Business Terms: Are They Ever Personal?

Just recently I got an email from a client that I hadn't heard from in a while. I'd done some bulk work with them a while back, where I'd provided ten or twelve articles a month for two or three months. The work trickled out and the client and I parted ways, but just recently he got back in touch with a one-time article writing project. Following my normal business procedure, I sent over a contract defining the length of the pieces, price, and payment schedule. That's when the trouble started.

The client wrote back saying he was offended to be asked for a 50% deposit upfront, because he believed we were past the "initial stage" of doing business together. He also "refused" to define a length for the articles, saying he wanted them to be whatever length was needed to give a thorough accounting of the topic. He felt I was treating him like a first-time client and wasn't giving him the freedom he needed to get the articles just right.

This gave me pause, even though I've worked with this client before with nary a problem. For me, business terms are never personal; they're just the conditions under which I do business.

However, I do work without a deposit sometimes--only for clients I have a history with who are ordering regular amounts of work each month. A few of my clients use me as a "go-to" writer and will ask me for random work--sometimes small, sometimes quite large--consistently throughout the month. Sometimes I'll do 20 or more small projects for a single client in a month. In these cases, it's onerous to the client to have to contract and pay 50% up front for each project, and they sometimes can't predict what they need at the beginning of the month so I can't charge them up front for everything at once. When this happens, I draw up a general contract and bill at the end of the month. This client was operating on a contract like this, because for a while he was a regular. But once he returned for a single one-off project, I billed him under my typical single-project business terms--50% up front.

I would have considered waiving that requirement for him if it had been the only issue. However, the fact that he didn't want the length of the articles defined really bothered me. The thing was, I was perfectly willing to write with no consideration to length--and told him so. But if there's no limit on length, there can't be a limit on price either--and he wasn't satisfied with that arrangement. Ultimately, it seemed he wanted to contract for a longer work and pay the price for a shorter one.

Unfortunately, this client and I couldn't see eye-to-eye and parted ways. This can happen, even for regulars you think you know well. Very rarely, I've had a prospective client tell me he feels a deposit isn't a "friendly" way of doing business or it indicates mistrust, but I'm not in this business to make friends. I'm here to make money, and I tend to resist people trying to control me by telling me I'm not being nice. Nice girls don't make waves or stand up for themselves. Professional women do.