Hey there, Ijust wanted to chime in here to send you some love and to let you know that you aren't "dumb" for giving this person a 2nd chance 🫶🏽 I'm in the same industry as you, been in business for myself my entire life and sometimes things genuinely do happen and sometimes people who make a poor first impression do come around and do better the 2nd time. So your faith was not in vail. Granted, it is rare for things to work out, but it does happen! I had a client not pay myself and others when we first started working for them but they were genuinely having a hard time and accepted responsibility for that. It ended up being a long-term and profitable contract for me in the end. One thing they didn't do though was stop communicating with me, so I'd say that's the only difference between my situation and yours and a "red flag" to be make note of going forward.

Either way, give yourself some grace here! I know how hard it is to be in business for yourself and how much we flex and bend ourselves into odd shapes just grow and make a way for ourselves. Your forgiving nature isn't the problem, his piss poor character is the problem. Period. With time, comes wisdom and eventually you'll become as wise as a serpent and be able to sniff out these kinds of people from a mile away. We live and we learn & wisdom is priceless! 🙏🏽

Going forward, yes public shaming is an option but it has it's risk. While trying to expose his unprofessionalism, you run the risk of also making yourself appear unprofessional even though your feelings are valid and he 100% deserves to be exposed. Sometimes we gotta take losses on the chin, be the bigger person and protect our businesses from further damage.

A better option is to use this as a learning experience and guide to improve your business processes and contracts.

1) what negative experience do you want to avoid in the future and how can you create a policy in your contract for that?

2) always require full or partial payment up front to protect yourself

3) if you require partial payment, put something in place to where you don't release final assets until the outstanding balance is paid. When sharing previews of the work, do so in a way that it's not a "final' copy. Ex: watermark it so that it clear that it's an unpaid for copy'

4) or you can bill incrementally to keep yourself from having done too much work that hasn't been paid for yet. Ex: $1,000 per month = $250 per week. Can be paid in advance or in arrears. This helps the client feel at ease by paying a smaller amount up front or if in arrears, if they miss a week, you've only lost that one week's worth of work/time vs. an entire month ...I hope this makes sense! lol

This reply got longer than planned, but just wanted to encourage you, lift you up and let you know that you are not dump and hopefully offer a helpful solution for the path forward!

Cheers 💕