After nine years of freelancing, it still amazes me when a client does something totally unexpected. Here’s the situation. I have been working on a book project with a client for over a year now. This project was supposed to be completed within three months.Now, I admit that a couple of delays were my fault. The project was a bit harder than I initially thought, so it took me about three months to just understand the subject in order to write about it. However, once I had a better understanding of what I was doing, it was smooth sailing.

I then created a great rough draft. I thought so and so did the client. He read it over and told me that it looked great on first glance but that it would need tweaking. Well, that was nine freaking months ago.

To make a long story short, this client jerked me around for over a year now. And I had little choice but to keep working because my final payment was held “hostage.”

Well, today I just got sick and tired of this client. I gave him an ultimatum. I told him that the stress of this project was just not worth it to me. I told him that I was slowly losing interest in his project and that we needed to get this done or he needed to find someone else to assist him.

Well, he chose the latter, so now I’ve lost my $1500 final payment. But I’ve gained something else…a new outlook and peace of mind.

Good riddance, dude. The money I lost will be made up with my IM efforts as I now have more time to get my own books and reports written so that I can receive residual income for my efforts.

This experience has taught me that as hard as you try, you can’t please all your clients all the time. You will have some good days and some bad ones. Sometimes clients can jerk you around but you have the power to simply say, “the heck with it, it isn’t worth my time and effort.”

In the future, I will be clearer with my terms. I will set limits as to how many “free revisions” are covered and will request that clients submit revision requests within seven days or the project is considered complete. I’ve also learned that by refocusing my time and energy into my own efforts, I will reap a hundredfold.

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