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How to break up with clients
The “dos and don’ts” of letting go for designers
Whether you’re a freelancer, an agency vet, or part of an in-house team, building trust with your clients and stakeholders is a key to developing successful business relationships. But there’s a lot to unpack in that process: Open and transparent communication, demonstration of expertise and knowledge, reliability, flexibility, good listening skills, consistent habits and delivery, and honesty all come to mind (and there are probably many more).
But even when you pay attention to all these things, and do your best to nurture your business relationships, they can still sour—this is especially true for your client relationships. When you find yourself at that breaking point, you have to know when to walk away (and how to do it).
When relationships work
After many years of freelancing in the design world and building trustworthy and respectful relationships with my best clients, most of my business prospects grew organically. That’s a huge benefit of putting in the work: People happily recommend you to their friends and colleagues when you consistently deliver on your promises.
And the more time passed, the personal value of my freelancing efforts definitely shifted from exploring opportunities and building my portfolio to working with new people and building relationships.
Through reflection, I learned that many of my early client relationship failures were my fault; the result of me not yet understanding how to navigate professional relationships, communicate with others about what I do properly, or identify the proper path to establishing trust. If you’re a designer out there navigating the world of freelancing gigs, this probably sounds like a familiar struggle.
I only got better at those things in the way most people do: Through continued effort, experience after experience.
Knowing how to honestly articulate the value and knowledge that you bring to the table—up-front—is one of the most critical steps in developing trust with any client.
But every client is different.
