Posts Tagged ‘client relations’

Crossing the Rio de la Plata after a week-long “hol­iday” in Uruguay, I real­ized how much the way I spend my money has changed. Now that I no longer need to steal film from the gro­cery store or cal­cu­late the exact per-grain price of a loaf of bread, I find I’m more willing to spend a little bit more money on things. For example, I’ll no longer buy a pair of shoes that retails for less than $100, although I’m almost insistent on only allowing for new shoe pur­chases when the afore­men­tioned shoe is on sale. I’d also rather pay a little more for a direct flight, or a faster ferry, or even the con­veni­ence of a cab to the air­port. While I’m sure this isn’t sur­prising to most people, I’ve always been per­petu­ally cheap. It took some time before I real­ized that price and value aren’t always as dir­ectly related as I thought.

The first web­site I ever built, as a gradu­ated pro­fes­sional, cost my client a whop­ping $300. I wish I could say I was six­teen when I did it, but I was twenty-two, working a full-time job and freel­an­cing on the side. Looking back, it’s no sur­prise when my first year of busi­ness after quit­ting my job landed me in debt. I’ve always had a policy of keeping my expenses as low as pos­sible, but char­ging $20 an hour simply didn’t cover such non-tax-deductible neces­sities as “eating on a daily basis”.

When I first started out, my biggest mis­take, bar nothing, was char­ging too little. My inten­tions were good—I wanted to save my cli­ents money, and I wanted to provide quality design for a low price. What I failed to realize, of course, was that would become a dif­fi­cult task when I quit my day job to run my busi­ness full-time. Sure, my cli­ents were happy, but I was broke, over­worked, and stressed out.
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Giving good feed­back is integral to good design. While I’m sure all designers—myself included–would love to just whip up a gor­geous design without asking anyone else for their opinion, good design can be made better by working within lim­it­a­tions and incor­por­ating the feed­back of others. And of course, we gen­er­ally want to make our cli­ents happy and give them what they want. Accord­ingly, any designer worth his salt will make sure that the design pro­cess includes his client: we make mockups, ask for feed­back, then refine, ask for more feed­back, refine, ask for more, refine—and so on a so forth, until everyone’s happy (in theory).

Some­times everyone really is happy, and the end result is beau­tiful and usable and made of design-love. Other times, though, one of us is going to end up miser­able, and the design can end up so off-target, messy, awk­ward, or down­right ugly, that your designer won’t put it in his port­folio. That’s a bad scene. In order to make the feed­back pro­cess as effi­cient as pos­sible, I’ve rounded up a few tips from years of going through this pro­cess with a rather sub­stan­tial number of clients—of both the dream and the night­mare variety.

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Walking home the other day, I saw a new tattoo shop had opened up near my house. “Classy Tattoo Par­lour”, the sign pro­claimed in loud, all-caps serifed let­ters. Of course, it was in a strip mall, so even if it were the classiest joint in town, full of ladies in bee­hives smoking from mile-long cigar­ette holders and men in fine suits drinking scotch (it’s pos­sible that “classy” and “debauchery” are con­fused in my mind), there’s some­thing of a dis­con­nect there.

It got me thinking about how often com­panies mis­rep­resent them­selves, some­times inten­tion­ally, and some­times acci­dent­ally. In a world where we all have less “face time” with companies—I’ve worked with all kinds of cli­ents I’ve never met, and some whose loc­a­tions I’m not sure about at all—it’s easy to see where our poten­tial cli­ents might not be as trusting of us as they ought to be. If a cus­tomer doesn’t trust a com­pany, he’s unlikely to give the com­pany any business.

So, how do you go about estab­lishing your credibility?

1. Answer your emails, please!

This has got to be one of the most valu­able things that you can do for your busi­ness, espe­cially if your sales are mostly gen­er­ated via the internet. Email is the method by which most cli­ents will reach you, and if their first few ques­tions go unanswered for lengthy periods of time, they’re going to think that this will always be the case. If you’re working with someone who’s halfway across the globe, email com­mu­nic­a­tion is sud­denly ten­fold more important, and if you don’t respond to your emails, your cli­ents will simply assume that you’ve run away with their money and pro­jects. I emailed a com­pany a simple ques­tion about their product three days ago and have still heard nothing; at this point, I’m highly unlikely to pur­chase any­thing from them. Even a simple “we got your email, we’re looking into it, and we’ll be in touch soon” might have suf­ficed, but it’s simply irre­spons­ible to ignore an email for any more than forty-eight hours.

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Four years ago, when I started out my busi­ness (or whenever it was—I always get fuzzy on the dates) I was char­ging all of $10 an hour (some­times less, as was the case in my first job). Looking back, it’s no sur­prise, really, that by the end of my first solo year I was so broke. Tech­nic­ally, it was more than min­imum wage, so I thought it would suf­fice. Of course, I forgot that around 50% of my time is unbil­lable, which has a rather dra­matic effect, either on your “hourly” rate, or on the number of hours a week you need to work in order to be profitable.

There’s a maxim to pri­cing freel­ance work that goes some­thing like this: you can have two of the fol­lowing three ele­ments: fast, cheap, and good. When I first started out, I tried to be all three. Nat­ur­ally, there ended up being some com­promise, most not­ably with respect to the “fast” and “good” ele­ments of the equa­tion. As I grew as a designer and a busi­nessperson (it still sounds funny calling myself that), the scales shifted: my prices increased as the quality of my work and pro­cess increased.

For some time, I struggled with the idea of offering cli­ents their choice between fast and cheap, but I’m coming to realize that this, too, is imprac­tical on a larger scale—I’m so con­sist­ently busy that it simply doesn’t make sense for me to take on very many lower-paying gigs, regard­less of how spread out their timelines may be. I really prefer working on pro­jects with shorter timelines, anyway: the work-to-reward cycle is so much shorter (and thereby more grat­i­fying), and a more rapid cycle of devel­op­ment means that the pro­ject remains fresher in my mind—I don’t forget details or need to re-learn any­thing as we pro­gress. So, unless it’s a case ofhey-I-really-did-need-this-yesterday, in which case a pri­ority place­ment and rapid-turnaround can be secured with a rush fee (although I’ve found most cli­ents with urgent pro­jects sud­denly decide it can wait a little, after all, when they dis­cover that it’ll cost more), “fast” is non-negotiable. Quality, nat­ur­ally, is even less negotiable

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Bad cli­ents are notorious among designers. We com­plain about them con­stantly, we’ve devoted a hilarious-yet-heartbreaking web­site to them, and we swap horror stories like badges of honour, rolling our eyes in empathy and disgust.

We spend so much time com­plaining about the bad cli­ents that it’s some­times easy to over­look the good cli­ents. Lately, I’ve been working with a few really great cli­ents, and I’ve been so happy because of it. Where a bad client can make you feel as though you’re losing your soul, a good client reminds you of why you fell in love with design in the first place and makes you feel as though you’re doing a good job. It’s the sort of warm-fuzzy feeling I asso­ciate with boys who bring me flowers and strangers com­pli­menting me on my shoes.

Win­ning your designer’s love, regard­less of any other factors, will mean that you will receive a level of ser­vice and quality that sur­passes that most Trouble­some Cli­ents receive. When I love a client and feel that my client respects me as a pro­fes­sional, I invest more of my mental ener­gies into their pro­ject. A good client makes you want to do an amazing job, where a bad client exper­i­ence will often just make you want to finish as fast as pos­sible and get the heck out.

So, how do you go about making sure you’re the greatest client ever, and ensuring your designer feels as pas­sionate about your pro­ject as you do? Here, a few tips culled dir­ectly from my Dream Clients:

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So since I no longer have internet at home, I’ve become a bit of a con­nois­seur of free wi-fi zones, altern­ately known as “a vag­a­bond with an expensive laptop”. I usu­ally tend to alternate between the lib­rary, a few coffee shops, and the train sta­tion, and I have spe­cific guidelines about what makes for a good place: it should be rel­at­ively quiet & empty, it should have lots of power out­lets that people don’t mind me plug­ging into, and the people shouldn’t get cross with me when I’m there for eight hours and only buy a coffee. (Though admit­tedly, I try to buy a coffee at least every three or four hours, as I’m sure it counts as a utility expense.) (more…)

So con­trary to what the local paper reported, I am not, in actu­ality, a firm made up of three people, one of whom is named “Dinah LeChaton”. Dinah has actu­ally been missing since November, and Marigold returned to Ottawa, where she may con­tinue doing some client rela­tions work. I decided it was high time to bring on new staff. So I picked up Kal­liope, an eager new talent whose skills include get­ting her­self tangled in plastic bags, finding a lap to curl up on even when said lap is covered in laptop, and elim­in­ating the evil mon­sters who live under­neath bedsheets.

I am, nat­ur­ally, enam­oured. (more…)