When To Break Up With Your Client

3 Reasons To Leave A Client And How

Stephanie Asmus
7 min readMar 6, 2019

Whether an agency or a freelancer, most careers begin by taking on a lot of work for little pay. Without a strong portfolio to start, many clients are taking a risk to work with you; as a result, you cut the price and raise the expectations, hoping for either a great review and portfolio project or more work down the road. Eventually, as you grow in your career, you start to bill more and more appropriately to your worth and wonder how on earth you ever took on such a project for little pay.

It is in these early stages of our careers that many of us fall into relationships with the wrong clients. It’s hard to set expectations, know the red flags and really know what we want in a client. In some ways, the starting relationships of working with clients are similar to our teenage years of dating. Some of us do turn our high school sweethearts into life-long marriages. Most of us would rather pretend it never happened.

At the end of the day, the right clients can help make or break the business and career of an agency or freelancer. Knowing when, and how, to move on from a client is an essential skill set to have to grow your business.

There are 3 reasons to break up with a client:

1. Unrealistically High Expectations

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