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Difficult situation with client
Hi All,
I just wanted to get the general view on this situation (and also to blow off some steam).
We used to work for a large national stationery company in the print side. We built up a large database of artwork and customers and things were good. The stationery company decided they didn't want a print department due to machine overheads and maintenance costs, so we were contracted to do most of their print work.
We took the artwork and customer database and continued to print for this company for a few years. Gradually they began to move some of the print to other print companies closer to their headquarters and the relationship started to deteriorate due to them not doing so well in the stationery side. Their ordering techniques became more aggressive in trying to reduce our pricing and to increase the hold they had over us.
Meanwhile, some of the reps from the stationery company left and started up their own stationery company. We agreed to give them preferential pricing and having some of the artwork helped them to take some of the business away from the other company.
As time went on, the original stationery company reneged on payments and became even more aggressive. We decided that enough was enough and told them we were not going to deal with them any more. They still owe us a substantial amount of money.
Anyway, the problem we now have is that the new stationery company started this kind of behaviour to us.
The biggest issue I have is that they are demanding that with every order they give us, we have to supply the print ready artwork to them for their 'files' and so that if they decide to get it printed elsewhere, they can.
Because they are our biggest client, we need the work! However, I feel uncomfortable giving them the artwork knowing that they may eventually take the work elsewhere. They make it clear that if we don't do this then we won't get the work.
We are a small company and in hindsight we should have gone after the customers ourselves, but we just don't have the resources. Unfortunately we have put all our eggs in one basket.
We have slowly been building our own client base, but the other company covers around 75% of our work, and we couldn't do without them at the moment.
Sorry to have such a long post.
If you're still awake, I'd love to hear your views.
Cheers,
Graeme
I just wanted to get the general view on this situation (and also to blow off some steam).
We used to work for a large national stationery company in the print side. We built up a large database of artwork and customers and things were good. The stationery company decided they didn't want a print department due to machine overheads and maintenance costs, so we were contracted to do most of their print work.
We took the artwork and customer database and continued to print for this company for a few years. Gradually they began to move some of the print to other print companies closer to their headquarters and the relationship started to deteriorate due to them not doing so well in the stationery side. Their ordering techniques became more aggressive in trying to reduce our pricing and to increase the hold they had over us.
Meanwhile, some of the reps from the stationery company left and started up their own stationery company. We agreed to give them preferential pricing and having some of the artwork helped them to take some of the business away from the other company.
As time went on, the original stationery company reneged on payments and became even more aggressive. We decided that enough was enough and told them we were not going to deal with them any more. They still owe us a substantial amount of money.
Anyway, the problem we now have is that the new stationery company started this kind of behaviour to us.
The biggest issue I have is that they are demanding that with every order they give us, we have to supply the print ready artwork to them for their 'files' and so that if they decide to get it printed elsewhere, they can.
Because they are our biggest client, we need the work! However, I feel uncomfortable giving them the artwork knowing that they may eventually take the work elsewhere. They make it clear that if we don't do this then we won't get the work.
We are a small company and in hindsight we should have gone after the customers ourselves, but we just don't have the resources. Unfortunately we have put all our eggs in one basket.
We have slowly been building our own client base, but the other company covers around 75% of our work, and we couldn't do without them at the moment.
Sorry to have such a long post.
If you're still awake, I'd love to hear your views.
Cheers,
Graeme
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Alisonp
Messages count : 27Likes count : 0Registration : 17 November 2009Graeme, I'm not sure whether I can do much more than sympathise here, since I'm in a different field from you - would you perhaps be better off asking this question in the Design forum?
I'm a translator. I use a programme called translation memory, which stores each sentence I translate and my translation of it, so it can recall the sentence if it appears again and tell me how I translated it last time so I don't have to translate it again (this happens not infrequently with updates of manuals and suchlike). Now, some clients are perfectly fine about this, but others - I've yet to encounter one personally, but I will eventually, no doubt about it - will insist on you providing them with a computer file containing all these translated sentence pairs so they can use it in their own translation memory system. Some of them do indeed just want it for backup purposes, but others will certainly use it so that next time they can perhaps pass it on to another translator who can undercut you, which sounds similar to your situation. A lot of my freelancer colleagues refuse point-blank to hand over these files; others will, but only for an additional charge (usually a little lower than the cost of the client taking the original and translated Word documents and doing it themselves, which they can do if they're that keen). Very few will do it for free. Obviously, I don't know whether that way of working would also work in your field.
One thing that I do wonder about, though, is what happens, contractually speaking, to the copyright of your work? Does it remain with you, with the customer merely receiving a licence to use it, or do you actually assign it to the customer once payment has been received? If it's the former, then do they have any right to pass it on to another company? I'm no expert on copyright law, but I know of other translators who, when payment hasn't been forthcoming, have contacted the client, or even the end-client, to point out that they have no right to use the translation until payment has been made. Perhaps this might even be a valid approach in relation to your original client, since they still haven't paid you? Do you have a free legal advice service you could contact about this?
HTHFreelance technical translator, French and German into English