Working for bad payers and meeting notes from 5th March 2025
Posted by Paul Silver
On the 5th March 2025, twelve freelancers met in the Lord Nelson Inn in Brighton to talk all things freelancing and tech. This is some of what we talked about:
- Blocking over aggressive website crawlers
- Local games
- Using AI to help write your own tools
- Rust and getting into other programming languages
- Tesla cars being vandalised
- Pensions
- Different ways of writing microservices
- The functionality of Dropbox has been merged into operating systems
- Working for people you’ve had to chase for money in the recent past
- Where to store documentation in a project
- Ethical fashion
- Branding that excludes older people
- Playing Samba
- Positive lockdown memories
- Being your own marketing department
Working for known late payers
Sometimes you get offered work from a company you’ve worked for in the past that you then had to chase for payment, potentially several times before the payment came through.
With a tight market meaning there’s less work around, if a client like this comes back to you wanting more work done, there’s a high chance you’ll want to take the project on even though you know they are poor at paying on time. This can especially be the case when the rest of the previous project for them went well – nice people to work with, good collaborative atmosphere and so on.
In this sort of case the thing to do is ask for payment up front.
You can explain, politely, that having to chase for payment in the past makes you nervous of working for them, even though you enjoyed doing so and felt the work was good. Getting the payment at the start of the project will put those problems behind you and let you focus on producing your best work for them. If they are a mid or large sized company, bear in mind that the person you’re talking to may have had no control over you being paid late. That doesn’t excuse it, it just means in any conversation about this you may be in agreement – they could be annoyed that the money was not paid to you on time and that it damaged your relationship. Also bear in mind that not every late payment is adversarial, sometimes they’re just a mistake. Approached with calm confidence (even if you don’t feel it) being paid at the start of a project is an easier setup to get than you probably expect.
If they say no to payment up front, well, it’s time to find someone else to work for. They want you to do the work, this is the time when you have maximum leverage in the situation – you have put no time in so have nothing to lose apart from potential work, they have nothing of your work that they might then use without paying you. If they won’t pay up front and you do the work anyway, you will have the worry of when they will pay and if it’s going to take a bunch of time to get payment, again. Betting not to go through that and find a different client.