Jen A. Miller Update: When to Fire a Client

Ladies & Gents:

Happy Valentine's Day! Today I'm going to talk about firing people!

Tee heeeee! Though this has nothing to do with the holiday. It just lined up with me being back from Disney World and enough past the worst of a head cold that I had the time to put something together, and I want to get it done before I start hammering at the 16 (!) assignments I have due by March 1. 

My one comment on today is this: I have been in relationships where I felt more alone than I do in my super single state. Staying attached for the sake if being attached is no way to live. Fin

And now – off with their heads!

Ahem.

So much out there about freelancing is about how bad it is, and some of that focus is on putting up with abusive editors. A certain vein of those conversations are about how it's just something writers have to put up with and Good God that is no way to live. Firing low performing clients was one of the best things I have ever done for my business. Not only does it make my business more profitable, but it keeps me sane too. One great thing about freelancing is you don't need to continue to work for someone who treats you like shit. 

Here's why I've let people go:

They don't pay on time – and are dicks about it.
I've had checks delayed for a lot of weird reasons: because someone spelled my name wrong, they accidentally paid the other Jen Miller, a person in accounting didn't know what to do with my invoice so they just waited until someone complained.

Things happen. I get that! It's what the client does when something goes wrong that makes a difference. In all of those samples above, my contacts dropped everything to find out what went wrong, and made sure to get me as paid as quick as possible – in one case having a check overnighted to my home. I don't get mad during these instances because we're all human, and in some organizations I write for, multiple people need to be all rowing in the same direction to get me paid. If someone scoots out of line, everything falls apart – but the good ones are ready to line it up again.

But when no one cares, it's a red flag that you are not valuable to them. Whether they ignore your emails, brush you off, tell you to wait it out without checking in with accounting – the worst. If they don't give a shit about whether or not their workers are being paid, why would you continue to work for them? (If you're think Well Jen who else will pay me for this work? THEY ARE NOT PAYING YOU. It can also be a sign that the publication is in serious financial trouble, if they go bankrupt, your chances of getting any money out of them is little to none).

Of course, sometimes your editor can really do nothing. If they are being stonewalled by accounting, ask for the contact in accounts payable and hammer away there. Again, humans are human, but if anyone, anywhere doesn't care that their contractors are paid, you should spend your time finding companies that do. 

Which leads me to my next reason to fire someone.

Their per hour rate is below $100/hour.
Most of my clients pay per project or per word, but I always try to tally the per hour rate. The clock starts from the moment I pitch the story all the way through following up to secure the piece, researching the piece, writing the piece, the editing process, and any work put into making sure I'm paid. So if an editor makes you follow up seven times to your pitches, or makes you write three outlines before an assignment is approved, or you need to send four emails over two weeks to find out why your check is late, that counts in the tally (that's also why clients who give you assignments vs. you needing to pitch work out so well financially)

Sometimes I'll give wiggle room to a client who I like working with if it's a case of a lower fee than I'm used to but they're a dream otherwise. But rates can be just too low for me to continue on, which means they have to go too. My business can't continue to grow if I keep them, especially when a lot of places haven't raised their rates since I started freelancing full time 14 years ago.

They treat me like a full time employee.
As much as I'd like to feel like part of the team, I'm not. I call myself a hired pen for a reason: I'm brought in to do the writing. This is a mutually beneficial relationship: they can hire an expert to do a task without paying the full cost of a full time employee (including benefits and employment taxes); and I get to work from home in my sweatpants. 

So, no, they cannot treat me like a full time employee. This means they can't dictate that I work on their project before someone else's; they can't schedule times to do interviews for me; they can't expect me to answer my phone or email at all hours of the day or night; they can't expect me to work for them while I'm on vacation; and they can't make any snitty comments if they see that I posted about being out running in the middle of the day but hadn't finished their piece yet (even though it wasn't deadline time). I once had a client scream at me because I was not at my desk at 4:45pm on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. I had another – a major hospital you all know – schedule an interview with a doctor while I was on vacation and said if I didn't come in off the beach to do it, they'd take me off the job. I said take me off the job, and I never contacted them for work again (and the day they picked was THREE WEEKS before the deadline). 

This is also why I decline to be part of any client-related Slack groups (I don't have Slack for anything!) and have pushed back against clients that expect me to learn their content management systems. One client wanted to make it a requirement that all their writers were on Google+ and I passed on that too. They understood (thank goodness) but it could have been a deal breaker.

Of course, this is a fuzzy line, and I'm more than willing to shift it for clients that treat me well, like when one of my favorite editors had to ask me one small editing question while I was on vacation and apologized profusely for it (and yes I do tell my editors when I'm going away). Another client asked me if I could interview someone right at that moment because he was about to leave on a three week vacation and they needed his input into the piece, and I said OK – because I had the time free and the interviewee knew I wouldn't be as prepared as I normally was when we spoke. 

So yes there are exceptions. But if someone wants that much access to me, my schedule and my life, they'll have to pay me a lot more for it, and start talking health insurance as part of the deal.

They increase the work, but not the pay.
I've have clients ask me to start doing things like writing social media posts, writing photo captions, and to "just give us a few hundred more words for a sidebar" when it was not part of the original assignment. I do have clients who put these requirements into their contracts – which is OK! Because then I know what the full work for that fee. But springing it on me after everything's already been signed and expecting me to work more for the same money is not OK. This happened with a big company whose magazine I wrote for. They wanted me to write a playlist to go with the story and said "it'll take no time at all!" which is why they offered no additional feel. I passed. I did not reach out to them for work again. 

They're assholes.
Insulting me, my work, my work ethic, my ideas, where I live, the name of my book – it's all happened! Sometimes this behavior is obvious, like telling me my work "seems lazy"; other times, it can be less nasty but still a jerk move, like when a potential editor said he liked my essays but didn't know if I could really report anything, even though I had included links to reported pieces I'd done in the email. I had another editor read a my pitch for a reported piece about Atlantic City casinos, an area that I'd been writing about for almost a decade, and suggest that I stick with "the health and fitness stuff." Not only was that rude, but it also dripped with the misogyny of putting "health and fitness" stuff in a category classically seen as lady writing, and he worked at a magazine that had a troubled history with how it treated their female writers already. I crossed him off my pitch list.

Most of these editors, I've found, work at publications that get pitched by a lot of writers. I guess they feel that writers are disposable. I don't see myself that way, so I'd rather work with someone who agrees with me (and one of these publications is nearly six months late in paying at least some of their writers, so double whammy on how shitty they are).

They keep me up at night. And not in the fun way. 
The most difficult firing I've ever done came in 2012. I had written for the magazine for a few years before a new editor in chief came on board and made my life miserable. He would send back 3,000 words of comments on a 1,000 word piece. He once asked if I'd even "bothered" to travel to the place I wrote about even though I wrote a book about it and the photographer submitted a picture of us both standing together on location with his selections in case they wanted to use it in the front of book bios of who worked on that issue. I won an award for a piece I wrote for the magazine, and when I told him, his response was that he was surprised because he didn't think it was good enough for them to submit on behalf of the magazine. But he sure did have his picture taken with me at the award ceremony.

He was so toxic of an editor that worrying about the work I did for the magazine kept me up at night. I couldn't sleep from anxiety. I had nightmares. So that client had to go.

At the time, the work I did for that magazine equaled several thousand dollars of annual income, and I was still rebuilding my business after the recession had wiped out half of it. Even worse, the stories I wrote for them didn't easily translate to other publications. It was a huge financial risk, but it paid off. Why? Because I used the time I'd have spent working on those stories – and worrying about that work – pitching to other publications, and I could finally rest easy without constantly worrying about the next nasty email from him. I don't think it's a coincidence that my career went through a growth spurt after I let that publication go. It was a dead weight that I needed to throw off my shoulders (and I heard as of last month that he's still treating writers that way. Protip: if the editor in chief you hired was fired from his previous job for sexual harassment, he's not going to treat your writers well either). 

How to fire someone
It's easy. Most of the time, I just don't pitch them anymore, or when they ask me if I can take on an assignment, I decline. How I decline depends on the past history I have with that editor. If it's a matter of the fee just being too low, I'll ask for a raise, and if it doesn't come, I say I have to move on (no one has yelled at me for it). I might say that I'm too booked up at the moment, but you don't really owe them a reason unless you have been writing for them regularly for a period of time and they need to find someone to replace you. But even then, you can just say you're moving on.

You not owing them anything is especially true if they've been abusive to you. You owe them nothing. And you owe it to yourself to find people who appreciate you like the fantastic writer you are.

Phew! I will now step down from my soapbox and get on with it.

Recent Bylines
"Postcards from Your Favorite Hometown Running Spots" for The New York Times
"Disconnecting Calories from Exercise" for The New York Times
"Do student-athletes make good doctors?" for the Association of American Medical Colleges 
"How companies overspend millions on IT procurement" for CIO Dive

What I'm Reading

Until next time!
Jen A. MIller
jenamiller.com
runningalovestory.com
twitter.com/byjenamiller
instagram.com/jenamillerrunner