The best business-client relationships are the ones who allows each other to meet their ideas and actions half way.

I’ll spare the details, and explain it this way: Part of my work with the client was to bring in a technical person for some HTML work. I was the contact point between the two. It became apparent that the technician and my client each had a different understanding of how things were working, and it was creating a problem.

I don’t have enough technical depth to be part of the solution, so I suggested that the two work together directly. There wasn’t much income loss for me, but if there had been, it would still have been the right thing to do.

I continue to work with the client in a different capacity.

Once we agreed on the contract and a reasonable rate, that would include fees over the expected hours worked, they proceeded to forward me the latest version of their database in an Excel spreadsheet. That was one of the requirements I had.

Before I began any work on it I reviewed it from top to bottom, beginning to end, and notified them right away that there were problems with it that needed to be corrected before I could do anything more with it.

As it turned out the database had not been updated in over a year or so, and a lot of the addresses on it were out dated and email addresses were no good. The response I received (and from what is supposed to be a big organization) was “we’ll fax you over current business cards we have.” That was fine except that the faxes were never clear, the documents were always ineligible, poorly prepared via faxed, and this went on and on until I stepped up and recommended using a form that could be sent to everyone on their list to request them to update their information. They loved the idea, except that the problem that came with that was they decided they wanted to do a huge mailing in a short period of time. At any rate the form worked out great. Everyone who received the form was doing what was expected.

After a meeting I had with the group expressing my concerns with the database, the status of the address update form, and the timeline to which I felt they should hold off on the large mailing to avoid any unnecessary complications with the database, they later accused me of inaccurately keying in the wrong address information and that it was my fault that many of the addresses were incomplete. This was after a director decided to take over the project, wanting full control of the project and the work I was doing. She threatened to freeze any future payments to me until she was satisfied the database was up to par (to her liking rather).

Her words were very unkind, harsh, and downright rude. Because I was a business contracted to do a job for them, I had to make the unfortunate decision to cancel the contract citing unprofessional conduct on their to include poor presentation of their database, how I received it in the beginning; I forwarded them all of my notes concerning the condition of the database, and why the address update form was even suggested.

Other members of the organization were sorry to see me have to make such a drastic decision, other apologized for her behavior, and other just didn’t care.

Do I regret having made that decision? I never regretted it. I was confident in the work I did and felt I held my end of the contract by performing as expected. It wasn’t worth the time and stress I suffered for such a short time.

I value the work I do for my clients. If there’s a problem I have no problems with making those problems known, providing sound and solid solutions to solve them. A good working relationship with my clients is always better than one that is poorly handled.