What kind of polite answer should I give to a client who visited us on Friday afternoon (29 Dec) and expected us to present him the finished website on Monday (1 Jan)?

// 1st Jan is public holiday and we made ourselves clear to every client that our office is closed on both Saturday and Sunday

I'm sorry but unfortunately we're closed on saturday and sunday and 1st is a public holiday?

...which is what you wrote obviously

@Andi our sarcasms cancel each other like fire and water 🤣

It really doesn't fucking matter that we missed your deadline, a 4 day website, weekend or not, is going to suck asshole

@CurseMeSlowly Fire and water?

Are you saying we should get a bit steamy together? ;)

@Andi 😏 😏 😏

It depends on the client and the work involved. Is this a priority deliverable that absolutely needs to go out by January 1st (for example, media buy on the client side, time specific events that the website is a dependency for, 2017 budgets that need to be used by the end of the year, etc) ?

The existing relationship between your business and the client is important here as well. If failing to deliver this work puts your client business in jeopardy then you have to make it work.

If this is something that can definitely wait or MUST definitely wait until the new year (not enough time for QA could negatively impact your client’s business), then you have to work with your client service team, project manager or whoever is responsible for managing the client so that they can set the right expectations and communicate the risks of pushing out a website over the holidays with limited resources and not enough time for the process required to provide them with the quality of product that suits their business goals.

@charlitos sadly my client is just an ignorant fuckbug ... So 🙄

@CurseMeSlowly Let your client know that multiple vacations have been booked for the end of the year and you will not be able to cancel them. You can however try to allocate some team members to see if they can cancel their vacation packages (which are non refundable this late into the year), yours included. If this is possible, you can still probably make it work if the client is willing to pay for these cancellations, as well as 2X the hourly rate which is what you pay your team when they work over the holidays. That being said, given the limited time available you still can’t guarantee the work done will meet their standards so a descoping exercise will need to take place today at 2pm with them (meeting invite already sent) to narrow down a solution that can be built in 3 days. Your client also have to make themselves available to review and approve the work potentially on December 31st, you will need their help with UAT review throughout that last day so that you can make it work for January 1st.