Posts Tagged ‘client relations’

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…)