Letting Clients Go To Grow Your Creative Career

As your empire ramps up and you develop bigger clients, the current stable of clients, that have been a real feather in your cap, may unfortunately need to be let go. If a client has been with you since the beginning, there is often nothing more difficult than moving your creative career up to a higher level and having to leave existing clients behind. It’s a tough move, but needed for your career to grow.

It does not really matter what you do, it could be producing graphics, animation, music creation, video production, audio producing, web design, traditional arts, whatever you are doing to provide content or a service, as your career ramps up you’ll get bigger and potentially better clients. This is actually a good thing, as your skill set increases, so does your rates. You start to get the type of clients on your radar that would not have even been considered by you a few years back. Your business is growing and as you move up, you move towards a higher end client. They are ready and so are you, thanks to your body of work, years of experience and newly minted quest to achieve more in building your empire.

At least that is the plan. Some will work in the opposite direction. Jobs come a little less frequent, you hit a slow patch, you want more clients than you actually have. You start to drop your rates, you take on clients that now take up huge amounts of your time, clients that you would not normally take on if business was better. You are making less and working more than ever and you can’t really understand why.

The reason is you are scaling downward instead of upward. Keep in mind, if you do anything for say five years, at the end of that five years you usually have much more experience, lots more skills, you are just better in many different ways. Your rates and services should absolutely reflect that.

Some creative artists get stuck in a rut. They never can quite get out of their current client base, they strive to do more, charge more, and get higher end clients. But the quest to achieve that often does not materialize. Of course it takes drive and ambition, but it also may be something that is holding you back, it may be your current client base.

And the process of weeding out current clients need not be a difficult one. Be direct. Let them know that you need to raise your rates for your business to thrive, to remain competitive. Convey that you are no longer able to work with them on their projects and provide suggestions on other creative producers who may be able to help them out. Remember, the apprehension is often always worse than the implementation. In this case you will typically find out that clients will support you in your career move. They will miss working with you, but they will generally understand if you convey it properly.

Everyone wants their business to grow and a lot of times your client base has to grow with you. You can’t let it hold you back. Raising rates and moving on from some of your existing clients is one of the hardest things you’ll have to do as a creative professional. Believe me I know this is not easy. But you need to flex new creative muscles, you need to break into new client challenges, you need to ramp up and reach higher to keep your path of success constantly reaching upwards. Often it’s not enough to want it, you have to be around people, clients and contacts that will help pull you along and move you there.

Are you ready for the next level of clients? What can you do to move to that level?