For those that follow me on Twitter you know that Thursday nights I’m usually tweeting up a storm during Scandal. This week’s episode “Say Hello to My Little Friends” started out with Olivia Pope and Associates needing money since her client base had dried up after her scandal being outed on being with the president. With that they began to take on a client that they didn’t seem to happy to take on and justified taking it solely because they needed the money.
I’ve been there before, at slow time in my business where bills needed to be paid and there were no clients to pay me or funds had come in late. There comes a time where things get down to the wire where you worry about paying staff and keeping the lights on etc. etc. and then someone comes along that wants your services but you aren’t really willing to take it on because either its not what you like to do or its not an industry or area that you would like to work in, or you don’t see how this type of client can take your business to another level. But, they have something you need… and that of course is money. What do you do? Do you take on the project and try to get over it as quickly as possible so you can pay those bills and move forward or do you refuse the project and move on to another that may not come along for another few weeks or months?
Decisions, decisions…
When I think about this, I sometimes think, you gotta do what you gotta do, do the work and move on. But for some reason when I took on clients that I normally wouldn’t during these times, they were the worst clients for me to have, they always seemed to cause me more stress than the projects and clients that I wanted to work on. Maybe its because I didn’t want to work on those projects but I just sucked it up and got the bills paid so I could keep on moving.
Usually after a lot of those projects were over it seemed like more of the same type of work came along. I would get tons of the type of work that I didn’t want to do, and for a while I would take it on, then I realized there comes a time where you have to draw a line where you won’t do things that don’t have anything to do with where you are trying to go with your company. You have to enjoy what you are doing in order for it to be great and make sure it aligns with your brand.
What about you? What do you do when you have tons of the types of clients you don’t want, that want your services but the types of clients you do want seem to be coming to you in a slow drip? Do you take projects that don’t align with your company in order to pay the bills or do you refer them to someone else? How do you deal with those projects/clients?
