If you want a satisfying and fulfilling freelance career it’s really important to have clients that you enjoy working with – because there’s no point in leaving a (horribly unfulfilling, tedious but secure) full-time job to still be miserable at work! A great client is a truly wonderful thing and they’re actually not as hard to find as you might think.
Difficult clients can undermine your business, knock your confidence, feed your insecurity, make you doubt yourself and even make you start to hate freelancing. So it’s really important you know how to identify and manage all the different types. Remember that you work with your clients, not for them, so it pays to steer the process proactively and manage the relationship before it gets out of hand.
This is a Virtual Assistant case study and interview with Sarah Liddle. Providing small businesses with tech and admin support, Sarah lives with her husband, a flock of sheep and a terrier called Henry on a smallholding on the Staffordshire / Derbyshire border and has been running her VA business The Lady in the Shed since April 2016.
After working for the same company for 13 years and then being overlooked for a well-deserved promotion, Jo Lewis decided she’d had enough. Working overtime with very little praise and appreciation, Jo had no time to spend with her friends or family, she was exhausted and her self esteem was really low. So she decided to change things.
After being made redundant, Laura Coyle didn’t want to go back to working for someone else and she wanted a working life that would reduce her stress levels and fit around her three young children. She didn’t want to waste her redundancy money so she decided to use it to set up her own Virtual Assistant business.
Emma Conway-Hyde wanted more from her life. She had become disillusioned with working in an office environment, was finding the commute hard, office politics harder and had become very unhappy. Emma couldn’t bear the thought of being in the same situation in 30 years’ time so she decided to set up her own Virtual Assistant business instead.
Although Jan Baber loved her job, she wanted to find out what her full potential was and if she could actually reach it. Jan knew that she was never going to make the sort of money she wanted by working for somebody else, and because she also wanted more quality time at home as well as more money, Jan decided to set up her own Virtual Assistant business.
I’m sure you’ve heard me say a billion times how important it is not to sleepwalk through life and fail to do anything with it. We only get one so it’s important to own it. But just in case you want to know what happens to those who do take action and practical steps towards creating the life they want, this post is for you.
Today I’m going to share a MASSIVE blunder that I made with one of my main clients just so you can see that it isn’t so much the mistake that’s the problem, it’s how you respond and deal with that mistake that matters to the client. And hold on to your hats and hide behind your fingers, because this was a pretty big and rather embarrassing error!
Back when I used to offer 1-2-1 training, I mentioned to a friend that a couple of trainees had confidence issues. I’d given them the practical steps they needed to become a VA, but I wasn’t sure how to move them forward when it came to building confidence. He reminded me that I wasn’t a therapist and asked if they’d completed a SWOT analysis.
