What Happens When Your Clients Are Morons?

Here is the thing.  For the most part, clients of creative businesses are smart.  Really really smart.  They have made their way enough in the world to be able to afford the services of a creative business.  Yes, there are varying degrees, but the ability to hire a creative business is evidence of success – financial and otherwise.

For some clients, the ability to invest in a creative business and to allow the art and the artist’s process to thrive is in full view.  These clients know that they are hiring the creative business for its gifts.  They know what they do not and cannot know.  We love these clients and respect them for their knowledge of their own ignorance.  Their ignorance is the desire to trust in a creative business’ ability to teach and to execute.  Simply, you get to do what you do, how you want to do it.  This is the recipe for success on every level.  We will call them smart clients.

Too often though, clients believe themselves to be collaborators; peers to the art and the creative business behind them.  Technology has only fueled the monster.  In the hands of these clients, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, etc. is, or should be, the bane of every creative business’ existence.  These clients are morons, not because they are in any way unintelligent, but rather because they refuse to accept that they do not know what they do not know.  These clients seek to marginalize a creative business at every turn.  They will question your process, your fee, even your design choices.  Most often, they will refuse to accept the axiom that needs to be true of every client of a creative business: once engaged, the only thing a client should be able to do is to say yes or no and/or pay you money.  That is it.  So when you get things like, “Can you just tell me what you think about XYZ” before you had a chance to present a complete design, please do one of two things: say no, it will wait until my presentation, or, if you have not been hired yet, run.

The one thing you can never do if you are confronted with clients who reveal themselves to be morons is to try to turn them into smart clients.  Will never happen and will only lead you into a power struggle from which you cannot survive.  What you have to do though is respect the art that your moron client seeks.  You might not think cocktail napkins are important for the after-party, but if the client does because they saw the cutest picture on Instagram, you have to also.  You just do not have to think about it when they tell you to.

Fundamentals and foundation are there for a reason.  You have to be able to go back to them in any situation.  Be grateful for moron clients.  They force you to stay true to your process no matter what.  You will present cocktail napkin ideas for the after-party at your presentation, to be viewed in context of the entire design, when you want to show the element. Not a second before or after.  Your process is yours alone.  Your way is the one that you know will bring you to your best work.  At the end of the day, this is what you are paid to do for smart and moron clients alike.  Moron clients are made not born.  They take you out of yourself because you let them.

It is not good customer service to indulge the notions of a moron.  Their success is not yours, just the mechanism that allows you the opportunity to provide yours.  If they could do what you do, they would.  Yes or no, pay or do not pay.  That is front and center in your work.  Smart or moron, you must be tireless in your efforts to make these decisions as powerful as they can be for both your art and your creative business.

I know moron is pejorative, hard to hear and to listen to over and over in this post.  Then again, being wholly disrespected for months on end is reason enough to acknowledge the depth of the word and how hard you must on your foundation and fundamentals.  That, of course, is the essence of your art and your creative business.  Moron clients only exist if you let them.  Please do not.