On disappointment with clients who are prioritizing production over quality

A friend of mine emailed me, amongst a few others, asking for advice. He’s been working as a consultant for a little while now but has been unhappy about his recent clients. He says they haven’t been focused on the quality of things as much the general production speed and it disappoints him. My reply:

Without knowing the details of your current experiences I would encourage you to look within to improve the situation. I say this not to let the client off the hook but if you wait for other people to change to make YOUR life easier you are going to be waiting a long fucking time.

One of the huge problems is that most of the clients you will interact with have no experience producing software. It is your job to explain to them what a professional software development process looks like and if all the parties are in agreement, and contracts are signed, it is your job to execute that process.

When you were in the early talks with this client how did you teach them what your professional process was like? How did they react when you explained your core values?

If they agreed to your process and then changed the rules midway, shame on them, Walk away as soon as professionally possible, preferably under the comfort of a contract clause they are breaking.

If you never talked about this and just assumed they knew what was in your head about what the process was going to be like then shame on you.

Look inward. Figure out your core values, your development process. Make this part of the marketing of the consultant you. Make it clear to those interested in hiring you, this is how you work. This is how they will get the best value from your time, their money and in the long run, the code base they will own.

And to be clear, finding good clients is hard work. I think making your own expectations clear to them is half the battle, the other half is getting out there to market yourself to more and more people so that A) in the early days you have enough options to weed out the bad clients and then B) you get to a point that through word of mouth you get more and more clients looking for you because your process worked so well for their friends. If you aren’t turning away 4 projects for every 1 you work on, you probably aren’t marketing enough.

Have a question for me? Send me an email.