Fighting For $10,000 That I’m Owed — I Should Have Trusted My Gut
Vol. 025
Fighting For $10,000 That I’m Owed — I Should Have Trusted My Gut
I knew that I shouldn’t keep working with this client, but I let the money cloud my judgement, and I did it anyway...
A quick bite:
Right after quarantine robbed close to $50,000 of work in early 2020, I started working with a business who was thriving amidst the pandemic. Things were great, until they weren’t. I quickly started to feel weird about the working relationship, but I didn’t trust my gut… now I’m paying for it.
Continue reading below…
Here’s some insight to remind you that no one is infallible.
Despite having some relatively notable successes in my career, I’m still constantly learning, adapting, tripping and falling on my face too...
I was working with a company for a few months in early/mid 2020. The relationship evolved into a process of doing the work all month, and the invoicing at the end of the month (not ideal). We spent a full month doing a bunch of work for them (sum totaling ~$10,000) and they recently filed for bankruptcy. That means it’s unlikely that I’ll see that money.
Many of you know that I lost $50,000 of work in just over a week at the beginning of 2020 — COVID-19, you son of a bitch.
After a hit like that, I felt a bit shaky and uneasy, and I was kinda willing to do whatever creative work I could find, regardless of the terms, so that I could get my feet back beneath me and keep things moving forward.
I was fortunate enough to connect with a company (name intentionally withheld) who was exploding during COVID. They had more work than they could handle, and literally worked day and night to capitalize on the opportunity to produce face shields, hand sanitizer and other products that helped fight the pandemic.
The work was non stop, and they needed me for everything from branding and logo design to traditional graphic design to packaging and website design. The first $4,250 invoice/check cleared, so I felt good acting as their go-to graphic design studio for anything and everything. It was great for a bit, but pretty quickly I started to have a feeling in my gut that they were either trying to take advantage of me or were doing something shady...I should have listened to my gut instinct.
Let’s look at what I did and why it was wrong, and hopefully you can avoid this moving forward:
1) I broke my own process:
I normally have a strict rule of sign contract, receive deposit, and only then do I begin creative work.
A combination of this company moving extremely fast (they needed everything “yesterday”) and me just needing work, I allowed them to dictate the process. This quickly turned into an hourly rate client, and I was doing everything they asked me to do, and I’d then bill at the end of the month. Read: I’d be on call all month for them, and I’d then invoice net-30 after all of the work was completed and they had the work in production (stupid!) But again, my intelligence and known best practices were overshadowed by my desire for stability and consistent work.
I didn’t feel good about this.
2) I acted like their employee
I was taking calls, meetings, and working whenever they needed. I never set the precedent that they are not my only client, and that they are hiring me for what I offer — not the other way around. I should have been controlling the situation to follow my process so that I could deliver the best possible work. Instead, I caved to their every whim and worked late, on weekends, or whatever else they needed.
I started to resent the work.
3) I did countless rounds of revisions at the flick of a wrist
Because I was doing so much work for them so quickly, I positioned what I was doing as quick, easy production, work. In reality, I had 2 designers supporting this project with me — two designers that I was paying out of pocket. The quick turns and immediate updates made it seem like no effort or strategy went into the work (even though it did) and they saw everything as an easy update.
I knew I was fucking up.
After bombarding me with calls, texts and emails for a couple straight months, and after I completed a sprint of packaging designs, they went silent… my heart sank, and I immediately knew something was wrong. After a few casual “hey, just checking in” emails, I resorted to more stern “I haven’t heard from you, and I see that there are 3 outstanding and late invoices, please let me know what is happening” emails.
After much anxiety around the matter, a bunch of emails, and some texts, I finally got through. I got the news that they had essentially made a bad purchase, and quickly lost a lot of money. Like, over-a-million-dollars-lot of money.
They basically said “we’re trying to pay people who did work, but we don’t have money, we’ll let you know what happens.”
I was speechless. I literally let these people walk all over me, they made a bad business decision, and I lost a month’s worth of time, and more than a month’s worth of pay (because I actually paid my contractors, unlike these folks.)
Unfortunately, even a bullet proof contract doesn’t do much for you when someone files for bankruptcy. My best plan of action is to your file a claim with the court that they’re filing bankruptcy with. However, they don’t respond to my calls, texts or emails, so I don’t know where that is…
I got really lucky, and they did pay one of the ~$5,000 invoices after one of my calls. But, this still leaves me ~$5,000 in the red.
What did I learn?
Always stay true to your process. Trust your gut. Had I listened to my inner voice early on, I could have made a quick few grand, and got outta there. Instead, I let the dollar signs cloud my vision and intuition, and now I’m paying for it.
I’m still not sure what’s going to happen. Though, I’ve accepted that it’s unlikely that I’ll ever see that money. The worst part is, I set myself up for this — I put myself in this position. Just like my mom used to tell me in high school: “i’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.” haha.
I hope y'all can learn from my mistakes.
