When is a good client a terrible client?

Clue: it’s not just whether they pay their invoices on time.

Welcome to this, the first post from The Business Of Analytics newsletter. I’m aiming to use this newsletter as a way of forming my thinking into longer (and therefore, hopefully more useful) formats than are customary on places like LinkedIn.

The best way I’ve ever found to develop ideas is half in a vacuum, and half in a group. By its very nature, a newsletter is sort of stuck in “vacuum mode”: here I am in a box, tapping things onto a keyboard, and delivering them to you in a method so unavoidably and so wholly one-way, that it almost borders on tragedy.

Almost.

I suppose that’s a long and flowery way of saying that I welcome feedback, so please hit reply and let me know what’s on your mind and how I can make the newsletter better. What you’re reading is 100% grass-fed, organic, human-at-a-keyboard honesty, and I’d love that fact to be something that sparked people into discussion in a way that AI-generated content never would.

Anyway, this issue: why do we struggle to tell the difference between a good client and a bad client? To work!

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How a bad client makes you feel on the inside. Photo by Bobby McLeod on Unsplash.

Let’s start with a little scenario.

Imagine you have a client that you’ve done work for in the past, maybe two or three distinct projects over the years, but you don’t currently have them on a retainer, and nor has one ever been required.

You get along well with your main contact, they consider you a knowledgeable expert in your field, and they trust your opinion on things. Perhaps you did a GA4 implementation for them as the initial big project, or you helped them migrate to server-side tracking… the sort of chunky project that fit your skillset, remunerated well, and perhaps even taught you a thing or two about their technical environment that you were able to apply on a completely different client or two later on.

On the surface, that might sound like a good client: they like you, they trust you, they paid you. And if they ever need anything else that’s within your capabilities, you know they won’t reach out to anyone else but you.

If I think back to clients I had when I had my agency that fit this definition, they were probably some of the ones that I most enjoyed working with. These are the clients that put a plate of biscuits on the table when you come to see them for a meeting, and in a world where there’s simply never enough biscuits I will concede that yes, that’s a special and rare thing…

So why would a client like this actually be a terrible client?

A consultant or agency owner will often say something like “we have these clients, they come to us whenever they have a technical problem. They come to us because we’re experts. They will never go anywhere else when they have a technical problem. We know their implementation inside-out. These are great clients.”

Expressed differently: “these clients only come to us when there’s a problem they need to solve, after they’ve tried solving it themselves.”

Ouch.

These clients may have spent $20,000 with you over the years, but lately they’ll just come to you with bitty things. They drop you an email, ask how you’re going, and whether you can “jump on a quick call” (there is no such thing, all calls are at least 60 minutes when you factor in calendar-juggling, aligning your thoughts beforehand, having a think afterward…)

They describe their problem, ask you to come up with a quote for how you’d fix it. The quote will probably take you another hour (yes, Claude or Panda will zap out a proposal nice and quickly, but your thinking time still adds up, and chances are that’s something you never actually charge for).

Then there’ll be some back-and-forth around the proposal, a green light, an “okay let’s get some time in a room with the devs”, and quite possibly a wait around while you get access to staging environments, backend databases, or whatever it is you need to get the job done. That’s another ninety minutes of faffing about before you’re starting your promised deliverables.

For those not keeping score: we’re up to at least three and a half hours lost so far, also known as half a day, before you start doing billable, chargeable, productive work.

(And that’s parking for a moment what you could do with half a day otherwise. Oh, the outreach, the partnership discussions, the strategic planning for where you want your business to be in two years! Forever lost, all because of a “great client”…)

You can see where I’m going with this, right?

If we assume that you budgeted 10 hours for the whole piece of work, you’ve just hobbled yourself with a 35% overage that you’re not getting paid for. You don’t get taxi drivers graciously turning off the meter when you’re 65% of the way through the journey, nor do bricklayers offer to build you another third of a wall for free after you’ve paid them to build one wall. But in our industry, we let it happen and treat it as part of business.

Or, let’s put it another way: you just gave that client a 35% discount on your rate. Without even blinking!

This is why I think those types of clients can be terrible. They may be the warmest and most supportive people around, but if they only come to you with niche technical problems, chances are you’re going to be losing more money than you realise by taking on the bitty, sporadic, piecemeal work that they give you.

And the problem really compounds, of course, because these clients don’t pull this trick on you once and once only: it’ll be multiple times per year, each time with a hidden cost.

So how do we fix this? Well, I’m glad you asked

I’ve got three practical suggestions, and one “nebulous, weird, thinky, non-practical” one.

Here goes with the practical ones:

1. Move these clients to a retainer

Is it true that the three most important things in scaling a business like this are retainers, retainers, and retainers? Probably, and with good reason.

You might be able to handle a bit of lossiness around hours as a single-person or micro-team (up to three staff or so), but there’s a reason why larger agencies won’t tolerate such tomfoolery.

Moving a repeat-small-project client to a retainer is really just a way of formalising their current way of utilising your skills and services, while giving them better service as well (assuming you provide strategic support and guidance as part of that retainer, that they won’t get if they keep engaging you only for projects.) Under a retainer, every single thing you do for that client becomes billable: no more 35% vanishing.

However, some clients will be allergic to the word “retainer”, in which case:

2. Move these clients to a “Bucket Of Hours” (BOH)

The BOH is your secret weapon.

Instead of a client needing to come to you, have a chat, get a quote, approve the quote, raise a PO, confirm timelines, and perform a ritual sacrifice of a small animal at midnight under a full moon before you can start work, they can buy a discrete allocation of support hours today, that they can use against any support request from now until they expire. You set the expiry: perhaps they expire at the end of the quarter, or the end of the financial year, or perhaps they never expire (which isn’t really advisable as it’ll mess up your forecasting.)

The benefit for you: under a BOH, from the moment the client first emails you with details of a problem, that comes from the bucket of hours. All pre-meetings, all invoicing, all WIP updates, the whole kit and caboodle all comes from the bucket. It also sets a precedent for moving to a 12-month retainer, or at the very least for further buckets of hours.

The benefit for the client: much faster to go from “we have a problem” to “yay that problem is fixed.” Far less faffing about with internal politics to get things done.

Bonus: you may, at your discretion, choose to offer a reduced rate per hour for the BOH. Perhaps your rates are due to increase in the new year (which they should, by the way, but that’s another topic); so if the client buys hours today you’ll honour the current, pre-hike rate.

3. Don’t just be a fixer, be a strategic partner.

If the client only views you as someone that can fix problems when they come up, is it any wonder that quick fix work is the only thing they come to you with?

Clients are just like the rest of us, they behave largely out of habit and rarely take on any more complex thought than is absolutely necessary. So it’s not their fault that they view your services as “projecty” if you’ve never given them a reason to think otherwise.

So: go to see your client, and present a broad strategy that showcases the work that you could do for them. Instead of talking about dashboards, talk about complex customer analysis projects. Instead of talking about GA4 fixes, talk about data ingestion into CDP. Instead of talking about (please, for the love of all that is holy) reducing the size of a GTM container, talk about how you can help them build out a semantic layer to have a custom GPT act as their data expert for daily reporting and querying.

Bonus: clients love to be first to be second. So if you’ve done something amazing for one client (which, of course, you have), anonymise it and present it to all your other clients so they can start to imagine how great their setups would be if they engaged you to do the same for them.

And the weird, nebulous, hard-to-pin-down, tricky one..

This is going to sound blunt and possibly provocative, but here it is: what aspects of the characteristics in which you do business allow your clients to be like this?

Are you too nice? Too accommodating and keen to be seen as doing a good job? Too honest?

These are wonderful and positive qualities of course — and I don’t want to get into psychological areas of which I am extremely uneducated and in no position to comment on — but the qualities that make one a good person are rarely the same qualities as one requires to grow, sustain and develop a business.

A groovy and accommodating mindset might very well be one of the principal reasons that clients like working with you, but it might be encouraging them to only view your services as having a small impact-area. The skills required to start and nurture a business are not the same as those required to scale and develop it.

It’s not as simple as saying the reason you’ve had two flat years in a row is because you’re not a nasty enough person!

But there’s a truth in here somewhere, I think. It’s hard to coax out, but I suspect it has the potential to be at least as transformative as those other options listed above.

So there you have it

Have you had clients like this?

Do you still have them now?

Could they be spending more money with you for more services?

You can hit reply if you like, but what I’d advise above all else is that you take these questions for a walk, outside, for half an hour, without your phone, and see where your mind takes you.