Have you ever had a long-term regular client who suddenly became less reliable? Maybe their business suffered due to economic circumstances. Maybe they had to deal with a personal issue and were less focused on business projects. No matter how reliable a freelance writing gig might seem, it can always disappear.

Let’s talk about some of the ways regular clients might suddenly become unreliable and what you can do about it if it happens.

Ways Regular Clients Might Become Less Reliable

Here are some things an otherwise reliable client might do to suddenly change your working relationship:

• They might cancel projects at the last minute.
• They might decrease their usual order size with no advance notice.
• They might simply stop contacting you or responding to emails (or phone calls).

The worst can be when a long-time regular client tells you on a whim that they can’t order for a month or two, but then they plan to get back to a regular order schedule. On one hand, it could be a worthwhile relationship to preserve, so you might try to accommodate. But that isn’t always the right thing to do. After all, you are a business owner too, and you have to put your own business interests first. If your business isn’t surviving, you can’t do your best work for clients anyway.

How to Deal with Clients that Become Unreliable

How do you deal with these situations? Given my last example, you have a few options:

• Tell the client it’s alright, and that you’ll be happy to take them on again when they’re ready;
• Tell the client that you’ll pursue other regular contracts to fill that void as soon as possible, and that means you likely won’t have availability when they’re ready to come back if they give up their spot;
• Combine the two — pursue only one-off projects in the interim with the expectation that the client will come back to their regular schedule after a month or two.

Personally, I go with the second option. I don’t leave my schedule open with some naïve hope that a client is going to come back. If their own business is struggling now and they can’t order any more (as budgets are usually the concern), there is no guarantee that’s going to change in the short-term. And it would be foolish to rest the future of my own business on those hopes. So I find someone else. If they come back before I’ve found another regular I want to stick with, that’s fine. If not, too bad. I’ll refer them to someone who can work with them moving forward. That’s not to say there’s any bitterness about it. It’s just business.

Because clients can become unreliable in different ways, there are also different ways you can handle the situations. Some examples include:

• Letting them know you can’t reserve their time in the future if there’s a break in the contracted work;
• Discussing their future plans with them in more depth — find out if there really is a very short-term problem at hand where it might be worth sticking it out for a month or so;
• Offering to adjust project specs to meet their new requirements without undercutting your own earnings or losing the gig altogether;
• Being firm, letting them know that commitments followed by last minute cancellations aren’t acceptable professionally (because once they committed, you had to turn down other prospects), and that if it happens again you won’t be able to continue working with them;
• Moving on and not looking back — especially if a client becomes unresponsive for an extended period (that can’t be explained with a brief emergency taking them away from work).

Are these the only ways to deal with long-time clients who become unreliable? No. But they give you somewhere to start and some options to consider. It’s one thing to like our clients and want to work with them to overcome their problems. But we also have to know when to do that and when it’s best to part ways — temporarily or not.

No freelance writing job is a sure thing. From large content sites that shut down or change payment models to smaller independent clients who can’t sustain the workload, gigs come and go. And it’s a part of our job to be prepared. So be ready to handle the situations if they come up, even if hoping they don’t. And never stop marketing your services and building your visibility to attract new prospects. Then when a sudden opening does happen, you’ll already have interested prospects waiting for a call.

About Jennifer Mattern

Jennifer Mattern is a freelance business writer and professional blogger who writes about freelance writing, social media, indie publishing, and small business. She also publishes e-books for freelance writers and is scheduled to publish her first nonfiction book, The Query-Free Freelancer, next year.