9 Boundaries You Should Set With New Clients

These life-changing boundaries will make your business WAY more fun to run 🏃

Burnout is real—and you know that if you’ve ever tried to wash your hands with a slice of pizza. 🍕

When it comes to running a creative business, or any kind of (omg, this is so much WORK) business, burnout doesn’t happen once a lifetime.

It happens once a decade.

Maybe it even happens once a year. Isn’t that why we’re all on Canva? To design revenge logos for some other alternate life we could *almost* see ourselves living?

(Nope, sure don’t own the domain www.funnyobituaries.com or anything. NOPE, NOT MEEEEE. *looks around room 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬*)

In case you don’t know this, my name is Ash Ambirge and I have a lot of problems.

Years and years and years ago, right around the dark age of dialing-up like peasants, I started a creative copywriting company that specialized in making the internet more fun to read. During that decade, I wrote a gorilla-ton of words for other people & companies, most of whom also had a lot of problems.

I’m mostly kidding about that?

But also, not kidding, because when you work for yourself you also work with humans, and apparently human interaction is not something they teach in school.

So, during that time I learned a lot about managing other people’s fickle-ass weirdness. Can that be a phrase? I mean, we all have our own fickle-ass weirdness we’re battling. For instance, I refuse to wash a coffee mug that has something floating in it. Even if it’s cheese. Even if I logically know it’s just cheese. That cheese has lost its dignity. It’s given up being cheese and is now just an existential crisis in dairy form.

Imagine what a treat I am as a client!

But in all seriousness, I learned real quick about the beauty—and necessity—of something I call “burnout bumpers.”

Cute name, right? But don’t be fooled: these things are ferocious little boundaries you gotta put in place in order to run a sane little biz (since remember, there are humans you gotta talk to).

So today, I wanted to tell you about 9 of my favorite, must-have burnout bumpers that will help you work with clients (healthily & happily!) without spontaneously combusting into a pile of stress confetti.

Your life is never going to be the same.

You might even start to like dogs.

And they will also make you more money. (Just because this is the internet and apparently I’m supposed to promise you that.)

Behold: Ash’s 9 Commandments for Working With Clients Without Murder or Spells