Here’s the reason you can’t afford this: if you are soft just once about this and comply, you’ve trained your client they can do this any time they want. They think they can get it any time they ask. This one might be partially your fault because you didn’t adequately train your client, but nonetheless, it’s still their fault for creating the situation.
5. Cheap Clients Believe They Deserve Better for Their Money
Cheap clients feel like they’re spending way too much money on you. Cheap clients don’t recognize that they’re cheap, and if anything, most of them are deluded into thinking they’re one of your better-paying clients.
This is why all the previous points are true. They think their money buys them everything they want, when they’re unaware that their money is already buying them more than it ought to.
Once again, I’ll say, it’s your job to educate them on why this isn’t true. But a cheap client will rarely listen, and if they do, they will often push back, or quickly rescind the next time they shoot themselves in the foot, and call you on a Friday evening to fix it ASAP.
6. Cheap Clients Believe Your Time is Expendable
Perhaps worse than all those things, a cheap client will only get you the promised materials by the end of the business day Friday, then be badgering you Monday morning about why it isn’t done yet. They believe you do nothing but eat, sleep, and work, and they will treat you like it.
You’ll often find that cheap clients are people that exclusively do things at the last minute, and get frustrated when others aren’t as busy or chaotic as they are. If you want any sort of stable working relationship with this client, give up now, and run far, far away.
…
There is a golden rule I’ve learned in my years as a business owner. And I frequently have to remind myself of it when I’m working:
The golden rule: A bad client will never become a good client.
Don’t believe me? Take on that cheap client (that you know in your gut you shouldn’t) and come back to me in 6 months when you’ve had to chew your own leg off just to sever ties with them.
I teach you all of this not because it is fun to vent about bad clients, but to warn you against the dangers of working with them. I say this to empower you.
You are much more valuable than you think you are.
You are much more skilled.
Your time and expertise is worth more than what you’re charging for it.
Don’t ever settle for anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.
