Success in Sweatpants

At the beginning of this 2007, at the eleventh hour, I fired my flagship client.

It was not a happy time in the halls of 4R Marketing.

First of all, it is never pleasant to fire a client. Second, it was a sloppy firing with a lot of loose ends left behind. Third, it blew my income forecast all to hell. But in spite of all that, I knew it had to be done.

The problems in this client-vendor relationship are likely familiar to many service business owners:

• In the beginning, the client implied that my services were over-priced, and that she was begrudgingly agreeing to pay them (I know for a fact that my fees were half of less experienced marketing consultants in her local area).
• In spite of six months of work together, lots of outstanding results, and several "ironing out the relationship" sessions, I was still being called upon to prove myself to her, practically on a daily basis.
• The client created extra work by interfering with the smallest items; she was unable to just let me to do the job—in this case, management of her very small consulting firm’s very ambitious marketing program.
• She routinely came up with new marketing initiatives and added them to my already high stack of programs, and expected me to simply accomodate them in the same amount of time and at the same price. Said another way, she lacked insight into reality as it relates to managing projects in general and marketing projects in particular.
• Her logic tended to jump from A to Z in one step, and she would periodically complain about how no results were being produced. One day she would say that I needed to take the ball and run with it, and next she was taking action on items that I was already working on, and without letting me know that she was doing so.

In a word, it was a thankless engagement. And very frustrating. I did my best to go with the flow and find a balance between making too many waves and letting her run amok all over the marketing program (and budget). It is her company, after all, and she has every right to do whatever she wants, but at the same time I have a level of expertise and insight into marketing that requires me to step forward if things are really going astray.

And in spite of all the struggle and inefficiencies, results did get produced—results good enough for her to propose a more strategic relationship with a monthly retainer starting with the new year. I took this to mean that I had proven to her that I really am as good at marketing management as I say I am, that we could now move past all the money squabbling and interference on her part, and finally get on with getting some really effective work done.

Then over the holidays she went weird. Yet again. Refused to issue a purchase order so that I could keep working while the retainer arrangement got hammered out. What was up with that? Continued to interfere with small things, and continued to add more items to my plate—while at the same time telling me that my proposed retainer amount was too high (though it was a no-brainer equation of the time commitment she had requested times my rate, so it should have come as no surprise).

This client was not, nor would she ever be, a partner. And I have found that partnerships are the only relationships that work for me and my clients.

I finally realized that things weren’t going to change AND that this was an untenable situation. I took a deep breath and cut the relationship.

What should the client be held accountable for by a service provider? What behavioral line should a provider draw in terms of client interaction? What behavior is not to be tolerated under any circumstances?

I searched "client vendor relationship" on the Web and didn’t find much in the way of vendor-perspective information, other than marketing material from IT companies bragging about how great they are with their clients. Seems to me that there needs to be thought put on "vendors’ rights" and what clients need to keep in mind when dealing with their third parties.