Dear colleagues, I am currently undergoing a very stressful situation with a company (a direct client) that refuses to pay me for services we provided to them recently. They have provided nothing but very vague excuses, have been evasive, ignoring e-mails and phone calls, and have consequently broken a number of business ethics codes. Anyway, I am not writing this post to rant or name and shame anyone [although I have no problem doing that because as a professional I feel it should be my duty to protect colleagues from falling victim to this unprofessional behaviour]. I would actually like to take the opportunity, based on what has happened to me, to revisit the direct client vs agency argument. You know how we slag off agencies very often for wanting to pay us a pittance and take advantage of our hard work and how we always say it is better to work for direct clients and keep all our profit to ourselves. Well, in my experience, working for direct clients has always been very stressful. And when you have to outsource part of that work, even more stressful, as (as it happened to me) you end up having to pay people out of your pocket. There are mostly two reasons for feeling like that: a) I have no way of vetting a direct client (if you can advise me how I can do that, especially for companies in the UK, please let me know). The Blueboard on proz is only one of many sites where you can check out an agency’s reputation (I am not saying this is 100% accurate either), but how do I go about checking a direct client’s reputation? B) Direct clients often don’t know much about languages and translation and about why some things are translated in a certain way leading to long and tiring disputes. Good PMs have language degrees. Just to be clear, I am only talking about the good agencies, good regular clients that pay you so diligently it almost feels you are working in an office. I have also found that if your general market rates are above average, your profit margin with a direct client is not that much higher either. Ok, you will now tell me that I am over-generalising and there are many good direct clients out there. Yes there are and I have worked for them but the stress of working for someone I don’t know for the first time has always been the same. So why bother with direct clients? What’s your opinion?
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 12:14:06 +0000
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