Hi all,
I’m a 24F entrepreneur with experience in marketing mainly in the US. After relocating to Asia for a while, I decided to start a digital marketing agency in Asia providing social media management, email marketing and other services to help grow online sales. Unfortunately, I came across a client that after we did all the work for a month, suddenly decided to not pay. Throughout the entire month, all the work was approved and reviewed by him, but by the time the invoice came, he decided that everything was not up to standard and he doesn’t want to pay the full amount. Contracts were signed but there was no deposit as it’s not the industry standard to pay upfront for these kind of services here.
I tried submitting it to the small claims court and all the due diligence. The process is very logical and straightforward but as entrepreneurs, how do you guys deal with the emotional side? The court hearing is in a few weeks time and I have been having so much anxiety over it. The money owed is not even worth the mental energy but it feels so unfair to just let it go like that when me and my team put so much hours of work. I just feel so helpless and scammed. Does anyone also goes through days of feeling anxious over things like this and shitty customers? How do you guys deal?
These type of emotions are so hard to deal with because I just keep thinking, why this had to happen? I know they say that as entrepreneurs the faster you fail and learn, the better. But wow, it’s so painful.
What are other emotional hurdles that you had to go through during your journey and how did you cope?
Pls be kind in the comments as I know I will eventually suck it up but just wondering what other’s people experiences have been.
I was in marketing in asia. this is very common, so in future mitigate for it not only in contract, but with deposits - even if its not standard try and come up with something that works - e.g. stage payments based on sign offs.
now, if you wanna screw them, then any work you have produced that they have used is your work, they have conducted theft. so you can demand that they take down any thing you produced.
if they don’t you can proceed to publish a very detailed post on linkedin with screenshots and publicly shame them - though i caution this would be a nuclear option.
Focus on other clients, you’ll get burnt from time to time, just move to the next opportunity, refine your internal policies and processes to prevent yourself from being exposed the same way in the future.
here’s another one i use to get when i was in agency-land in China - client would literally ping-pong revisions over and over and over again driving everyone nuts - i got the client to agree, once one step was approved, no-backies unless you pay a hefty fee, and then sequentially got each part of the creative approved - mood board - approve; colours - approve; fonts and copy - approve; visuals approve; final touch -approve — once the client agreed to the process, there was still ping pong- but to a much lesser degree and at least everyone knew they won’t have to go back to square one.
as a side note, the best comment i ever heard was a criticism from a client who wanted ‘flames’ in a picture of a grill, they dint have money for photos, so what we did was find the creative for the same brand in other countries then take that as the base for the flames, i’m gonna remind you year, the creative was approved, by the same brand in another country and the china brand manager came back with the response ’ the flames are not fiery enough’