Stop Villainizing Your Client: Charge Them More

A few years ago I had a client who drove me up the wall. Endless revisions, constant tweaks, the kind of name that made my stomach drop every time it hit my inbox. I was convinced she was the problem and I was this close to firing her. Then a mentor asked me one question that flipped the whole thing on its head, and I walked away making more money and actually enjoying the work again.

In this episode I'm breaking down the exact reframe that changed how I look at difficult clients, the question you should ask yourself before you draft that breakup email, and how to handle it if the client pushes back on the ask. I'm also drawing a hard line between the client who's merely annoying and the one who's genuinely toxic, because one of those you can fix with a number and the other you can't.

Work with me 1:1 at suzieconsoli.com.

Transcript

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A few years ago, I was venting to a mentor of mine. I had this client who kept coming back with revisions, round after round after round. Change this, move that. Can we try it in a different color? What if it's a little bit lighter shade of green? No, I think it needs to be a little more sage. Every single time her name popped up in my unbox, I felt my whole body tense up. I was so annoyed. And I remember saying to him, if she keeps asking me for revisions, I think I'm going to lose my mind. And then I told him, because I'm a nice, responsible business owner, I think I need to update my process. I need tighter boundaries. I need to fix something on my end. So this stuff's happening. And he asked me a question that completely rewired how I think about difficult clients. He said, How much would you have to charge her in order to not be annoyed anymore? And I just kind of stopped and, you know, stared at him on Zoom and said, uh, what do you mean? And he said, How much would you have to make off her in order to stop being annoyed and actually start enjoying her as a client again? Here's the thing: it had genuinely never occurred to me that the number was the problem. I thought she was the problem. I thought her revisions were the problem. I was convinced that I had some kind of process failure on my hands. And he was pointing out something completely different. He was basically saying, maybe you don't have a client problem. Maybe you have a pricing problem. And so I actually sat with it and I did the math in my head. And I went, okay, if she paid me $200 every time she sent me an edit, I would feel amazing. I actually would be so thrilled to see her name come through because it would mean dollar signs instead of just a time suck. And he said, Great. So charge her 200 bucks an hour and tell her, hey, the edits you're asking for are going to take me about two and a half hours. Would you feel better if you made $500 off of this? And I said, Yeah, for sure I would. But then I'm gonna have to have this whole debate with her. She's going to push back and she's gonna want to negotiate and it's gonna be this whole thing. He said, just trust me. And he said the part that actually got me to do it. He said, You're already ready to walk away from this client. So what's the harm? And I was like, All right, you're right. He's like, at the end of the day, you're either going to be done with a client you don't like, or you're gonna have $500. And it sounds like either way, it's a win. The worst case scenario was the one I was already in. I was already so close to firing her in my head. So there was no real downside in asking for more money. So I drafted the email and I said, Hey, these edits are out of scope. So I'm going to need to charge you for this. It's going to be an extra $500. And she said, Great, no problem. Paid the invoice immediately. Didn't blink, didn't negotiate, didn't make it weird, didn't pick up the phone. And all of a sudden, I loved this client again. I was completely back in the game with her. I didn't want to lose her because I had just opened up a whole new revenue stream. Now I want you to sit with what really happened there for a minute because nothing about her changed. She didn't suddenly stop asking for revisions. She didn't get easier to work with. The exact same behavior that had me ready to walk away the week before now was the behavior that I was happy to work around. The only thing that changed was I was getting paid for what my work was actually worth. And this is the trap so many of us fall into. We convince ourselves that the client is the problem. She's too demanding. She's too picky. She never knows what she wants. We build this whole villain in our head. And why? Because the narrative that we've told ourselves is that she's not going to pay us more, that if we ask, she's going to be offended or she's going to leave or she's going to leave us a bad review or call her friends and say, oh my gosh, can you believe this? So instead of asking, we just quietly resent our clients. We do the extra work for free and we get really bitter about it. We let the annoyances build up until we're ready to fire a client who, in a lot of cases, would have happily paid us if we had just opened our mouth and asked. Here's what I want you to take away from this. The next time you catch yourself getting annoyed with a client, before you go and rewrite your whole process and start drafting a new SOP, before you start drafting the breakup email in your head, I want you to ask yourself my mentors' question. How much would I have to make off this person to stop being annoyed and actually enjoy working with them again? Write down a real number, not a fantasy number, an actual number that would make the work feel worth it to you. And then look at the gap between that number and what you're charging them right now. Because nine times out of 10, the gap is the real problem, not the client, not the revisions. The fact that you're doing premium work for a price that doesn't match the effort, and then blaming the client for the math not working. And if the fear of asking is what's stopping you, remember the other half of what my mentor said. If you're already ready to walk away, there's no harm in asking. The downside is that you're so scared of the situation you're already living in. So you might as well ask. You might be shocked at how fast somebody says yes and writes the check. Most clients are not trying to squeeze you. They're not sitting there hoping that you'll undercharge yourself into resentment. They just want the work done. And most of them are perfectly willing to pay for it. We're the ones who decide before we ever ask that the answer is going to be no. Now, I'm not going to pretend that every single client is going to say, great, no problem, and pay the invoice in 10 seconds like mine did. Sometimes you make the ask and the person gets a little prickly about it. So let's talk about what to do if that happens, because the way you handle that matters just as much as the ask itself. First thing, don't flinch. The temptation, the second you feel any pushback is to apologize, walk it right back. And I'm the first to say that I did this way too many times. Oh, you know what? Don't worry about it. I'll take care of it this time. The instant you do that, you've taught your client that your prices are a suggestion and that your boundaries are negotiable. So before you ever make the ask, you have to decide in your head that you're not going to cave and then just hold steady. A calm, kind, no problem at all. I totally understand. Here's why the cost is what it is, will get you a lot further than nervous retreat. Second, separate their feelings from your fee. A client can be a little annoyed and still be a perfectly good client who pays you. Those two things can absolutely live side by side. Somebody being momentarily surprised by a number is not the same as the relationship being broken. This, I wish that I had heard that years ago. I felt like somebody being annoyed with me meant that my whole business was going to crumble. So when they get quiet or say, oh, I wasn't expecting that, your job is not to fix their feelings by lowering the price. Your job is to stay warm, clear, and let them land where they land. Third is to anchor the conversation around the work, not to you. Do not make it personal and do not make it apologetic. You're not asking for a favor. You didn't do anything wrong. The framing is simple. This request falls outside of what we had originally scoped. And here's what it will take to do it well, and here's what that will cost. When you tie the number to the value and to the time instead of to your feelings about the number, it stops being an emotional negotiation and starts being a business conversation. Most people can hear that. Every now and again, somebody is going to be genuinely upset that you have to be paid fairly for your work. And I need you to hear me on this. That is incredibly useful information. A client who reacts to a fair, reasonable ask, like you have insulted them, is showing you exactly who they're going to be for the rest of the relationship. That's not a client that you lost. That is a client you found out about early. And I want to be really clear about who we're talking about because I don't want to get this twisted. The client in my story was not some sweet, easy, reasonable person I felt bad charging. She was annoying me. I was ready to bail on her. That's the whole point. This reframe is for the client who's grading on your last nerves, has you halfway writing the breakup email because this is the exact situation where we mistake annoyance for a deal breaker when it's really a pricing problem in disguise. But I also need you to hear the flip side because the two are not the same thing. There's a difference between an annoying client and a toxic one. An annoying client asks for a lot of revisions, takes up more of your time than you had planned, and gets on your last nerve. That client can often be fixed with the right number. A toxic client is something different entirely. That's one who disrespects you, blows past every boundary, no matter what you charge, makes you dread your own work, and treats you badly as a human being. No invoice fixes that. If you've genuinely got a toxic client, charging them more is not the answer. Walking away is. So before you run the number, just be honest with yourself about which one you actually have. Because the goal here is not to talk yourself into keeping people who are bad for you. It's to stop you from firing merely annoying ones that a fair price would have made you love again. So stop firing clients that you could have just charged correctly. Stop doing what they ask for free. Run the number, make the ask, and get back into the game. If you want help figuring out what your work is actually worth and how to charge for it without the fear spiral, come find me at susiecoli.com. I would love to chat with you. Thanks for listening. Until next time, sell well.