I've Never Fired a Client...Until Now

In 15 years of being a contractor, I haven’t had to fire a client, until just 2 weeks ago.

In May, I got a referral from a friend who was also part-owned of a new company. She’s highly regarded in her field, many years of medical cannabis experience. I was honored to be thought of for the role.

Working with start-ups takes a lot of patience and understanding. It’s a lot of handholding. These are things I love about working with them. I also really enjoy educating and training and empowering people to learn more about how business works, especially on the digital side. We only know what we know, right?

We had a great chat in May, realized we liked a lot of the same bands from “back in the day,” and had a great rapport. During the call, I made sure they understood that with their budget, they’d have to provide content, to which they agreed. They wanted to follow up to start in August, so I emailed the last week of July to check in. I was hired to start August 1st. Yay!

Nay. Once I started working and getting to know the people involved, I realized there were a lot of holes in this company. For starters, the website wasn’t done, and this was supposed to be an e-comm site. There was no content, only a couple paragraphs here and there. No blogs. Product photos were scattered all over the site, rather than in a Shop tab. I spent that first month getting to know all the vendors, creating a library on Drive for everyone to upload to, and creating a strategy for Instagram and LinkedIn. One of the owners outright said “I don’t want this on Facebook.” Great! I hate Facebook with a passion, and to be able to skip that in my work was refreshing.

A month goes by, and the website hasn’t been touched. I had thought they were cleaning it up for us to get going by September. Nope. Nothing changed. No blogs. No landing pages for products. It was atrocious. I later learned that the website had been sitting there like this for 2 years. Under each product was every piece of information you could come up with for that product, all on the same landing page. All of the verbiage was done by AI, which was very clear. Instead of real photos of vendors, they had used AI to create cartoons. The same cartoon for each vendor, which made no sense because not everyone was the same gender.

So, I spent 2 days with a content creator to go over the website, create a document, and sent it over. In every single email, I made sure I was available to walk them through this, piece by piece. Come to find out, the person “doing the website,” had no experience building an e-comm website, and would take SOME of my suggestions and chat with someone on Fiverr on how to fix that part of the website.

That was a giant red flag when I heard that, because you have to hire the right people, especially for a website where you’ll be selling other peoples’ products. Fiverr???

We spent an hour going over the document we painstakingly created, that went through every single section of the website to show how it worked, and how it should work. Then I waited, because I was then 6 weeks behind from implementing my social media strategy, but in order to do that, I needed a real website that functioned properly. My document, created by 2 women with years of experience in the digital world, was called “This little document.” Talk about insulting! We went out of our way to do nothing but help these people, who had never had a business before, who had never had an e-comm business before, and knew nothing about how to build a website. It went unappreciated, and was called “the little document” in a few emails. By the way, that little document had a list of 31 points that had to be rectified before launch, but they just didn’t care.

So, I spent each month going through the website, creating SEO- and keyword-rich content for all the sections. I wrote over 30 blogs, each showcasing vendor products and ingredients. They had no idea how long it took to write them, nor did they know that these were crucial to keep people on the website reading and discovering the products. With each batch of blogs, I’d write in a note with the link to the product (well, tried to, since only 2 products had an actual URL to link to!), with verbiage, so that all they had to do was upload the text, link where appropriate, and then I could use that on social media.

No links were ever added. I would go back to the website every day, still waiting to implement my social media strategy, but…nothing. So, I kept writing web content and blogs, since they were paying me, because I can’t just sit here and NOT work for pay. I would have walked away, but my friend was one of the owners, and I had a contract. I wanted to see this company succeed.

These people also wanted video calls, all the time. Things that could be discussed in a 10-minute phone call were now taking up a whole hour, with mostly chit-chat and no agenda or strategy. The other owners started treating my friend like shit, on the calls, in front of me. They would ignore her meeting invites and claim they never got the emails. I stressed that they needed to check their domain server about the emails, which was just a bullshit phrase I came up with because I knew they were lying. And, if they weren’t, then there really was an issue with their backend crap. My friend ended up resigning in October. I would have left, too, but I had a contract I needed to honor.

In this time, there was no marketing strategy or calendar to share with me, so I could tweak my strategy as needed. By now, it was the middle of November, which isn’t a great time to launch because with new social media accounts, there would be no traction for Black Friday. But, they decided to launch the week before Thanksgiving. I learned this the day before, and had to scramble to see what content they created would be appropriate for launch.

One thing about social media is that it isn’t about selling, like most believe. It’s about branding and tell the story of the people and products involved. They created great videos, introducing each vendor, which I had spread out in my content calendar. Within minutes of me posting the first one, another AI-created graphic showed up. What was happening here????

I emailed them, telling them this wasn’t appropriate, since I was the social media manager with a strategy and content calendar. I also explained that this wouldn’t do well in the algorithm, since what I posted was a video and has heavier weight in the algorithm.

Their response was to ask me to explain algorithms. If you are posting on Instagram, and you don’t know what an algorithm is, you have no business posting. I get a lot of clean-up work because people don’t understand Instagram and think it’s just posting with a million hashtags. And why were they posting, when I was being paid to be the social media manager????

Even though the abusive female owner told me months previously that she didn’t want Facebook, she now wanted it. No big deal, even though it doubled my workload, as a Facebook Page also has to have a social feed set up to like, comment, and share. Of course, this went over their heads because they knew absolutely nothing about social media. So, I added Facebook to my daily tasks for them. I still wanted to help as much as I could.

The emails back and forth kept coming, with theirs gradually insulting me more and more. One of the platforms had been shut down, as often happens, even with someone like me knowing compliance. They kept pounding me to explain myself, which I did in the first response. There was one man in the company, and the emails were coming from his account. I knew that the female owner, who was the most abusive, was dictating these emails to him, because he is a very passive person and I had never had any tone from him in his emails. To have this coming from a man created even more anxiety for me with this company! The verbiage was very strange, too, and I am pretty sure they were using AI to respond to me.

These people discovered AI and thought they could run with it and use it for everything. Another AI graphic showed up on Instagram, and I emailed them to explain that this wasn’t wise for Instagram, as transparency and authenticity were what was needed, especially for a new brand. And, Instagram was only one of three networks! They used AI to write the product descriptions, ignoring what the vendors sent them. What?????

In the meantime, my anxiety was high and I wasn’t sleeping. These people took up 6 hours of my time, just in emails. My tone is always professional and straightforward so that nothing can be misconstrued. Yet, I will being disrespected at every turn and my work was being ignored.

So, I decided this wasn’t going to work any longer. I finally had work to do for which I was hired, but they were doing everything to sabotage everything I had been doing. I spent a Friday afternoon and full Saturday to complete a month of content and schedule it out on all the networks they wanted. I tracked my hours, and made up for the rest of the month. I then emailed them, telling them the business relationship had crumbled so much, that I was going to step away. I informed them that I had used their designated hours for the month to complete all of the content for all of the networks. Even though I needed the money, and there was a month left on the contract, I knew it would be detrimental to my mental and physical health to continue.

Once I sent that email, my body relaxed, and my anxiety was gone. I slept that night, finally, after a few weeks of heavy anxiety.

There is nothing worse than having 20 years of experience in something, 15 of those as a Social Media Manager, but being shut down and disrespected on a daily basis. Once I let them go, I got 2 new clients. Their negative energy was blocking the good that was trying to come in. Phew!

I am worth every penny that people pay me, and I accommodate start-ups with smaller budgets when I can. Every single one of my clients appreciates me, my skillset, and mindfulness when it comes to budget.

This was a lesson learned, and I need to pay more attention to red flags. It would have saved me a ton of anxiety and stress.