If you provide a service for clients, do you have a way to deal with clients that give you headaches or frustrate you? You should.

I was given a piece of business advice from a friend with quite a bit of experience in the area. He said, “never say no to work, just say how much.” I find so much value in such a short statement. The meaning here is that if you have work for a client that you don’t want to do, for whatever reason, rather than refuse the work propose a price that will satisfy you in doing the work. This could be a multiplier of your regular rate (just like overtime) or an hourly surcharge. It could be even be the cost to outsource the labor to someone else and just act as the project manager. If you’re getting paid a bit more, it’s much easier to work with a client that’s causing you stress.

If there are any manager out there reading this, you should consider applying this extra income in some way that benefits the people that have to deal with the clients directly. After all, they’re the ones that are dealing with the difficulty.

Whatever it is, you should decide on how you want to deal with difficult clients in advance of actually having to deal with them. Once you’ve identified a difficult client, anyone dealing with the money should be aware of this and all quotes or estimates for work should include the “new” rate.

As a design company, to all intents and purposes, we are experts in design. Most of the time our clients are coming to us for that expertise and to allow us to do the best job we can for them. On occasion, we get clients that seem to want to interfere with our processes and derail us. It’s not their fault—they’re just doing what they think is right. We run into difficulty when they want to assert their opinions over our expertise. When this happens, and if we can’t get them to allow us to do our jobs, we note them as difficult clients.

It’s important to know that we still want to do our best and we want to put out the best work we possibly can but when we have a difficult client, we have to make adjustments. In a lot of cases this extra charge isn’t really that much extra—it’s mainly just paying for extra communication that goes on and in some cases the “trial and error” that typically occurs when the experts can’t do their job.

At Lift, we very rarely have bad clients because we do focus so much on making sure communication is clear. However, we’re ready in case we do get one.