Give clients the pink slip

An article by Kevin Airgid on When to fire a client (despite it's spelling errors) speaks the truth! If you've never had a client like this, you really haven't gotten much experience under your belt. Although reading the article will give you a better idea of what it's like to deal with hellish clients once in a while, you really won't know what it's actually like until you get a client from hell yourself.

I remember a particular client I dealt with that wound up flaking out, leaving me aching for payment in my most dire time of unemployment. His name is Arye Sachs ( I repeat his name with glee because changing names to protect people are for spineless designers!) and apparently I'm not the first person he gyp'd!

I was so scorned that I created a warning page and even e-mailed other freelancers I knew. I may not have been the first client he spurned, but I was determined to make sure I was the last!

Shortly after posting the case study to my website, I got e-mails from several other designers who claimed they were also bamboozeled out of money from Arye Sachs. The dirty rat couldn't even pay me the measly $100 bucks he owed.

From then on, I knew I had to always get contracts signed and deposits always needed to be made before any work on the project starts. Tangible tokens like those help to filter out the flippant clients from the serious ones.