Episode 39: How To Deal With Picky Clients
Have you ever had a picky client that was never satisfied and your work was never good enough to make them happy? They want revision after revision and it makes you want to pull your hair out! Let's talk about this.
First, let’s define picky. Most of us define picky as a bad thing since it often leads to extra work. Sometimes a client’s pickiness is not worth the cost or the time that it takes to make the changes, but other times it is. There’s a balance.
The world needs particular, detail-oriented people but perfectionism can also be a bottleneck in business.
The biggest thing I’ve had to teach some of my clients when it comes to being overly picky is how to say, “it’s good enough”. The continued cost and time is not worth making those changes. Sometimes it is worth the extra finessing and other times it’s not. Improvement is a noble goal, but getting OCD about something can get costly.
But here’s the thing that annoys freelancers most when clients want change after change:
On the surface, if the freelancer charged a flat rate, then they are losing money and their hourly pay is getting lower and lower with each revision.
If you’re humble enough, you’ll take every criticism from a client seriously and analyze how you can improve your skills, systems, and communication to reduce the amount of changes that are needed.
One of the biggest reasons that most freelancers get into these scope creep situations is that expectations weren’t clearly established between the client and freelancer.
When a freelancer is being paid hourly it’s not as big of a deal because every revision gets charged the same hourly rate so hourly is safest with beginner freelancers. If you’re charging a flat rate, you have to have very clear rules regarding revisions and the whole process in order to not walk away with less money per hour than you’re worth.
More importantly though, these endless changes can also make the freelancer feel that the client is doubting his or her expertise.
Most of my clients have been pretty trusting of my work, especially the more experienced I got, and they leave it up to me to take care of quality checks. Sometimes they will check in, but that trust is only there because I earned it by providing content up front that didn’t have many flaws.
I have a small team and several eyes that review videos to check for spelling and other errors, so my clients should never have to review everything in full. But for a solo freelancer, the client does need to be that extra set of eyes and you do need to set the expectation with them that sometimes errors like spelling happen and your mind fills in what it’s supposed to be.
There’s a reason that when an author writes a book, an author who is a very good writer and knows good grammar and spelling, they still need to have a separate editor and proofreader. There are several people that review it. As long as the client knows they are the second pair of eyes then you should be fine.
But still take the time to review your work closely yourself because there are times when clients just don’t want to spend the time reviewing everything. I hire freelancers to edit my blog posts and videos and I don’t always review everything in full, I just trust them.
When it comes to how to deal with a picky client without getting a negative review or without losing them as a client if they have potential, I’ll explain a personal experience and what I did.
I had a client a few months ago that was criticizing my work again and again and one big problem was that I didn’t get on the same page at the beginning regarding their stylistic preferences. Some clients don’t have stylistic preferences, and they care more about the content or other aspects. Some are much more visual and do care, so it’s important that you figure that out quickly.
And don’t just go off of their adjectives when it comes to style, especially if you’re a designer or providing any other creative service. So in my scenario, we were editing videos for YouTube and we were creating a template for how the graphics would look for this client.
They kept using words like “elegant” and “professional” and I just assumed my definition of those words were the same as theirs. Nope. ALWAYS ASK FOR EXAMPLES OF WHAT THEY MEAN. Don’t assume you know what “elegant” or “modern” looks like.
Every new revision I made of the video style got more criticism than the first, but it should have been less! Part of the problem was that the client didn’t fully know what they wanted yet and didn’t have their branding fully figured out.
Now I know that if I have a client in that same situation, it’s important that we don’t begin work until they have certain things figured out. They didn’t hire me as a brand designer or strategist yet I kind of stepped into that role accidentally and ended up failing.
Mistake number one on my end was assuming a role that I wasn’t qualified to do.
So we paused our contract so they could figure out their branding first. Once they could produce visual examples of what they wanted, then we continued, and got off to a much better start the second time around and they’ve been a great client ever since.
But now I know what matters to them. I know that even micro design features that most people wouldn’t notice matters to them. What matters to your client in the work you’re producing? Is it design? Graphics? The content structure itself? Figure that out. What matters to them must matter to you because they’re paying you to care about what they care about.
I’ve had other clients that let us design a template and they never had anything negative to say about it. Also those clients had more of their branding figured out so we had an easier time matching that but some clients are just less picky about certain things. If you can’t gauge that during pre-contract conversations, then you must approach every new client as if they’re particular about everything to play it safe and then settle back to where they’re at.
The biggest thing that most freelancers get wrong is that they blame the client for all the issues.
Yes, the client often has a part to play in the problem but never assume the client will go out of their way to set clear expectations, you must do that. In the situation I was in recently, I accepted responsibility for the extra time that the client had to spend going back and forth on the initial video editing process.
I apologized for not taking more time upfront to understand the client’s preferences and style. And I apologized for not having a more efficient editing review system. The experience with them actually caused me to improve my editing workflow with my team.
We had gone ahead and created an entire video without ever getting full approval on some of the graphic elements in the video. Partly that’s because the client said it looked good and gave us a note about a different thing to change, but we didn’t give the client a chance to review more thoroughly for other changes.
We assumed “it looks good” was the final approval. It wasn’t. What they meant to say was, “It looks good but I need more time to review to see what isn’t working.”
So I realized I needed to slow down the editing process, especially up front when we’re nailing down templates and design and rules to follow going forward. The client shouldn’t have said things like “it looks good” if they weren’t ready to approve it.
But now I know that you must double check with them by literally saying, “Do you fully approve of this design?” There are no more changes to be made? If so we’ll finish this first video and we’ll lock in this edit, which means no more changes can be made.” You have to be super clear.
So long story short, the client had some shortcomings with communication which left room for me to assume things that weren’t true. They also had a shortcoming of not knowing exactly what they wanted, and weren’t able to give clear examples for me.
Ultimately, I pointed these things out to them, but only AFTER I admitted to my own shortcomings in the situation.
I still took the bulk of the responsibility, but then I softly mentioned what they should have done differently. I said things like, “If you had given more clear branding guidelines, our video graphics would have been more consistent. But I should have asked for more examples before starting the video.” See how I told them where they faulted but still took some responsibility for it? Never leave yourself out of the blame if you want to keep a client.
Sometimes there are certain clients that just have to be let go. They just don’t treat people with respect and there is no communicating your way into a good relationship with them.
I’ve had those and I had to dump them. Luckily I’ve only had those clients rarely because I quickly developed a better screening process for knowing how a client will behave. But don’t just throw the client away with the first issue and conflict. Work through it and give the client a chance. They might turn out to be a great client once you’re on the same page.
Accept responsibility and also review your pricing structure. You may need to start hourly with new clients and then shift to a flat rate once you know how picky they are and how much time you’ll be spending on each project.
So to sum up how to deal with a picky client:
Don’t blame them for the conflict or frustration over a project not getting done because of excessive revisions. Take responsibility for most of the problem and then softly but specifically mention where they erred. It’s important you let them know where they went wrong in a nice way.
Taking responsibility is contagious. If you blame them first they will likely put all the blame back on you but when you take responsibility first, they tend to admit to their side of the conflict as well.Set limits to how many revisions a client gets to force them to look for all the things they want changed at their first or second look, rather than only giving you one at a time. And let them know that when a project is locked, no more changes can be made unless they want to pay extra for it. Because sometimes the client will keep changing their mind and they have to pay for their indecisiveness because that’s how life is.
When you can’t decide on something and keep changing your mind, you lose money and time, there are consequences. Clients need to know there will be consequences if they change their mind.Have a “setting expectations” meeting where you interview them on everything that matters to them in the service you’re providing because each client will be different. And certain things that matter to them might affect what you want to charge them. If they want to be extra picky, they get to pay for it.
A good example would be one client I had who wanted a graphic to be in a very specific position on the screen in a very specific size, with the text lined up a certain way. Some of their wants are things that the viewer will never notice watching a YouTube video on their phone or computer, but it mattered to them so it needed to matter to me.
So I adjusted my pricing to reflect what mattered to them, and once I had the rules set for how they wanted things edited in each video, it was much easier and less time was spent on every project after.
Hopefully this has given you more tools for the next time you have a picky client. Learning how to handle these clients takes practice, but improved communication helps everyone. Until next time.
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