deepbluejh
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Upload & Sell: On
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I deal with a fair number of challenging situations during the lead-up to a booking. Some people are a breeze to work with. Other are difficult, for various reasons. Well in 6 years of doing business I'm dealing with my most difficult clients to date.
I'm going to try to give a condensed timeline of events here to help explain the situation. I first made contact with the bride's sister about two months ago, so thats where I start.
- Bride's sister contacts me about a wedding on Saturday June 1st, 2013. I give her a custom package quote. She says that sounds good, but the price is too high. We negotiate a bit and get the price down.
- A couple weeks later the sister calls again and wants to continue to hash out details of the quote and get the price down a little more. I tell her we can, but we might need to reduce hours. This becomes a problem.
- We go back and forth through email almost TEN different times about various things. I give her a final quote and am FIRM on it - meaning not budging an inch. By now all of the haggling has gotten to me and I'm frustrated with these people.
- As an aside, in addition to the "deal", they also want complete control over pictures meaning I cannot use them ANYWHERE for marketing purposes. They also demand to rewrite portions of my contract because they don't like my wording. We are in full pedant mode now and my head is spinning.
- Eventually after about 6 weeks of back and forth, we FINALLY settle and are ready to move forward. At this time the "negotiations" shift from the sister of the bride to the father of the bride.
- Father refuses to mail the contract and check (as is standard for most of my couples). He also demands to see my business license (yet doesn't want to pay sales tax on the contract himself). Literally SIX emails back and forth about this nonsense and we still haven't agreed on how to settle up. FOB is trying to make things as complicated and convoluted as possible and I just can't wrap my head around it.
We live about an hour apart and I said I'd be happy to meet him halfway in a central location to sign the contract take care of the deposit, but that's not good enough. He wants to me to drive all the way to him to pick everything up.
At this point, I'm >< this close to saying 'forget it" and just walking away. Sound petty? Maybe it is, but I'm so far beyond frustrated with these people I can't even put it into words. I feel like I've been disrespected and pushed around the entire process (which rarely happens) and latest demand is just the final straw.
Part of me thinks I should just swallow my pride and go pick up the contract and the other part of me says I should stand my ground and send them a message - even if it means losing a potentially good booking.
If all my clients were like this, I would have quit years ago.
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