Yesterday I finished a small job for a client and that's exactly what he said to me. I spent a day tweaking his website and making it 'social media friendly'. He was very happy with the work. A month prior I had finished a similar job for another client at nearly ten times the rate and do you know what he said? Nothing. Not a damn thing. Not even 'Thank you'. No 'Attaboy', no nuthin'. And I had bled for that client as well. Not only did I do an inordinate amount of work and education to bring them into the social media age, but I had thrown in an 18 page illustrated report called the 'Blog Cookbook' so he always had a handy record of how his site operated and how to improve and grow it. But none of that seemed to matter.
The difference between client 'A', the happy client, and client 'B', the silent client is pretty simple. One of them knew what he was buying and the other one didn't. Nothing more than that. But the reason I had bled for the bigger budget job was not that I was being paid more (both hourly rates were the same) but because it was for a large multi-national brand and I wanted to impress the big boys. Didn't matter - because in the end, they weren't sure what they were buying - it was just something they had to buy to be in the game.
Moral of the story: You can't always expect warm fuzzies from every job you do, but it's a whole lot nicer when you get them.- it increases your suspension of disbelief.
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