When you work a 9 to 5, you have the benefit of learning about your co-workers, your supervisors and your employer and coming to a certain level of understanding about their expectations of you, their likes and dislikes, their skills and their attitudes.  But when you freelance, each client starts a brand new learning experience, and each client seems wholly different from the last, which can make managing clients a challenge.

All freelancers have a few easy clients who assign a project, disappear into the background while you do your work, pay promptly and cause few problems. And then there are clients with their peculiar quirks, who are great in one way and more difficult in others, and of course, the downright picky and difficult clients. Chances are good you won’t know which category a client falls into until you’ve already accepted the job.  You’ll get some who seem to want to make every decision for you, some who give no direction but then complain that what you’ve done isn’t what they had in mind, some who just don’t understand the technical side of things and make suggestions that would basically undermine everything you do. 

When a client insists on backseat driving while you maneuver your way through the project, you can let them—to an extent.  Make it clear that you appreciate knowing exactly what they want, but that you’re happy to do the work without quite so much involvement.  Sometimes a client can be so specific about their needs, it almost seems that they would have been better off simply doing it themselves.  When you come across a client like this, weigh your frustration against your income from the job and decide if it’s worth it to do projects for this client in the future.

Clients who take an opposite approach can be frustrating, too.  When you first start working with a client, you might not know if one who gives little direction will be one who leaves the creative and technical concerns to you and will be happy with your judgement, or they’ll end up upset because you can’t read minds and didn’t deliver quite what expected.  When a client gives little direction, ask pointed questions in the beginning to get as much input as possible, and make sure they’re aware that  changes caused because you weren’t given enough information won’t be included in your original price quote.

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