Apsis Blog: Be easy to fire | Apsis Labs

It’s not hard to find stories of agencies and freelancers getting screwed over by clients. Happens all the time, if you believe the internet. The problems run the gamut: clients who refuse to pay, constantly change scope, demand more than was initially expected. Sometimes these stories are sad, some are funny, some infuriating. The responses to these issues are similarly broad ranging from reasonable to less reasonable.

I get it. After a decade of running an agency, I’m very aware of the risks every new client brings; how much work goes into dismissed proposals; the anxiety of asking for payments that are already months late.

But I’ve got sympathy for our clients, too. Often we are working with small fish in small ponds: new startups, sole-proprietorships, good people earnestly trying to launch a good product. And the thing about small fish is (to stretch a metaphor) there are a lot of predators. I know that finding a good dev is hard. For every great agency or gifted freelancer, there are a dozen more who overpromise, underdeliver, or just ghost a project unfinished. A lot of our clients are paying agency developers precisely because they lack technical expertise, and that means they often lack the tools to gauge who can be a trusted partner or not.

I know Apsis has been incredibly lucky over the years, but I think part of that luck is because we put in the work to build long-standing, collaborative relationships, and a big part of that comes down to one of our core principles as an agency: be easy to fire.

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