I’ve worked successfully, remotely with clients thousands of miles away from my geographical location without so much as a phone conversation. Meeting up is expensive and so are telephone conversations. There are technologies like Skype, Yahoo Messenger, GoogleTalk that allow me to work seamlessly with them.
But local clients ALWAYS want to meet.
If I had half a chance I would love to meet with all my clients and extend the work-relationship further into a friendship. But when that means meeting for four hours discussing your sister’s education and bitching about your own clients without discussing anything about the work I’m supposed to be doing for you, I really am tempted to charge by the hour.
Why in God’s name do I need to meet to get a brief from a client? I have a document that can be filled in and I ALWAYS follow it up with a phone conversation to understand the client/company/product better. Besides, the non-meeting projects have ALWAYS worked out wonderful with glowing client testimonials so I really have no reason to convert everything to a face-to-face meeting. I’d waste enormous amounts of time socializing and would never get anything done.
Filed under: from HELL
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