When Should I Fire a Client?

Beatriz Solano: This is Office Hours, I'm Beatriz Solano, and today we're talking about the client you should not keep. Viktor Hale runs a product design studio of fourteen people in Prague, and Lucía Ferrer founded a packaging studio in Valencia. Both have ended client relationships, and both say they waited too long.

Viktor Hale: About eighteen months too long, in my case.

Beatriz Solano: Viktor, what is the first sign?

Viktor Hale: How they treat the most junior person in the room. If a client talks over your intern or forwards their work to the founder with a complaint, that client will eventually do it to you. Everything else, late payment, scope drift, is survivable. Contempt is not.

Lucía Ferrer: For me it is invoices. We had a wine cooperative that paid at ninety days, then a hundred and twenty, then asked for a discount on the overdue amount. That was thirty percent of our revenue, which is exactly why I did not act.

Beatriz Solano: That dependency is the trap, isn't it?

Lucía Ferrer: Completely. My rule now is that no client goes above twenty percent of a year's fees. If one does, I start winning other work before I need to, not after.

Beatriz Solano: What does the conversation sound like?

Viktor Hale: It happens in writing first, then on a call. The email is short: we are not the right studio for the next phase, here is what we will finish, here is the date, here is who we recommend. You give them a finish line. Nobody likes being dropped mid-project, and the files you leave behind matter.

Lucía Ferrer: I also hand over everything. Working files, font licences, the printer specifications, the colour references we agreed with the factory. A client who has been let go and then cannot reprint a label will tell everyone in the region.

Beatriz Solano: Do you give a reason?

Viktor Hale: A true one, but a small one. I said we could not staff it properly. That was correct. I did not say their marketing head shouted at my designers in a review, although that was also correct.

Beatriz Solano: What happened afterwards?

Lucía Ferrer: We lost the thirty percent and replaced it in seven months, with two olive oil producers and a small brewery. The team was calmer within a week. People stopped dreading Tuesdays, which was the cooperative's call day.

Viktor Hale: Two of my designers told me afterwards they had been looking for jobs. Neither had said so.

Beatriz Solano: What do you wish you had done sooner?

Viktor Hale: Put the twenty percent rule in place before I needed it.

Lucía Ferrer: Write the reasons down as they happen. When you finally decide, you want a list, not a mood.

Beatriz Solano: Viktor Hale and Lucía Ferrer, thank you both. This has been Office Hours.