Should you be friends with your clients?

Yes. For the most part, my clients are my friends.

This philosophy goes against most people’s advice. We freelancers are told that we have to maintain a professional distance. That we have to ask for money, which you don’t do with friends. That we might even have to our your clients — or they might have to fire us — and that doesn’t go well when you’re friends.

I get it. And yet, I am friends with most of my clients.

Why my clients are my friends

Since I am a ghostwriter and editor, my relationships with clients tend to extend over many months. And I am a sole proprietor, meaning I do nearly all the work — not only what clients are paying for, but fielding leads, establishing relationships, and billing — myself. These factors lead to a lot more connection with the clients than most freelancers have.

A significant number of my clients start out as my friends. They’re people I’ve worked with or interacted with over the years before we begin this professional relationship. They trust me. So of course, we’re going to stay friends over the course of the work I do with them.

But regardless of whether they were friends before or not, they’re putting their dreams in my hands. Books matter to people, and not just professionally. They matter emotionally. These clients’ put their best ideas, along with hundreds of hours of effort, into books that become a major milestone in their lives. I accept the emotional responsibility of treating those efforts and dreams with respect and empathy.

I share honest (some would say brutally honest) feedback with these people. That works best if you have established a relationship and an understanding of who each author is, what is important to them, and how they think about the world. This is one reason that as I work with author, I spend time learning about them as people, and take time to help them learn about me. This activity is not “billable” — it would be very awkward if I billed for chatting about our lives — but it’s essential to the success of our working relationship.

As time goes on, I often find that authors’ dreams become important to me. Yes, I want to help you fix people’s messed up assumptions about strategy. I want you to tell the story of how you triumphed over adversity as an entrepreneur. I want you to educate the world about better ways to understand truth and data. I want to help you help people become visible online and improve the world. Your goals become important to me.

I choose projects where I like the client and I can believe in the project. I like a lot of kinds of people, and I’m fascinating by so many of the goals that nonfiction books can accomplish. My clients are diverse — not just by gender, race, and age, but by how they define success. By being open-minded, I can embrace a lot of these folks’ ambitions and make them, at least a little bit, my own. So of course they become my friends.

If I could never be friends with you — if you’re an ass, or if your book project is trivial or evil — then it’s not going to be a good fit for us to work together, and we shouldn’t.

I know there are limits. These aren’t my closest friends. I’m still going to charge them a high rate based on my expertise, and I’m still going to ask for more money when a project goes out of scope. I’m still going to tell people things they don’t want to hear. These are things that other kinds of friendships don’t include, and I’m certainly aware of that.

Even so, when your clients are your professional friends, making a living is a lot more fun.