For a time I shook my head at the irony that the smaller the client and the smaller the job, the higher the maintenance and the harder it was to get paid. The n

For a time I shook my head at the irony that the smaller the client and the smaller the job, the higher the maintenance and the harder it was to get paid. The nickel-and-diming, the offers of creative means of payment ("I'll take you out to a nice dinner!", "My wife makes fantastic cookies!"), the weekend calls to the cell phone. Of course, I later came to understand that this wasn't ironic at all. The best predictor of how "difficult" a client will be in this dimension is the degree to which the person you deal with is paying with what they perceive as "their own money", literally or figuratively. A client selection strategy based on this observation dovetails nicely with the "charge more, much more!" approaches frequently discussed on these pages.