Too many service-based professionals believe they need the client’s approval to become a client when actually it’s the other way around. The client needs your approval to become your client.
Did you know that you can limit the number of revisions, reviews, and opportunities for feedback for clients … as many or as few as you want? It’s true.
Just because a client wants something, doesn’t mean that you’re obligated to give it to them. And I say this with love: please, in fact, do NOT always give the client what they want, simply because they want it.
Today, we’re talking about limiting the amount of times you revise a client deliverable. You can limit it all you want, but only IF you have three key sentences in your contract. And that’s what I’m here to talk to you about today. Because there was a time when I thought that the client was always right. And then I learned they weren’t.
Seriously, though. Clients are amazing. You might be my client, and if you are and you’re reading this, I want you to know I’m not talking about YOU – I’m talking about clients from ages ago, decades ago. You know, the ones I cut my teeth on before you.
We’ve all been brought up on this idea that the client is always right. We’ve been told this by our elders, been told this by our bosses and supervisors over the years. Maybe even from clients and customers. But let me disabuse you of this idea.
Because the client, the customer – they aren’t always right. That quote you hear? It’s incomplete.
The actual quote is: “The client is always right… in matters of TASTE.”
In other words, if a client doesn’t like something I’ve created for them, that’s totally cool. It’s not to their taste. It has no reflection on me or my value as a human or a service-provider, just like it wouldn’t have any reflection on you or your value as a human or a service-provider.
If a client doesn’t like something, it simply means it’s not to their taste. But it does not mean we have to redo it, give money back, or change it.
Especially, and I mean especially, if your contract outlines three things:
- how many revisions/opportunities for feedback that a client gets
- how much it costs them per hour to get more than that number of revisions/feedback
- what to do if you can’t come to an agreement about the actual deliverable and they don’t want to pay extra for more revisions
Now, if your contract does not outline these three things, then maybe – just maybe – you might feel morally obligated to provide more revisions, and if that’s the case, then my hope would be that you have clients who feel ethically obligated to offer to pay you extra for the additional work you’re doing above and beyond what you expected to do for them. I hope you have those kinds of clients, but chances are if you do not have a contract that outlines these three things – or, you don’t have a contract at all – chances are that you’re attracting clients who take advantage of your well-meaning, kind, beautiful self. And you’ll feel pressured to give when they ask.
However, just because YOU expected to only do a certain amount of work on the project, doesn’t mean that THEY expected you to only do that certain amount of work. And here’s where mismatched expectations around the services they will receive gets hairy.
If you think, “oh, it’ll only take two rounds of revisions to get this where it ought to be, because it usually only takes two rounds” and they think, “oh, I can’t wait to get this PERFECT and EXACTLY AS I SEE IT IN MY HEAD!”
Then, when you send the first draft, and then the second, and then the third, and now you’re getting frustrated and annoyed and bordering on angry … and they’re still thinking, “oh, this is not quite there yet, let me send some more helpful feedback,” then you’re going to find yourself in quite a predicament because you’ve got two different sets of expectations – and I guarantee you that’s a recipe for disaster.
This is where disputes come up the most with clients – you believe one thing, they believe another, and you DID NOT have the conversation about it before signing the contract or agreeing to do the work. Pretending that everyone is on the same page, without talking about tiny details like how many revisions they get until it’s a PROBLEM, is a recipe for disaster.
When you have clarity around your process and the details around your client experience, then you don’t need to keep hoping and pretending they won’t ask for more than you’re willing to give.
The problem with this scenario is that people usually wait until there’s a PROBLEM before they clarify the LIMITATIONS.
A lot of service-providers, creatives like you – they’re worried that if they limit the client before the work even starts, that the client will push back or be annoyed or angry. They’re afraid of losing a potential client and afraid of not giving ENOUGH to the client to make it feel “worth it” to hire them.
But the problem with this is that they feel these feelings BECAUSE they don’t believe in themselves – they don’t value themselves, they feel unworthy of charging a proper fee, they feel undervalued probably because they’re charging too little for their services, but that’s a different episode altogether – in fact, go back and listen to episodes 24 and 25 – those are a great start to services and pricing).
🔗 Episode 24 about Determining your Client Services
🔗 Episode 25 about Determining your Pricing for Client Services
They believe that they have to PROVE themselves to a potential client before the client will pay them what they deserve, and they believe that they need the client’s APPROVAL to become a client (when, actually, it’s the other way around – they need YOUR approval to become your client).
And, let’s be honest, they’re probably avoiding confrontation, too. But by avoiding confrontation, you actually are more likely to CREATE confrontation.
By avoiding confrontation, you create confrontation.
Any potential client that’s a right fit for you, will respect your process. They’ll see that there’s a limit on revisions in your agreement, your contract, or you will have that discussion together in the intake / consult.
Instead of waiting until there’s an unreasonable amount of revisions, and you’re coming at it from a place of frustration and anger, I want you to tell them up front what the limit is on revisions. I can almost guarantee you that they won’t think twice about it and a big reason for that is because they do not know any better. They’re trusting YOU to be the expert and to guide them in the process.
So, instead of waiting or taking a “please don’t ask for one more revision or I’ll go coocoo,” just include this in the contract:
1. how many revisions/opportunities for feedback that a client gets
2. how much it costs them per hour to get more than that number of revisions/feedback
3. what to do if you can’t come to an agreement about the actual deliverable and they don’t want to pay extra for more revisions
In order to not be stressed out about the number of revisions or opportunities for feedback that a client will have, just tell them what the limit is.
So, “What Would Sheila Say?” to include in the contract or intake/consult?
🎧 LISTEN HERE FOR MY ADVICE! 🎧
To have clarity around the number of revisions your clients get, you actually have to understand your process well enough – and have it all mapped out properly.
If you don’t know how long it usually takes you or how many revisions it normally takes, then you’ve got an opportunity now to start outlining that and documenting it for the next client. And once you know, you share it ahead of time with the client. That way they know what to expect, and so do you. And then, they won’t be surprised when you tell them it’ll cost more to do more revisions that planned out or included – because you told them ahead of time and they signed the contract that outlines that charge.
At the end of the day, we’re all looking for clients who respect our boundaries and our process. I come up on this issue all the time when working with creative clients on their contracts.
I had a student once who interned at an agency and was eventually hired on. He did graphic design work for agency clients and he told me how the agency never put restrictions or limits on clients of how many revisions they could have for each phase of the project.
That meant that the projects would drag on and on because (as you know) rarely do clients know what they want. So every time they’d send out a draft, the client would come back and say, “oh, this is getting there, can we also – dot dot dot ….” There would always be something to change or add or tweak. And it was frustrating. Maddening. They couldn’t make any real headway on projects because there would always be one more thing and it would make it very difficult to put limits on clients or push forward because that was the standard at that agency – the client was always right, and the client could have whatever they wanted. Not only were they wasting precious energy, they were wasting time and money. Not the client’s money – THE COMPANY’S MONEY. Profit matters – without it, you can’t pay your people, you can’t pay your taxes, you can’t pay your bills. If something like unlimited revisions is eating up all your profit, then it makes it very difficult to feel good about the client relationship.
And, let’s be honest: it can be difficult to get clients to explain exactly what they want, because if they could draw the thing or write the thing or build the thing exactly as they wanted, they wouldn’t hire us in the first place.
It makes sense that they’d want to tweak it or change it because they envisioned something else. But the whole point of hiring people like us, creatives like you, is that we’re the experts. We are the talent. And we need to be trusted.
So, when that student came back to me a few years later to create his freelancing contract package together, he was so fed up about the situation with the revisions that when we got to that part of the process, deciding on those limitations and those guardrails for clients, he was adamant about not allowing ANY revisions. I mean, he literally said to me, “NO! NO REVISIONS ALLOWED!” And look, I mean. I’m a reasonable person, so no revisions AT ALL feels like the other side of the pendulum. He swung from one extreme – unlimited revisions – to the other extreme – wanting no revisions. We talked through it and eventually, we agreed that two revisions would be enough, and anything above that would require an hourly fee, with a one-hour minimum.
And here’s the thing, and I’ll let you in on a little secret – I am a big believer in a “”a rule for one is a rule for all.” So, if you give one client unlimited revisions, but try to put restrictions on another, that’s really not fair to the client, and it’s not fair to you, either. Because you’re the one who has to track it and remember which client has which number of revisions and at which stages of the project, and which milestones. And I can think of a million better ways to use your big beautiful brain – and it’s not on tracking something like that. Keep it simple.
You see, in order for him to apply that rule for all clients, he had to be clear about his processes. Once we understood how long things would actually take and where he needed client feedback, then he was able to confidently say “only two revisions” – and when it was all outlined in his proposal and contract package, he didn’t have a problem courageously pointing to that line in the contract that said, “two revisions and anything over two is charged by the hour with a one-hour minimum.”
At the end of the day, the right people will respect your process and they won’t have a problem paying you for your talents. But you can’t undervalue yourself. You can’t believe you’re unworthy of charging properly. You don’t have anything to prove – make the decision, set the expectation, enforce the boundary. Because the hardest part isn’t deciding where the guardrails are with a client – it’s enforcing them. It’s telling a client that the contract says X.
At the end of the day, this is also about protecting your peace, your reputation. It’s about setting clear boundaries around your time and energy and talent. When you clearly outline what to expect, they won’t push back. And if they do push back, you can point to the contract and say, “LOOK.”
Instead of waiting until there’s an unreasonable amount of revisions, and you’re coming at it from a place of frustration and anger, tell them the limit.
In an industry full of people who do creative work for ridiculously low amounts of money, it can be hard to say no to a client when you’re trying to land them or keep them. But as I’ve said before, you want clients who respect your time, your energy, and your talent. That’s how you’ll get projects you love, and also, it’s how you’ll get the pay you actually deserve.
Society – well, capitalism really – wants you to give access to your talent and time and energy – and to do that without restrictions. And that’s wrong.
- Capitalism wants you to avoid confrontation with your clients. It tells you that clients are always right, but that’s not true either. They’re only right in matters of taste. And if your specific way of doing things isn’t right for them, that’s okay. They can find someone else who is.
- Capitalism wants you to put pressure on yourself, to keep going and just give the client what they want so you can go on to the next thing, and that’s no way to spend your beautiful talent. That’s wrong.
You don’t have to play that game. If you’re my client, I won’t let you play that game. I care about you. I care about your talents. I care about helping you do great work for great clients.
If you just make those three tweaks I mentioned, I’m pretty sure things will change for you – not just in the way your clients treat you, but in how you feel about your clients and your relationships together.
Next Steps
- 30-45 Minutes: Free Interactive Guide: “12 Simple Tweaks to a Clearer Client Contract”
- 10 Minutes: Free Scripts for your Out of Office / Auto-Responder when you need more time
- 1 Minute: Get on the Waitlist for the 8-Week Contracts Course!
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Hi! I’m Sheila, your guide to a Joyful and Thriving™ creative life! I have lots of titles: attorney, social worker, coach, consultant, keynote speaker, educator. And while I’m proud of those titles, I am a human first and a title second – just like you. I want to help you reset expectations, set boundaries, and make aligned decisions, so you can streamline and focus your energy on the people, projects, and pay that actually matter to you.
Instagram: @sheilamwilkinson | LinkedIn
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