Working With Clients: What They Don’t Tell You

Most client problems don’t arrive directly — they arrive through the job agency. In fairness, the agency is usually just the messenger. They’re trying to keep the client happy while also keeping you on board, and clients often have a surprisingly hazy understanding of how consultants actually work.

That doesn’t make the problems any less frustrating. Here’s what to expect.

The Contract Offered as an Annual Salary

You’ve seen the ad: ‘12-month fixed-term contract — £45,000 per annum.’ This is the worst of both worlds. You get a permanent employee’s salary, but with the certainty that in twelve months you’ll be out of a job and back on the market.

Sometimes this comes from genuine ignorance — a client who has never hired a consultant before and doesn’t know how it works. Sometimes it’s a client trying their luck. Either way, a decent agency should be advising the client before it gets to you. Avoid these contracts.

The Annual Salary Converted to an Hourly Rate

A variation on the above: the client takes a salary for the role, divides it by the number of working hours in a year, and presents the result as a day rate or hourly rate. It doesn’t work. Consultants aren’t cheaper permanent employees — they’re paid a market rate that reflects the different nature of the arrangement.

Again, the agency should be sorting this out. If they’re not, that tells you something about the agency too.

Hourly Rate vs Daily Rate

I’ve always worked on an hourly rate. It’s transparent and easy to verify. If you’re offered a daily rate, make sure you understand what you’re actually agreeing to before you sign anything:

• How many hours does the daily rate assume? An eight-hour day is standard. A ten-hour day is not — and the difference matters when you’re billing 20+ days a month.
• Will you be paid for hours worked beyond the agreed daily total? If the answer is ‘we’ll sort out time off in lieu’, translate that as no. Get it in writing or assume it isn’t happening.
• What happens if you work fewer hours in a given day? Is there a minimum billing requirement?

The Inflated Ego Client

Some clients — usually from well-known firms — seem to believe you should consider it a privilege to work for them and accept a lower rate accordingly. It doesn’t work like that.

Back to the plumber analogy: if a well-known politician or celebrity wanted work done on their house, the plumber wouldn’t charge less because of who they are. If anything, the plumber might charge more. The prestige of the client name is not a currency that pays your mortgage.

When this happens, let the agency know your view. They need to manage the client’s expectations, and they can’t do that if you just quietly accept it.

The Client Who Wants to Negotiate Your Rate Down

This one never fails to irritate me. We’re not graduates looking for our first break. We have years of specialist knowledge and experience, and we expect to be paid market rate for it.

The analogy I always use: someone walks into a Mercedes dealership, looks at a fully spec’d model, is told it costs £120,000, and says they can’t afford it. So why are they in a Mercedes dealership? They knew the price range before they walked in. If you want something cheaper, go to a different garage.

A client who genuinely can’t afford your rate shouldn’t be approaching you in the first place. Walking away is not only acceptable — it’s the right thing to do.

The Client Who Doesn’t Understand Flexible Working

Covid changed the landscape here, and it’s worth acknowledging that directly. Before 2020, asking for flexible hours or the ability to work remotely occasionally was something you had to negotiate carefully and justify. Now, hybrid working is the norm for a large proportion of the UK workforce — ONS figures put it at around 28% of workers in a regular hybrid arrangement as of 2025, with over 40% having worked remotely in some form during 2024.

Most clients have adapted. Many will assume some degree of flexibility is on the table without it needing to be negotiated. That’s progress.

The problem is that ‘most clients have adapted’ is not the same as ‘all clients have adapted’. You will still encounter the occasional manager operating on pre-pandemic assumptions: fixed hours, five days a week on-site, eyebrows raised if you want to leave early on a Friday. They are the old school type that works on “bums on seats”. That type hasn’t disappeared — they’ve just become rarer and, frankly, harder to justify.

There’s also a newer variant: the client who accepted hybrid working during Covid under pressure, quietly resents it, and is now looking for opportunities to row it back. Watch for the difference between a client whose culture genuinely supports flexibility and one that tolerates it grudgingly and will use any pretext to change that.

If you’re working away from home, the original issue still applies. Travelling back at weekends, leaving at lunchtime on Friday, arriving Monday morning rather than Sunday night — these are entirely reasonable requests for a consultant who is based elsewhere. The difference now is that you can also make a reasonable case for working remotely on certain days entirely, rather than just adjusting travel logistics.

Reasonable flexibility:

• Early Friday finish
• Late Monday start
• Longer days midweek

These are entirely reasonable requests for a consultant who is based elsewhere. The difference now is that you can also make a reasonable case for working remotely on certain days entirely, rather than just adjusting travel logistics.

The rules of engagement

• Don’t assume. Just because the client talks a good game about flexibility in the interview stage doesn’t mean it survives contact with your actual manager on day one.
• Get it written into the contract. Not a verbal agreement, not an email saying ‘we’re fine with that’ — actual contract terms specifying your working arrangement. This is as important now as it was before Covid, and possibly more so given the number of companies currently pushing return-to-office mandates.
• Be specific about what you want. ‘Flexibility’ means different things to different people. If you need to leave by 3pm on Fridays to make a train, say that. If you want two days a week remote, say that. Vague agreements produce vague outcomes.
• If there’s any chance of a management change during the contract, the contractual protections matter even more. A new manager isn’t bound by what their predecessor informally agreed to. A contract term, they are.

The Client Who Doesn’t Understand Monthly Hours

Closely related: most contracts are based on an agreed number of hours per month — typically 160. If you travel home for a long weekend and work a shorter week, you’ll catch up the following week. That’s the basis on which the contract works.

Some managers object to seeing more than a set number of hours in any single week, even if the monthly total is correct. This is unreasonable, but it happens. The fix is the same: make sure the contract explicitly states that hours are agreed on a monthly basis, and that weekly variation is permitted within that total. If it’s not written down, you have no comeback.