Reader Q&A: Context-switching and dealing with late payments

Plus: Do you have to charge less if you want to work with early-stage clients?

Happy Friday, friends!

I’m back with another round of reader Q&A this week - here’s what we’ll cover:

→ Listing client experience on LinkedIn

→ Managing context-switching

→ Navigating late payments

→ Pricing for early-stage clients

Let’s dive in!

🤔 Should I list client work as individual line items on my LinkedIn profile?

I don’t have a hard and fast rule here, but my general rule of thumb is to include longer engagements where:

A) The client is relevant to my target audience

and

B) The title aligns with the type of work I want to do

If you peek at my LinkedIn profile, you’ll see that right now, I only have four past client engagements listed. I need to do a bit of clean-up (I want to focus on what’s most relevant to my target audience today, and pull in a bit more detail on my work on each of those engagements), but I won’t add anything that’s going to push my Nutrafol experience behind the “show all” link because I know it’s super appealing to my ideal clients.

Similarly, you won’t find a big chunk of my most recent work as its own line item. I had a lengthy engagement with Walmart Health & Wellness last year, and while the category is very relevant for many of my ideal clients, the business size isn’t. (And let me tell you - that engagement really reinforced my preference for working with growth-stage brands rather than giant companies!) Instead, I have this work rolled into my “founder” role in a “brands I’ve worked with” blurb.

If you want a deeper dive on what goes into my profile and my overall LinkedIn strategy, you can find all of my thoughts on the subject here.

🧠 The context-switching between clients (and my own business) is killing me. How can I deal?

Eek, yes. This is hard, and it can take a real toll. One thing that’s helped me is getting very focused on my niche - it means that I’m typically dealing with the same types of challenges and work across clients, so it’s not a drastic shift from Client A to Client B. (I know I’ve linked to my post about finding my niche a lot, but it also always gets a ton of clicks - so I’m sharing it again here.)

I’m also a big fan of timeboxing, though it took me many years to come around to this. I wanted freedom with my calendar and worried timeboxing would be limiting, but the opposite has been true. I shared my approach to setting (and maintaining) client office hours in detail here and have been particularly loving it this week, as I completed my seasonal migration from Seattle to NYC and was delighted to wake up the morning after a late flight and realize that I didn’t need to be client-facing until 1pm.

Having a transition between focus areas has also been helpful for me, even if it’s just going for a quick walk or making lunch. This is particularly true when making the shift from focusing on my business to focusing on client work - I find a change of scenery (even just from my couch to my desk) also makes a big difference here.

Finally, I generally don’t take on more than two fractional clients at a time. My fractional work tends to be more embedded with clients on a day-to-day basis, so it requires more active context-switching than project work (which for the most part is more independent/async, at least in my business) or advisory work (which has very tight boundaries).

🚨 Help! My client’s late on paying their invoice! What should I do?

I hate when this happens - and no matter how buttoned-up you are with invoicing and reminders, or how good your client relationships are, this happens to all of us at one point or another.

True story: I used to feel awful about following up on late payments. I felt like I was being annoying or greedy or desperate for asking to be paid for my work as outlined in my contract. If this is also something you struggle with, your first step is to remember that you’re a business owner. Are other businesses taking a pay-when-you-want approach? Is your credit card company going to think “oh, I don’t want to be annoying” if your payment is late? Nope. It’s completely reasonable for your business to expect to be paid on time.

Now that we’re a little fired up (if you’re not yet fired up about late payments, go watch this scene from Goodfellas), let’s get tactical:

Following Up

Your first step is to follow up with your day-to-day contact and your accounting contact. Nine times out of ten, it’s a simple miss and this will solve it. Keep your follow-ups in email so that you have documentation in case it’s not such an easy resolution.

Pausing Work

With retainer clients who generally pay on time, I typically won’t pause work over a late invoice - but if it was a recurring issue, payment was more than a week late with no resolution in sight, or if the payment was for project-based work, I might consider it. If I got to this point, I’d note in one of my follow-up emails: “If payment is not received by [DATE], I will need to pause work,” and specify the impact of pausing.

I’m about to get into the details of my contract terms that help me deal with late payments, as well as the steps I take when a payment is REALLY late, so the rest of this post is for paid subscribers only.

I’ll also answer one more question about pricing for early-stage clients with tight budgets.

I’d love to have you join me as a paid subscriber, but if this is where we part ways, please consider liking or sharing this post - both are incredibly helpful in growing this newsletter. ❤️

If you’d like to go deeper, you can find my Build Your Pipeline workshop here or book a power hour here.