You Replaced a Boss With a Client

Dear Emily Post,

I ran a department for twenty years, and then I walked out and went independent. I have one client who pays for almost the whole year, I pick my own coffee shop, and nobody makes me sit through a staff meeting. My friends say I replaced a boss with a client. Are they right, and should I be worried?

Signed, Booked Solid in Entrepreneur, Texas

Dear Booked Solid,

Emily asked me to take this one, because she has never sent an invoice in her life. Your friends are half right, and the half they got wrong is the half that can shrink your year.

When you had the company job, you answered to a chief executive, a board, or both. They could change the plan on a Monday, and you still had to run your part of it, and you were good at that. A client is a different animal. A client pays you for the work and keeps paying as long as the work is good, and they do not put you on their payroll, give you a yearly review, or decide whether you get a bigger title inside their building.

So you can have no boss at all and still have one client who pays for most of the year. If that client calls on Friday and says they are pausing, the money pauses with them. Pausing is their polite word for the checks stopping for a while, without anybody having to call it firing you, and the month simply gets smaller because one name was most of it. A boss can tell you what to do on Monday, but a client can end the money without ever telling you what to do, and that quieter kind of power is the one big-job people miss.

Look at the week you are so proud of. On Monday you are in their meeting, on Tuesday you write the thing they asked for, on Wednesday you are on their call, on Thursday you fix the problem from that call, and on Friday you send the bill. Every day was real work, and none of those days belonged to your own business. You think your client loves you too much to ever pause. Are you that good?

Over fifteen years ago I wrote that the Coyote is always out there waiting, and the Coyote is always hungry. I was picking on the CMO who kept the status quo, and the same Coyote circles a one-client practice. It might be a new chief financial officer at your client, a budget freeze in the third quarter, or a cheaper firm that took their new chief executive to lunch. You will not hear it coming, because a full week is loud.

Europe put out The Final Countdown in 1986, and every wedding DJ and arena in America has played it when something is about to begin. (Do not pretend you cannot hum the keyboard line. I can see you from here.) Joey Tempest wrote it, and he told The Guardian he wrote the lyric about the human race leaving a dying Earth, a countdown to the last ship leaving the planet. He still cannot decide what kind of song he made.

"I don't know if The Final Countdown is a happy or sad song. It's got a positive feel but it's melancholic. It's used for weddings and also funerals."

You left the company, and leaving felt like the start of the song. If one client is your whole Monday through Friday, you may be dancing at the wedding to a song about the last ship leaving.

Winston Churchill had a line for what happens next. German bombs had destroyed the House of Commons, and in 1943 he stood up while the members argued about how to rebuild it and said, "We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us." A week works the same way. You built a week around one client, the same meetings, and one person who has to keep liking the work, and now the week tells you what to do. You take their call because the month needs their money. You charge less than you meant to, because you do not have a second yes to walk toward. You skip coffee with somebody new, because the client work is real and the new person is only a maybe.

I am not going to hand you a study and pretend it is your bank account. MBO Partners surveyed independent professionals before the pandemic, and the average person in that group was working with 4 to 6 clients at the same time. That is neither a rule that you need four nor a promise that four will keep you safe, but the people in that study were not living on one name.

Run the test the way you used to read a budget, with real numbers instead of a feeling. (Yes, your feelings are excellent, and the bank still does not take them.) First, write down the money you expect to make this year. Second, write down how much of that money comes from your biggest client. Third, ask yourself whether you could still pay the bills for the next few months, without taking a job again, if that client went quiet on Friday.

If the answer is no, you do not have a boss. You have ONE client who is most of the money, and neither a better title nor sending the bill yourself changes that answer.

Back when I was barking about CMOs, I said every new contract should carry a hire and fire date, and I still mean it for you. I recommend you do one thing this week, before you sign anything new. Put the end date of your biggest contract on a calendar you actually open, and if you do not know the date, ask them this week in the same normal voice you would use with anybody else you do business with. Then put one conversation on the calendar with a person who is not that client, and give it a day. Reading about being independent will not change who pays you, but that conversation can start to.

If you want to see whether a practice with more than one name on Monday is a fit for you, that is what the next page is for. It walks you through who it is built for, and you decide from there.

See if you fit: theretern.com/apply?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=independent-chief&utm_content=you-replaced-a-boss-with-a-client

See you next week.

CHEERS

Kirk

P.S. Reply with one number, the share of this year's money that comes from your biggest client. I read them when I can, and Emily Post promises not to tell anybody.