We've been blessed with a lot of great clients. They've been fun to work with, usually giving us a lot of creative freedom, and they are most often full of praise for our work. That always means a lot to us. We take great pride in our work and it's always rewarding when a client loves their new look.

 

Every once in a while we get clients that seem to think they can do it better than us. They second guess our designers at every step, micromanage the whole process, and don't trust our experienced recommendations. Inevitably, this leads to much higher project costs for project management and design revisions, which we try hard to avoid. But it always begs the question, "why did you hire us in the first place?" There's a fine balance that we have to walk, between being straight-shooters and yet not being rude. After all, we believe our clients are paying us for our opinions. They are the boss, but in order for us to do our job we have to be tenacious in protecting the integrity of the design and the broader image of our client. Often that means being blunt and telling a client, "no that's a bad idea." Thankfully, most clients are happy to hear that and in the end they get a better product. But it's always a difficult thing to balance our dual obligations: pleasing our client and faithfully doing the best job we can. When these are in conflict, we apologize in advance, but the client is not always right. And we believe they do not want us to agree with everything, otherwise our expertise would be useless to them.

 

Money Makes the World Go Round 

Every once in a while we get a few clients that don't seem to think they should pay us for our work or at least pay us on time. This is particularly difficult for us because we try not to make this all about money. But at the end of the day, we have to pay our skilled employees for their work, and when a client is late or just refuses to pay it hurts us in more places than just our pocket book. We want to develop a long term relationship with all our clients. And it is awkward when we have to call a client and pester them about paying their bill. Overall, we've never had a case where the client refused to pay outright. But we've had several cases where a client failed to pay from several months to over two years. Those cases are rare fortunately. But what is more common, and more difficult because of it's regularity, is when clients get too busy to pay our invoices. Most mean no harm, but one month passes and then two months pass, and still they haven't paid their invoice. Meanwhile we've paid our employees and being a small business we quickly feel the financial pinch.

In the end, this all too common phenomenon has forced us to be more strict with our billing process, requiring due dates and late payment fees. It's not at all what we want to do, but in order for us to stay in business for everyone's benefit, we must get paid on time. So we apologize for the added bureaucracy, but we have to keep the love going around.