3 Reasons to Break Up With Clients (Other Than Money)

Phase One of building a business is finding clients. That’s a given: you need a sustainable livelihood, whether you’re running a business with employees or working as a solopreneur.

But Phase Two looks a little different. You have enough work and can afford to be choosy about clients. That might mean not taking on new clients if you get a bad vibe from them. And it might also mean saying goodbye to existing clients.

Money is a no-brainer reason to break up with a client. Some old clients might be paying below your current rates or are slow to pay invoices. Logistics is another good reason — the client is difficult to work with from a project management standpoint (or a personality standpoint).

But beyond that, there are other, totally valid reasons to break up with clients.

1. Terrible work (or lack of respect for your work)

We all want to do work we enjoy. True, that’s not always the case, but ultimately you should be able to see your work's value to clients. It may not be personally satisfying, but you understand how the client benefits from the end result.

As a freelance writer, I do a lot of ghostwriting for client blogs. Even though my name isn’t attached, and it’s not something I would write about if I weren’t being paid for it, I’m still proud of the work (and include it in my portfolio).

Then there are times when the client relationship… isn’t good. Even if you’re providing a product or service, the client doesn’t respect what you do. They treat your company or your work as a commodity, rather than something of value.

Writers see this all the time with clients that want to produce “content for content’s sake” without thinking about the reader’s experience. In my words, it’s contributing to garbage on the internet.

When I first started working as a writer, I was at a content marketing agency. Part of the internal process was to answer the question “Why should this content exist in the world?” with every draft.

I still ask myself that question as a freelancer. And if I can’t answer it, that’s a problem.

One time, I was assigned work from a client that made absolutely no sense. I asked for clarification and received the answer I expected: the content was serving the Google algorithm (stuffed with keywords), rather than targeting actual readers. I declined the assignment.

If a client respects your business, they’ll treat it as more than a vending machine (“put money in and work comes out”). If you’re an established business owner, you can break up with clients who don't respect your work.

2. Lack of integrity

Not all companies are on the up-and-up (shocking, I know). Indiscretions can range from how clients conduct their own business to taking shortcuts to manipulating information.

Sometimes it’s a fine line. Pablo Picasso said, “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” In my world as a writer, copying would be outright plagiarism. Stealing might be a client asking me to look at a competitor and lift some ideas. Then I have should ask myself: is it just a starting point, and I’m making the finished deliverable unique? Or am I being asked to simply re-work the competitor’s ideas, without contributing anything new?

If it’s the latter, that’s only a short distance from garbage on the internet. When working with clients, they should be asking you to formulate a new perspective, not simply copy. It should be obvious that the product or service your business offers is yours, and not a carbon copy of another company’s work.

Or, a client may provide you misleading (or downright inaccurate) information, for their own gain. Maybe it impacts how you price the work or how a client works with your employees. Maybe it creates a false sense of urgency. Whatever the reason, the client isn’t being forthright during the relationship.

It happens all the time when writers include quotes or stats that are taken out of context. There’s nothing wrong with making a client’s product or services look good — that’s part of the job. But it crosses the line when you know you’re writing something that isn’t true.

A client asked me to include a statistic in a blog article that seemed bogus. I researched it myself and found that it was horribly misleading. I informed the client that anyone with access to Google could fact-check this statistic and figure out it was bad. The client’s response? “No one is going to fact-check this.”

When a client isn’t being upfront or asking for something that feels shady or underhanded, it’s a reason to break up. That type of behavior harms you or your team.

3. Goes against your belief system

We all have issues that are important to us or causes we care about. And sometimes, a client’s values directly contradict what we believe in. It can make us feel really icky to work with that type of client.

It might not be evident at the outset. Maybe you or your company were hired to do one type of work, and it wasn’t obvious that there was a values misalignment. Or you accepted the work initially because you had to, but now you’re in a place where you can say no to client work.

Case in point: a fellow consultant was asked to do work for a weight loss company. The work made her feel squeamish from the get-go and as the relationship progressed, she was asked to do work that she felt would be detrimental to a woman’s self-image.

Or I worked with an organization and edited a monthly newsletter. The newsletter included a message from the CEO, and his statements went against many of my beliefs. Every time I edited his submissions, I cringed.

I was at a point as a solopreneur where I still could have used the money, but it wasn’t worth it to do work that made me feel angry and terrible.

You get to make decisions

One of the best things about owning a business or being a solopreneur is that you get to choose your clients. With an employer, you’re often stuck with your colleagues and have to find a way to maintain the peace (or find a new job — which is a huge undertaking).

People always talk about breaking up with clients because they’re hard to work with or don’t pay well. Not enough talk about breaking up with clients simply because you don’t like them.

But that’s the beauty of becoming an in-demand business owner or one with niche expertise. You get to choose.

Check out my free eBook: 17 Smart Tools Solopreneurs Need to Start, Grow, and Scale.