You Get the Clients You Deserve
attract and land better clients by changing your presentation and counting to ten
Clients from hell are the worst. You’d never take them, but here you are working for another one and you have a follow-up query in your inbox from that awful one you finally finished last week. How can you get better clients, ones who will just act professionally and stop trying to pay you half of what your skills are worth?
It’s easy to complain, focusing on them and their awful habits, the way they tweak your projects and request constant changes and updates, the way they don’t pay on time. The problem is that you are complaining about a problem you can change at any time, and the complaining is relieving pressure that would otherwise force you to make a change.
You are complaining about basic choices you’ve made as a professional.
Enter Nathan Allotey of Freelance Jumpstart to help you navigate out of this frustrating situation. Nathan has been a member of my business community for a while and has given me leave to translate some of his material into this article in hopes of helping more people. Helping people is his passion, so let’s learn how to escape these terrors.
change your signals to attract better work
You attract based on the signals you send out, so change them. The chart above shows the four basic target markets which a brand or reputation will attract and participate with, based on the correlation of the prices you can charge for your services and their willingness to pay you. Which one are you in, and where one do you want to be?
If you want to move up and get into that juicy premium market, it will take more than skill. You need to increase your prices and have the skill to compete with seasoned professionals in your field, sure, but more importantly you need to change your presentation.
Everything you do needs to be high-quality and more importantly look like it is high quality. Even a whiff of sloppiness or slow email response can turn premium clients off. They want someone rock-solid and dependable to do business with.
They want confidence that their problems will be solved before they pay you money to solve them. They want confidence that they can plan to have it when you say you’ll get it to them. They want to ensure you won’t draw a social media firestorm with tactless militarism, leveraging their brand for personal fights.
They want a professional, whether you’re working for them in their office or yours.
This means no more typos, no missed weekly blog posts, organized deliveries, and solid planning. That’s amateur [definition: unpaid, inept, or incompetent] stuff you can’t afford. If you are getting paid or want to be, you need to run a tight ship. Treat your home business like showing up to a “real” job, not an excuse to slack off. Get dressed, show up on time, and work for your pay.
“Are you aware of the gap?”
There is a gap between where you stand and those high-powered agencies who get the clients you dream about. Do you know what the gap is?
Agencies sell the talent of their designers
— Chris Do, Founder of Blind and The Futur
It’s a process gap: An agency will be able to take on all aspects of a project — getting paid for each step along the way — while a freelancer will usually only find success working to provide their unique value in a niche aspect of the whole project. By mixing and matching top-quality designers and consultants, they can fill high-caliber clients’ needs from the beginning of a project whether they come for strategic input, development or content creation, analysis or streamlining, or production.
An individual will typically either operate as a consultant or as a designer, working with only half of a client’s total project needs. By providing a one-stop shop, an agency eliminates the need for the client to assign a project manager of their own to coordinate the different professionals, adding immense value to their bid.
You can definitely succeed at jumping the gap to land in an agency or make an agency of your own to deal with premium clients, but we’re really looking to bridge the gap not make a risky jump.
making your bridge
I make a decision about a designer in the first 10–15 seconds of viewing their portfolio
— Matthew Encina, creative director at Blind and The Futur
Make certain your portfolio looks good instantly. You cannot waste the first impression, it is too important. The better the client, the more premium their time and attention are so do not waste a precious second. Check your spelling for goodness’ sake, there are all manner of free tools to help you automate this even if you can’t justify getting an editor; Hemingway and Grammarly are two of my favorites.
Remember to make sure every piece you showcase has context that can be found and explored easily too — a story, a description, a case study to let them see your process and evaluate you for their purposes — whether it’s on Instagram or your own custom site.
This is especially important because it is very unlikely that you are the best in your field. It’s a big world. You need to make your creative process stand out clearly so that they can see both that it is reliable and that it is complete from start to finish. Both in the eyes of Google searches and potential clients alike, Sean McCabe says it’s not a process unless it is written down.
The product you sell is not what you create. It’s how you create. It’s your process
— Ben Burns, Digital Director at Blind and the Futur
Another key point is that you primarily need to think strategically, not technically. You must transcend the simplicity of your craft to understand and move the goals of the project forward. It does not matter if your design is amazing, it matters if it achieves the project’s goals. Focus on ferreting out the real problems and addressing them just as much as executing on assignments.
You need to be someone that can bring about positive changes in the real world, even if you need to do charity work first to build up your street cred. You have to reach the real world, real problems, and real people to be seen as a valuable asset.
You should eliminate the word freelancer from your vocabulary. Purge this word from your vocabulary. If you are a freelancer, you are a solver of problems
— Brennan Dunn, Founder of DoubleYourFreelancing.com
Lastly, you need to tell a story. Stories excite and inspire, and are among the best ways to get someone to make a decision in your favor. Stories are what engage us, keep us interested, and get us invested in a person or cause.
But you can’t just start telling any story: Target your audience.
Who are you trying to reach? What is your goal? Set a plan down in writing, and take time charting your course. You work too hard to find out you’ve been heading the wrong way months or years down the road. Your portfolio might tell one story, your appearance another. Pay attention to the story you are telling.
If you want to turn your business into an agency, you need to be watching what the leaders in your field are doing so you can learn and mimic good practices. If you want to partner with an agency, study their process and build a portfolio that matches with their operations well before you reach out.
After you’ve got all this down into an easy process and made your portfolio shine, make sure people can find you easily. Ensure your phone or email is obvious, and that you keep your fingers on it at least every 12 hours so your responses are swift to new opportunities. This fast turnaround, this “agility” is vital to the people who are moving and shaking in the world.
For the full story in more detail and his own words, go watch Nathan lay it out for you on his channel. If you are starting out as a freelancer, struggling to build your business, or need advice on a particular issue, check out his podcast and start getting better clients.
