Pity me. I've had my share of annoying clients and dead end projects. But I've just come off a project that might chalk up as one of my worst. And it's not because I'm dealing with a person who I don't like or a project I'm not interested in. So let me hit rewind on this tape and go back to the start.
This project started two years ago, well at least it nearly did. I got a phone call from *Garry about an urgent project. He just got funded by some investors and yo, we need to talk. So we set a meet-up in a trendy little cafe pronto. And we met, for 2 long hours. As I furiously wrote notes and ask clever questions (according to me 😉 ) I thought the meeting was going very well. The second half of the meeting (or maybe it was like the last 10 mins) was about how we work and how we could help. He seemed very satisfied we were the right team to work with and he'd had recommendations from other clients to use us. We bro'd down, bumped fists (or maybe we shook hands?) with an understanding to move forward. Except, we didn't.
Two weeks goes by and I've heard nothing from the client. Finally we reconnect and we did the dance on the phone all over again. Same script, same questions and surely more understanding this time? I thought we were sweet to rock & roll. No dice. Phone falls silent again, for like two months.
Time does a funny thing to memory. Yep we had to do convo 1 and 2, all over again. But this time I thought I'd be a bit more insistent on a brief supplied by the client. It was hard to extract. So I wrote one, based on what I understood the project to be. And he still didn't get what we were selling and how the process might work. At this point I'm thinking it's me and I'm doing a shit job of explaining how we work / how we can help. I decided to pull in another person at our agency to take a look and they thought the brief was solid. At this point, I should note I was fatigued by the communication & general vagueness, but I wanted to get the project over the line ...hello my little friend sunk cost bias you have struck again. So I recorded a Loom video to accompany my excellent little brief in Notion . That should get it over the line I thought, and I proudly hit send on my email.
Crickets is what actually happened. And then somewhere around the 6 month mark, up popped the client like a little jack in the box, hello. I was taken back by this call, especially because it seemed he'd been studying my loom video and brief for the last 2 weeks with meticulous detail and now was peppering me with all kinds of questions and for the life of me, I could not recall the details because it had been 4 FREAKIN MONTHS SINCE WE LAST TALKED. However, like all good friendships, you should be able to just pick up right where you left off except WE WERE NOT FRIENDS. In a classic stall move I muttered something about phone reception while I pounded the keyboard clumsily looking for a login to our proposal system. Here it is. Time for another stall question: oh great and how's the product build coming along? while I speed read the entire scope which fortunately I had learnt to do the week before. Phew.
Somehow I made a recovery and a sensible pitch albeit a bit off balance and again commitments were made and yes it was urgent and yes investment was coming in and yes we MUST get started. It was at this point I should have seen the pattern. My client threw down his magic powder and with one mighty smoke bomb, he slipped back into his bat cave.
2 years slips by. I'm sitting at my desk and my phone silently alerts me to danger. It's the guy again. The many pitches, no dice guy. Two thoughts enter my brain with a decision tree hanging off each one. Don't answer, that's client danger. Answer, it will be highly entertaining for a blog post down the track. So I answer. Same routine. Holy shit, their actually might be something wrong with this person's mind. And because I answered the call, there might be something wrong with my mind. What he wanted to know was this: can we still hold the price from 2 years ago? Of course I said, way too casually. For I knew that he would not actually do the project. Except this time he did. Shit.
Climbing the highest peak might have been easier than locking down a meeting date with this guy and I lost track of the number of reschedules. I couldn't get him to sign the paper work or pay the kickoff deposit, no matter how many times I reminded him. It was at this point I knew I'd made a gross judgement error. This was going to be painful and time wasting.
If there's a lesson for me and maybe for you, it's this: The way a client behaves before they sign that scope is pretty good indication of what you might face during a project, except you'll need to amplify bad behaviours to the power of 4. So pay close attention to early client chats and don't pave over the cracks or ignore the red flags. Predictably, the project has been dogged by disagreements over the scope (even though it's super clear). The put down and pick up time wastage has been significant and of course a missing-in-action client who strays for weeks at a time without word is a bad sign. Wait, that's him calling now.
*Garry is not his real name. Sorry to all the Garry's out there.