The CLOWNS Framework | 6 Red Flags That Mean You Should Walk Away From a Client

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 369

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. On the last episode, we talked about something called the Vant Framework. It is a way to qualify potential leads before you get them on a sales call or discovery call. And the whole point of that is so you're not wasting your time talking to unqualified leads, who are just going to be kicking tires, you have to chase them down for payment, they don't really have the budget anyways, etc., etc. Go back to last episode, episode 368, for more on that if you missed it for some reason. But that is just your first line of defense. Once you get past the qualification point, and you actually get on a discovery call with a person, this is your first chance to see if you're actually going to like working with them. Because just because they're qualified doesn't mean they're not going to be the client from hell, someone who makes your life an absolute miserable existence. And that's where this episode comes in. If you listened to the last week episode, you already know what this is about. But getting stuck with even one red flag client, someone who's soul sucking, the vampire, the piece of shit client that ruins your life, is not worth it. In this episode, we're going to talk about that. The reason we get these red flag clients is because we're just saying yes to pretty much anyone who has a budget. We're desperate for money. You're ignoring your gut. Or even worse, you believe deep down, for some reason, you're broken and you believe that you can fix them.

You believe you can manage the red flag client. It's not that bad. I can deal with those sorts of things. And you end up underestimating how much damage it's going to do to both your psyche, your reputation, your mental fortitude, your mental well-being. And so you end up getting burnt out. You resent your clients. You resent yourself for taking on the client because of the constant revisions, the scope creep, the late nights, the damage reputation because they talked bad about you either publicly or with their own group of people because they were unhappy with how it turned out with you because they're a horrible client. And nothing that you did wrong is the reason that you were being punished for it, but you are being punished because you ignored all the red flags. So let me give you something that I wish I would have had maybe 15 years ago when I started my entrepreneurial journey. When I started my recording studio early 2009, we're going to walk through something called the Clowns Framework. Made this up so I get to call it what I want. The Clowns Framework. How to avoid all the clowns. These are six red flags that could turn a normal project into a living hell. And if you just spot one of these, it should give you pause. If you spot two or more of these, run the other way, get the f**k out, go away. No thank you, no amount of money is worth it. Because the fewer the red flag clients that you work with in your life, the better your life will be. Full stop, period, done. No amount of money is worth it. So if you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. It is a podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more money from their creative skills without selling their souls. So when it comes to red flag clients, you can earn more money from those red flag clients, but you are selling your soul in the process. Therefore, no thank you. We don't want that money. Not all money is created equally here at 6 Figure Creative. Now, my approach to this podcast is I like to bring outside influence from a lot of different places, a lot of different genetic diversity, if you will, to diversify our own gene pool as creatives so that you're not just looking to your left and looking to your right and just doing whatever the people in your little industry are doing. Because I call that an inbred business. We don't want inbred businesses here. We want genetically diverse, healthy, happy, fun businesses to run. And that's what this podcast is all about. Take a lot of outside influences from everywhere else and bring them to you as creative freelancers so that you can implement them in your business. So let's talk about the Clowns Framework. The Clowns Framework. Last week was Bant, B-A-N-T, Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. That's Bant. This is the Clowns Framework. And you can think of this as like a checklist to go through when you're on your discovery call with your client and you're looking for these things. You're spotting it. Do I see any clowns here? Do I have a clown on the phone right now? Do I have a clown on this other side of the table for me for this meeting? The goal is to have no, no, I don't want no clowns, clowns. Okay, I'm done. Oh my God. That's a new low point for this podcast. That's the Scrubs song from probably the 90s for you old people. I forget sometimes that thousands of people listen to this podcast, and I just do dumb sh** like that. C stands for cheap. That's the C in clowns. Cheap. We don't want cheap clients. People obsessed over price instead of the outcomes. People who are asking for discounts or asking for that friend pricing that they know that their friend has because you've been working with that person because they're actually a genuine friend, then with that friend pricing, maybe they compare what you're doing with what they're seeing prices-wise on Fiverr or Upwork or some guy they know. We all know this type of person. Now, if you are getting compared to Fiverr, Upwork, people are directly comparing your pricing to someone else, this could be the symptom of being a button seat freelancer. I talk about this all the time in the podcast where you are offering something no different than any other person offering that exact same service. It's basically commoditized. I could buy it like salt. It doesn't matter what kind of salt I get. It's gonna make my food salty, so I don't really care. In your case, I could buy your service in five different places, so I don't really care. It's just a button seat. You don't wanna be that. Now, that's fixable, but this can, if you don't fix it, can attract clients who only care about price. So sometimes you gotta look within yourself and within your business, and if you're only getting cheap people, that could be the true reason for that here, the root cause. But I got one simple filter question. You can wear this however you want. You can adjust it however you want, but the core of this needs to be the same. You can ask a question in your sales process, something like this. What kind of return or result would make this a no-brainer investment for you? You could word it in a number of ways, especially for B2B people. If you're working with business owners, obviously what kind of return or what kind of result would make this a no-brainer investment for you. But also in the B2C kind of world, like in my background, music production, where I'm working with a lot of independent artists who are closer to consumers than they are businesses, and you're not really getting them an ROI. It's more about a result or an outcome or a sound. You can change it up to be something like, what kind of sound or what kind of end result do you want? What would this need to sound like in order for this to be a no-brainer for you guys? And what you want is someone to explain a lot of the things that you can deliver on. If you can't deliver on them, there may be an expectations misalignment that's going to turn into a whole cluster down the road, which we don't want. So if you can't provide what it is that they're asking for, then just know that now before you go too far in the sales process. But what we don't want is someone to say something to the effect of, I was hoping you could tell me what's fair. It's the whole, what's the meme with like the three Spider-Men pointing at each other, and maybe it's just two Spider-Men. And one is the client saying, what's the budget? And the other is the business owner saying, what's the price? And they're just like trying to get each other to talk first. I've come across this myself, multiple times in my life, both on the business owner side and the freelancer side. But this isn't really what we're wanting here. If they're saying, I was hoping you could tell me what's fair, then you might want to pause and reconsider. Now again, someone saying something like this, they may just not know anything about how to price in this world. So they need to have maybe a gauge on things, and maybe you just need to quote them a rate, right? But what we're trying to get at here is, what's the value of your service to that person? And if the value is way higher than what they're paying, you have a good arbitrage between what they're paying and what they actually get. That's a good thing. You want that gap to be as large as possible, as long as you're making what you want to make. But what we don't want is the value of what they're getting in their minds way below what they're paying. And if that's the case, the arbitrage goes the other way. It's like negative equity in a home. You don't want that because no matter what, if that discrepancy is the other way where the value is lower in their heads than what they're actually paying, then it's going to be terrible the entire way, especially for those of you who charge hourly or daily, and the client doesn't really understand how long it's going to take. And so they're just so stressed at how much money it's going to cost them in the long run, because they didn't really understand how much it was going to take, and they thought this was going to be 10,000, but it's going to be 25,000. So the whole time between 10 and 25,000, when you're billing them for the ongoing work that you're doing for them to get them the end result that they want, they're questioning why they ever did this in the first place, and they're presenting you for billing them. This is the whole thing you don't want to get into. So C stands for cheap. You're trying to suss out whether there's a discrepancy between value and price before you ever start working together. That's the first letter in this acronym, cheap. The second letter is L.