We’ve all been here.
You finish a job. You’re tired, because the client came back with endless changes and last-minute demands. But you’ve resolved everything to their satisfaction. There’s only one thing left to do: send your invoice.
But then it all goes deathly quiet. You wait. And you wait. And you wait. The client just disappears, leaving you hanging. And broke.
Or you’re halfway through the job.
Your client needs to supply assets (images, copy, information, materials). Or they need to approve this phase, before you can move on to the next.
You’ve made the next steps clear, and requested what you need in plenty of time. But again, they just vanish into the ether.
You’re left twiddling your thumbs, not knowing if they hate the work, if they are just busy, if you’ll ever get to finish the job – or if you’ll ever get paid for the work you’ve put in already.
We’ve all been ghosted by clients.
It’s frustrating. And sometimes infuriating. And there’s no easy solution to it.
Often there’s no malice: just people who are over-worked and overwhelmed, and are waiting to hear back from their manager before they can pass on feedback.
Or a broken system that has left your invoice waiting in a pile to be signed off by someone who’s been off sick for weeks, or caught in a bottleneck between two departments.
So what to do?
If you’ve been ghosted on a payment:
Never give up. My record for a late payment was two years, nine months after finishing a job for a major record label. It was a complicated situation where the British company booked me, their US parent company was paying, but the work had actually been requested via a German subsidiary. None of whom seemed able to communicate with each other.
Did I resent those monthly emails and phone calls? I did. But I was very happy to finally have the money owed. Plus interest!
If you’re getting no response from the person/department that commissioned the work, try talking directly to the accounts department. Be firm, but also calm and polite. (They are shouted at a lot – it won’t work for you.)
If they’re the bottleneck, they’ll usually take action as soon as you start mentioning late payment charges. If the person who commissioned you is the cause of the delay, they’ll chase it for you – or at least tell you exactly what’s missing, so you can chase it down.
Know the law.
In the UK, it’s relatively cheap and easy to take your case to the small claims court. You don’t need legal representation. In my experience, a formal letter politely stating that this will be your next step usually resolves matters. There are plenty of good templates for this online.
Re-invoice, and add on whatever late charges local law allows. Again, my experience is that accounts rarely pay these charges. But they do pay the original sum very quickly once you start adding them on.
Many freelancers worry about aggressively chasing invoices in case they don’t get work from that person again. But most of the time, the person you’re dealing with was simply forgetful or so overwhelmed with work that they didn’t sign off on your payment. They’re often grateful for a polite nudge.
Also: do you want more work from someone who doesn’t care if get paid?
Avoiding future hauntings
Before you start any new job, always confirm it in writing. An email will do. Include the schedule, the fee, what rights you are giving and anything else that is important.
Make sure the client agrees to it before you begin. Later, if there are any misunderstandings or attempts to increase the scope of the job, you have something to refer back to.
I can’t tell you the number of times it has helped me. When an editor tries to increase the number of words they want or someone else in the payment chain tries to cut the fee, I can calmly point them to the agreement we made.
But for bigger jobs especially, a contract is even better. Depending on your field, your trade organisation might have templates you can use, or you might find something online.
If you do a lot of corporate work or your fees per job are high, it’s worth hiring a lawyer to create a standard contract that you can adapt to each job. It’s an investment, but one which will save you time and money, over and over.
Add a ghosting clause to your contracts
This is often termed a Restart Fee. If your client doesn’t supply what you need or give feedback in a timely manner, it’s going to cost them money. They also risk delays, because you’ve moved on to your next job.
In a recent newsletter, the brilliant Freelancing Females suggested this wording:
“If client feedback or required assets are delayed by more than 14 business days without prior notice, the project will be officially paused and removed from the active queue. To resume work, a $250 Re-boarding Fee will apply, and the project will be rescheduled based on the Contractor’s current availability.”
Never wait to the end for payment
Imagine if a brand told its staff that it couldn’t pay their wages until a new product was fully launched, or until the company reached certain financial targets. They wouldn’t have any staff.
Nor would you get served if you went into a restaurant and offered to pay 50% after the meal, 50% later, once you’ve digested the food and seen whether you to put on weight or develop any allergies.
If you tried on a new outfit in a clothes store, then tried to walk out wearing it while promising come back and pay in 30 or 60 days, they’d refuse.
Yet this is what people do to freelancers, all the time. You work without pay, deliver the work, and they finally pay you 30 or 60 days later. Or you get 50% of the fee upfront, the remaining half long after you’ve delivered.
We need to push back on this, gently but firmly.
Some scripts to follow
Jamie Brindle has some useful suggestions in his LinkedIn posts, especially when dealing with corporate clients.
If a client asks to pay once everything is approved, for instance, he suggests a calm: “I need a deposit to even open the project file, otherwise I can’t guarantee my availability.”
If they say their accounts department works on a 30-day payment period, “Totally! I can bill you know and we’ll get started as soon as they can take care of it.”
Start as you mean to go on
Charge a booking fee upfront, before you block out time in your schedule. Decide how much of this you will refund in the event of a cancellation or date change.
When I first started coaching and record labels and TV production companies booked me for a session with their talent, they’d often cancel at short notice – sometimes when I was already on-site or on the train to London.
I was grateful for the work, so I put up with this for far longer than I should have. But finally, I added cancellation fees to my terms of service. They’d pay the full fee if they cancelled a session on the day, half if it they cancelled or changed with less than 24 hours notice.
The result? In the 15 years since then, only two last-minute cancellations. Both for very good reasons.
Tie your payments to project milestones
Break every project into 3-4 clear phases, with payment connected to each. This could look something like this:
- Booking, brief and discovery
- First draft and feedback.
- Revisions and final handover.
Never move from one phase to the next until the client has paid your invoice and approved any feedback. Then, if your client does a vanishing act at any stage, you’ve been paid for the work you’ve delivered so far.
Freelancers always won’t be able to do this.
But do try! As a writer, I’ve found that corporate clients will always try to pay in 30 or 60 days. But if you push back, they’ll often agree to some payment upfront with the rest at agreed stages.
Newspapers and magazines have paid on publication for so long that I’ve found it near-impossible to break the pattern. Some will agree to pay on delivery, not on publication (which with a monthly magazine might be months after you’ve done the work). A new law proposed in the UK should make it standard to pay on delivery from 2027 onwards.
But you can always ask for expenses to be paid upfront. And you should certainly claim any expenses as soon as you incur them. The more a publication has invested in a story, the more likely they are to actually run it. (And pay you.)
So: no easy solutions to the ghosting problem, but some strategies to make it less likely. If you’ve found anything else effective, do let me know. I’d love to share it!
What do you think?