When Clients Blur The Lines Between Business And Personal

I have been self-employed for a very long time, doing numerous different things. I had a daycare for almost a year one time, I've done freelance writing for over 10 years, and I've recently introduced web design and digital marketing into the fold. I have dealt with my fair share of clients, from amazing to nightmare. I've always worked as an employee for large corporations - businesses where the President or the CEO doesn't know who you are and would never recognize you walking down the street. Heck, one company I worked for - I don't even know what president's name was! And I've worked for smaller companies, where staff become a family and you work closely with your superiors, managers, and CEOs. Honestly, after almost 16 years in the workforce, I have yet to decide which I prefer - being close to your staff, being just another employee in a sea of employees, or running my own business where I call the shots.

The problem with me is that I am a passionate person, and I may sound like a millennial when I say this, but I have trouble working in a job where I'm not passionate about what I do. But don't get me wrong! That doesn't mean that, as a writer, I can't become passionate about anything that isn't writing. Because, in fact, I can become passionate about anything I do! I am a learner, a researcher. I enjoy learning new things and discovering different parts of me I didn't know existed before. For instance, after I closed my daycare, I decided to go back to work; I just wasn't cut out for working from home - I need stimulation. So I went to work as a Rental Agent for a property management company. I had never done anything like this before, but I discovered very quickly that I was good at it. And when I am good at something, I become passionate about it. If I found out I has a knack for unclogging toilets, I would probably have a passion for that, as well!

But I digress. As I say, I become passionate; I am an empathetic person and my biggest passion in life is helping people. So although my main responsibility as a writer at the moment is to write content for websites and marketing companies, but I offer more than that, too. I chose to offer my services to small and/or start up businesses because these are the people who need help the most. These are the people who could benefit from my vast knowledge of business practices, of my knack for marketing, and my creativity as a designer and writer. So, not only do I write for them, but if they need help coming up with creative promotions, or if they're having issues figuring out how to use their new software, I want them to feel like they can come to me. When it comes to technology, marketing, and business practices, I am a bit of a Jack of All Trades.

However, from all the past work I have done for people, most specifically within the daycare industry, I quickly learned that people are all survival of the fittest. They can claim to care about you or want what is best for you, but when money is involved, no one really cares about anyone - well, that's from my experience anyways. Except...well...I do. I DO care about people; whether you're paying me $100,000 a day or $5 a day, I CARE about your business. That being said, I have had to teach myself to always stay at an arm's length from my clients. And there are two reasons for this:

1. When your clients can tell you're an empathetic person and they can tell you care, they will take advantage of you every change they get - whether they realize they are doing it or not.

2. When your client knows you care, and you develop a relationship with said client, they start to feel like you're actually friends and they start to feel like they are the exception to the rule and so they begin to request specific things from you, thinking that because you're so nice, that you will do them a "favor". Except, if you do it once, they will expect you to do it 1000 times.

I promise I'm not cynical. This is just the reality of being a business person - it's called self preservation. And since my daycare days, I have learned to always keep a distance, to always treat business as business, to always ensure my client knows that I am only here to do what they are paying me to do.

But then, that becomes very boring, and it makes me feel cold. I like developing relationships with people, I like it when people see me as a friend and feel they can come to me for things they need without worrying about me charging them an arm and a leg. And so, in the past little while, I have let my guard down. And yes, I have been screwed - but it's only because I let my guard down too much and realized I was getting taken advantage of and when I decided to pull back the reigns, they freaked out. But that's OK. Lessons were learned, more was added to my contract and I am a better businessperson for it.

But working over the computer and speaking with clients mostly over email and Facebook messenger makes it easier to separate myself from them. It makes any "relationship" we have formed seem more distant than if I had been meeting them face to face. It's when you have a client who refuses to read your signals, who refuses to listen to your boundaries, and who insists on being friends, even though you make every effort to try to let them know (without flat out saying it and risking offending them), that makes it VERY difficult to have a business relationship. I have always had a rule - that my clients were never to be added to my personal Facebook page as a friend. It was all fine for them to be apart of my business page or my personal/business page (yes, I have three pages), but never my personal Facebook page.

But sometimes, those people who refuse to listen to your signals become your downfall. About three weeks after meeting a specific client, for whom I would be seeing face to face every day, I violated my own rule and allowed them to add me to Facebook. What happens when you do this is you create a personal, intimate relationship - they see everything you do, they get to hear some of your thoughts on things you wouldn't normally tell them, and they can comment and make jokes on your posts and photos which then creates a common ground - a dangerous common ground. However, my thought behind adding them to my Facebook page was because as a mother, I understood putting your child in the care of someone else - someone you barely knew, and this way, they would be able to watch their child on a daily basis, get to know what was going on, see what we were doing, and I could share funny videos or photos I happened to capture - capturing them for the SOLE purpose of sharing them with the client, allowing them to see the level of care and fun their child was being exposed to on a daily basis.

The thing is, some people who are inexperienced in working closely with another person don't know how to draw the line between business and personal and so their lines get blurred. They begin to think that because they get along with the person, they are suddenly able to do whatever they want, and although the business person has policies or procedures that were created for the sole purpose of self-preservation, the client's inability to find that line leaves them thinking they are the exception to the rule, and then are severely disappointed when they violate a procedure and get reprimanded for it.

Then it happened - the moment a businessperson is at risk for when they develop a friendly relationship with a client: the client decided, last minute, that they no longer wanted to work, took their child out of care and then said, "It's a good thing we didn't pay you today because it looks like we're not going to be able to." I guess because there had been a friendly relationship established, this client assumed that I would take pity on them and would wave the obligations of the contract and forget about the money owed. But in doing this, I would be failing as a business person. Not only would this be anti-beneficial for my business financially, but it would be extremely unprofessional. This was not a case of me being unable to draw the line between business and personal, this was theirs. That being said, with the initial news that I would no longer be receiving any money owed, I became the bad guy - I became the heartless villain who didn't care about the people I had worked so closely with over the past few months. However, when I requested to say goodbye to the little person I had been with every day for the past 6 months, I was accused of being unprofessional by allowing myself to blur the lines between business and personal because I cared too much - as if the little person I had be minding was a piece of furniture.

What happened here was the client turned the tables on me. In an attempt to get me to forget their unprofessionalism and their inability to hold up their part of the deal, they tried to turn the tables on me, to make me look like the unprofessional so that their irresponsibility could be forgiven. The thing is though, that I have been doing this a long time, and I have been through almost everything a business person can go through in terms of client behaviour. And so I know, in my heart, who I am and what I am when it comes to my business. I know I am good at what I do, I know that I sometimes care too much, and I know that there are definitely people out there who will take

advantage of that, but I also know that there are some people who won't, some people are just so thankful for having the help. However, once money is exchanged, once one person is being paid for a service, the person doing the paying seems to become entitled - that because they are "giving" you their hard-earned money, they are somehow entitled to be treated a certain way, to get away with things they know they shouldn't, and to give unsolicited advice/knowledge/information that otherwise would not be warranted. Once money is exchanged, people's true colours come out, and that is one thing I have learned and carry with my throughout all my business dealings. And I know that - I recognize it and I accept it. I also know that when a client gets upset because the business person is drawing a line - insisting that the client follow proper policies or procedures, or the business person is asking to be paid for a service the client thinks they should get for free (because, we all know people LOVE doing things for free *insert eye roll here*), it is not the fault of the business person as the business person is simply following his or her own rules, it is actually the client being unable to recognize; that although you were joking and laughing the day before, the business person's policies have been violated and the business person then must insist that the policies be followed. The client becoming up in arms about it is them taking it personally - it's them feeling as though your response to their violation is a personal attack on them. They don't know how to handle it because they have never seen your business as a business, but more as a personal service. And everyone should know, when money is exchanged, unless that person to whom you are giving money is living in your home, there is no such thing as a personal service and the sooner people begin to realize this, the sooner their business dealings will improve. Otherwise, they will continually be stuck in a perpetual cycle of going on the attack and burning bridges.

And this is why I am choosing to write this article. Although it is different from the other unpersonal articles I have written in the past, for new business people who are starting up, it can be tough out there. People can be heartless and cruel, but the most important thing is to know who you are and what are you are as a business, and once you know this, no matter what a client throws at you, you will be able to handle. Just remember one thing: If you're going to allow yourself to develop a friendly relationship with a client, you need to have the willingness to still implement your policies and business practices when they are violated. And if you're going to develop a friendly relationship with a client, you must acknowledge that these clients are not practised in owning their own business and may not be as practised in knowing the line between business and personal, so when you then have to turn around and implement your policies, they will go up in arms about it and try to turn the tables on you. Thus, if you want to avoid all of that, the best thing for you to do is to always retain a business relationship and if the client refuses to read your signs and consistently steps over your boundaries, you either need to confront the problem or release them as your clients because at the end of the day, all this will bring is trouble. If boundaries are being blurred, other lines will be blurred as well. And the best type of business person is the type of business person who can predict and foresee issues from the beginning. So learn to read the signs and practice self-preservation. It's the only way to survive in this world.