Who your true client actually is

Hey there -

There's a piece of business advice you're probably familiar with that’s mostly fine as a general concept: "give the client what they want." The problem is the word "client." We tend to picture the company - the logo on the invoice, the name in the contract, the brand we get to list in our portfolio etc. But somewhere inside that company is a specific person, a marketing director or a product lead or an operations manager, who owns the problem you were brought in to solve, who had to justify the spend to somebody above them, and who will be standing in a meeting three weeks from now answering for the choice they made when they picked you.

That person is your true client. Their experience of working with you - how smoothly the project ran, how easy you were to deal with, how much your judgment improved the outcome, and above all how good you made them look to their own boss - is what decides whether you get the next call or whether the next project quietly goes back out to the open market. And in 25 years of freelancing I can tell you that the second outcome is almost never about the work. Good work is expected. It’s the table stakes for even being a freelancer. Good work gets forgotten in a quarter. But being a pain to work with? That can be remembered for years.

Here's what "a pain to work with" looks like from their side, because most of it is invisible from ours. You send over payment terms that read like a collections letter (50% up front, balance due on delivery, late fees kick in at day 8) to a company that pays every vendor on net-45, and now your contact - your true client - is stuck in a fight with their own accounting department over a policy YOU wrote. Or you go quiet for two weeks mid-project and they have to tell their boss "I don't know" when asked how it's going. None of that shows up in the final deliverable, but every bit of it costs you the relationship.

So in my view, the goal is pretty simple - make working with you the easiest, lowest-risk decision that person makes all quarter. That's an operations problem as much as a craft problem. It means payment terms that fit how their company actually pays. It means a kickoff that maps out every approval they'll need to line up and when, so they're never ambushed by their own org chart. It means status updates that arrive before they have to ask, deadlines that hold, and a handoff clean enough that they can forward it to their boss without editing it first. And it means a check-in a month after delivery to see how the thing is performing, which almost nobody does and can be worth more than any amount of "marketing."

That's what "service business is relationship business" actually means in practice. The relationship is with a human being who has a career to protect, and every policy, procedure, and workflow you build either protects that career or puts it at risk. Build enough of those relationships and something interesting happens - it becomes absurd for them to go looking for somebody else. Why would they? They already have someone who knows their industry, delivers on time, doesn't start fires for them internally, and makes them look sharp in every meeting where your work comes up. The reality is that this is where most of my work has come from for a very long time - repeat business and referrals from people I made look good, some of whom took jobs at new companies and brought me with them.

So the question to carry into your week: pick your last three projects and think about the actual person who hired you on each one. Where did YOUR process make their month easier, and where did it make it harder? Every friction point you find is a policy you can rewrite before the next project starts.

More from the trail next week.

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- Brendan

P.S. The fastest way to make a client look bad is a project that melts down halfway through. I wrote up how to keep that from happening here: How to Protect Your Freelance Jobs From Melting Down