Bad Clients

It took a few projects to teach me to stay away from bad clients.
So before signing up any project , I advise you to spend a few minutes, hours or days  talking to your potential clients and get to know them .If you see the following signs you might want  not to work with them.


These are the few bad signs:
1-Bargaining dollars and cents with you right from the beginning.
2-No experience in dealing with architects, contractors or building projects.
3-Unrealistic schedule.
4-Unrealistic budgets.
5-Very high expectation. Expecting perfection,but has no real budget to support it.
6-Cannot really define what they want or expect.
7-Mentally unstable, easily stressed out.
8-Check or call you every 30 minutes.
9-Rude.
10-Ask you for discount. Tell you there will be future projects.
11-Bad mouth about other architects.
12-Bad credit ( yes you need to check their credit histroy)
13-Expect you to guarantee the work.
14-Playing good cop and bad cop games with you.
15-Knows someone in City Hall who can expedite things.
16-Sleazy. 
17-Don't trust your judgement




If you have any bad client stories , please share.

Architect As Developer

I think the best way for architect to gain control over design, reponsibility and making profits is by a being a developer/builder. Without it all we ended up with is a set of documents which the clients wants to pay zero for it and their lawyers can find all kinds of issues with it. 
There are many successful and rich architect/builders. The top 4 that came to mind over here at USA are :
John Portman (http://portmanusa.com/founder.html)
David Hovey http://www.optimaweb.com/Company/corporate_profile.html
Jonathan Segal. http://www.jonathansegalarchitect.com/
Isadore Sharp ( Canadian)  http://www.fourseasons.com/book/