 Welcome. As you mentioned, my name is Karen Keane and I work as a freelance WordPress developer as well as a project manager for other people's projects. I got my start as a project manager actually at an agency and I spent a number of years working within that agency setting and then eventually moved over into being a freelancer because I wanted to be able to give my clients a little bit more of that personal touch that you can do when you're on your own. But while I was working in the agency setting I was able to learn a lot about client communication from some of the different managers and COO's that I worked with and from that foundation I've been able to move on from there and continue to learn more and more about how to set up good client communications that way these projects that we're running are able to go through smoothly. In addition to working as a developer I'm also a podcast and audio drama creator. I got a degree in film screenwriting specifically so I like to bring a lot of storytelling into my development projects and tend to focus on that a lot. So that's a little bit about me and basically where I come from. So as a quick question to the room, how many of you are actually either working with clients directly or through like a project manager sometime? Okay, awesome. How many of you are having some conflict or some trouble with this clients from time to time? Yeah, yeah, okay that's kind of what I was expecting. It's super, like this is just a very common thing with freelance projects especially as you're talking to clients or working with clients there's always going to be some elements of conflict and the question is how do we help to avoid that or make that better? Alright, so we're going to start off with work sure would be great if not for the clients. I have heard that phrase said by so many people I have even uttered it myself where we love what we do. We love designing or developing or working with analytics or developing UX. Whatever it is that you do, you're in it because you love doing it and getting into these sticky situations with your clients just makes you miserable because it is miserable. I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with the wonderful website called Clients from Hell. I love them. They get user submissions from different people who tell their stories of these kind of horror stories with clients. I pulled a few of those from here for us to look at today. But oftentimes our clients do. They just drive us crazy and it feels like maybe they're coming from Hell. They either have a serious lack of knowledge such as this lovely example where they feel like our target audience is male to female age zero and up. Which is good. They excluded fetuses I guess so that's a step in the right direction of audience definition. Or they might have really horrible ideas like here I think that they should say stuff because kids say stuff. Or with feedback that is absolutely impossible to use. I was talking with some of my developer friends in preparation for this and asked what was some of the most useless feedback they received. And one person, she works actually as a costume designer but she had this great story where someone came back to her and said, well I like it. Can you make it 10% cooler? I'm not really sure what 10% cooler looks like and how that's different from 20% cooler. But she worked with it and tried to make that work. But with all of these stories basically what we're looking at is that we are in a situation as freelancers where we are constantly in conflict with our clients and that's not anything that we like. It makes us miserable, it makes them miserable and we do not enjoy that space. As I've been working with clients and also speaking with other freelancers I found that there were four main reasons that we end up in conflict with our clients. And here's what they are. The first one is that deadlines aren't met. Either we don't meet a deadline or they don't meet a deadline and that tends to cause some conflict. The other one is adding extras. Clients ask for, oh could you just add this thing or could you just add that thing and you want to be nice and so you say yes to the first thing because you think oh it's just going to take ten minutes and then there's another ten minutes and then another ten minutes and then before you know it you've added hours and hours of unpaid work to your project and that's not a good space to be in. Another one is a lack of understanding. This is huge. Clients, clients ask for things and they just don't understand what they're asking for. Either they think they have an amazing idea that's actually not, for example we use some or they will ask us to do something that they think is a very, very simple change because of their mind it is, but it actually takes hours and hours to develop some functionality out. And then the last reason is fear. There is a lot of fear in our clients and we may not be always aware of that. But the reason that the clients hire us is because we are the experts. We know what's going on with building WordPress. We understand development and design. We understand online strategy and they don't to the same extent. And that's a somewhat scary place to be in because they're paying sometimes thousands of dollars for something that they're not even 100% sure how it works. They don't know if they're going to get what they want. They don't know if they're going to get what they need. And so because of that fear it starts to create some undesirable communication patterns controlling or micromanaging or just getting really demanding all the time. And being able to recognize that as a fear response is really helpful in finding ways to help to eliminate those kinds of negative interactions that we have with our clients. All right, so the question is then what do we do? So we've talked about how client relationships can be tricky and difficult to manage and we're going to then jump into what we can do. One thing that unfortunately we can't do is there is no magic button that just makes it better. I wish that it was, but we can't actually change what anybody else does. The only thing we have control over is what we do. And the good news is that there is actually a lot that we can do in order to take control of client relationships to be strong and compassionate leaders in those spaces and ultimately to craft a better experience. So along those lines we are going to look at three steps to create better clients. Now my father was a public speaker so growing up I was told that you must do things in groups of three and they all must start with the same letter. So you are welcome. I have created a properties with brilliant dynamic device for you all today. And we are going to look at expectations, edges which is my key word for boundaries and education. With expectations we're going to talk about how we set expectations, what sorts of expectations should be set and why it's important to do that. The main reason being that human beings across the board tend to handle things better when they know what to expect. Even if you have something really really difficult in your future, if you know that it's coming you can prepare yourself for it and then that process is going to go much more smoothly. Boundaries is really important particularly because it creates a culture of respect within the relationship that you're building with your client. If you do not respect your own boundaries they will not respect your boundaries. And so by setting the beginning of the relationship with respect by using boundaries everything begins to run much more smoothly. And then finally we're going to look at education. As I was mentioning a lot of conflict comes from just a simple lack of understanding. Our clients don't know everything that they need to know and it's not their job to know if that's why we're here. So our job in addition to helping to deliver a beautifully created WordPress site or beautiful design or whatever it might be that you're working on with your clients it is our job to also respectfully teach them what it is that we're doing for them and how it is that they're going to be able to use that to become more successful in their business or organization. Alright so we're going to get started on setting expectations. We're mostly going to camp out here today. Setting expectations is probably the single most helpful thing that we can do as we're seeking to find a better way to relate to our clients. So let's start off by talking about why expectations matter. So there's two things that are really helpful to understanding why we should even bother setting expectations. So the first is giving a big picture. It's important at the beginning of every project that you very clearly lay out the big picture of what's going to be happening in that project. You go from beginning to end and you let your client know exactly what it is that you're planning to do. Now you don't have to go into the super fine granular detail. I will lock this up in Photoshop and I will use this many layers of Photoshop. That's not important. But do let them know this is when we're going to work on strategy and this is what I will give you at the end of that strategy and then we'll move into design and then to development and you kind of lay the whole process out for them. The reason to do this is it's letting your client know that you know what's going on and they understand that you are in control of the process. And so that helps to minimize some of that controlling behavior that we see in a lot of our clients where they try to seize control or they'll try to break or manage us. A lot of that comes from them not knowing what the big picture is and so they feel like they have to drive the project forward when in actuality that's just not the case. The second one is feeling prepared. As I mentioned earlier it's easier to handle difficult things when you know that they're coming. And inevitably with every project there are going to be difficulties. The more experience you have the better you're going to be able to forward project when those difficulties are. But just the ones that you already do know about you can begin to help them understand what difficult things might be coming up and how they can handle that. Alright so let's talk about then what expectations to set. So there's four main areas of expectation setting specifically for design development projects that are very very useful. The first is setting schedules and deadlines. So we need to in this area clearly communicate to them what our deadlines are and what their deadlines are. So it's not just about okay I will have a finished website to you by this date but it's at what point will these different deliverables be handed to you when do I need feedback from them. Because the client deadlines are just as important as ours. The other thing that's really important to do is clearly communicate from the beginning what's going to happen if a deadline is missed. So for instance if you have clients who are writing their own content which often happens they will have to have all that content to you by a certain point in time in order for the project to continue to move forward as planned. Or often than not I have found that clients will almost always miss that deadline. Clients getting new content on time is probably one of the single biggest issues with building websites to the point where I actually mostly don't let my clients write their own content anymore. But what happens is it's important to let them know what happens if they miss that deadline. For instance it's a very logical thing for a client to think oh I'm a week late on my deadline of getting client content in. Then the website will also be pushed back by one week. But maybe you have another project scheduled and you actually don't have time to do it to leave after the original launch date. And so actually if they miss their deadline by one week it's going to push their launch back by a month. These are very reasonable things that might happen to communicate that upfront so that the clients know ahead of time oh this deadline is really important because it's not just me losing a week it's me losing a month. And so by communicating all of these myths what happens if something is missed what happens if something goes wrong upfront is very helpful. It also then keeps you from seeming punitive later on down the road when that inevitably happens and then you come back and say oh well you missed it by a week and the launch date is pushed back by a month that's going to cause conflict if the person doesn't go ahead of time then that's what's coming up. Another one is deliverables and scope. So this one's also super important. Before you begin working on the project it is vital that you write down in writing exactly what it is that you're going to be giving to them and saying I will build you a website is not enough of a deliverable. It needs to be I will build you a website with a homepage that has a rotating slider on it and there will be an about page and a contact form and also oh you want like three pages of the different aspects of your organization great we will include those three pages and clearly lay out what is going to be given to them will you have to do custom design work or will they be providing all of the design will they be writing content for you or will you have to be writing up the content on those pages get that all nailed down in writing before you start the project so that way if you start to get into the situation where the client says oh actually could we add a page about you know an FAQ page then you can say yeah absolutely it's going to be this much extra and you're justified in being able to say that because you have a predefined list of deliverables the FAQ page is not on that list of deliverables so it's very easy to have the conversation about why someone needs to pay extra for those things that they're asking and then you get into less of that gray area where you're not quite sure how to tell people that next is involvement it's really important to set expectations for clients with how involved they're going to be in the project so if you're getting a simple migration like say they have their website on Squarespace and they want to put it on WordPress and they just want a straight transfer over clients are probably not going to need to be too involved like you get some login information and some server information from them and you can just work and give them the project at the end but if you're building something from scratch the client's going to have to be very involved they're going to need to be involved in strategy branding sessions if that's what you're doing if you are still pulling together exactly what sorts of pages need to be there they're going to have to be involved in that they may have to gather images from their business or they might have to sit down in an interview with you so that way you can gather from them all the important information about their business that you need to write out all of their content and so it's important to let the clients know how involved they're going to be because again the very reasonable expectation is I have signed the contract you will now build the thing but that's not always the case but they're not expected to know that they shouldn't know that, that's our job to let them know that this is actually any difficult situations that might arise and again it's hard to know exactly what that's going to be because those are different for each type of project that you're doing as well as for your individual workflow the more projects you know the more you're going to be able to anticipate where those difficult areas are some great examples of this are that I run into I work with a lot of non-profits and non-profits tend to have a board as a decision maker at a non-profit that's going to slow things down because you send something to them for approval they can't approve it until the whole board can get together and that means organizing people's schedules and what have you yes exactly the design by committee thing and so that's really difficult so if you know that you're working with a company whether it's not a single decision maker you're going to want to buffer the heck out of that schedule we'll talk about how you do that later another example is like I've been mentioning if the client has to be writing their own content let them know ahead of time that that's a very difficult thing to do and so they're going to need to plan for like twice the amount of time that they think that they're going to need to spend and again if you tell them that this is going to be difficult when inevitably it turns out that it is difficult they are less likely to be upset at you that it was hard because you told them ahead of time alright so moving on from there we're going to look at what happens when an expectation is not met so we never need to miss deadlines or misunderstand something but it's going to happen so here are some tips for how we can handle that it is their fault so if the client has missed a deadline or misunderstood something that we thought had been clearly explained what we want to do is very clearly and calmly lay out what was missed and then immediately follow that up with some sort of a positive plan for how to get back on track or a way to turn this unfortunate situation into an opportunity to do something better as the one pointing out the problem the great thing is that we are in a position of power to take charge of the tone and to set the expectation for how bad things get handled if we can do that in a very positive calm sort of way our clients are much more likely to respond in kind if we come at it in an accusatory you missed your deadline I guess there's nothing I can do about that then it's setting a tone of confrontation and apathy for the rest of the relationship and that's just something we want to avoid being aware that we are the leaders in this relationship is very important and being able to lead even in these situations of failed expectation is super important to maintaining positive relationships moving forward it is your fault only that you made a mistake don't try to make excuses don't be vague about it don't try to blame someone else or blame the weather or whatever it was clients will absolutely respect you more if you own your mistakes and apologize for them and then set out a plan for how you're going to make it right and that last part is really important don't just say I missed the deadline sorry but explain how you're going to either make up that lost time or how you're going to give them a discount because you've made a mistake or add an extra deliverable for you to charge once when I ended up missing a deadline because of personal things that came up I just wasn't able to do it I was working through them on some logo design so I just mocked up a business card that I said hey I'm really sorry that this happened free of charge here is this business card design that you're able to use and you don't need to pay for that and they weren't real they thought that was the best thing ever and they were not at all worried about the fact that I missed the deadline another great example of this actually just happened this month I just signed a new client for an author and I told her that I would have our strategy document and brand work done and then it turned out I needed to take them onto the east coast for a specialized hospital visit that she had to go on and that ended up being way more intense than I thought it was going to be and I had no time to get any work done so what I did in order with that is I did know that I was going to be going to the east coast and I thought that it was going to be a lot less stressful and that I would have more time to work on projects so I did tell her when we had been talking I just kind of dropped it into our conversation that oh yeah I'm going to be heading into the east coast and taking them off to the hospital what that did is let her know that something was coming up so that way when inevitably it did end up being a problem because I didn't think it would be a problem but then it was a problem but she already knew about it so then I was able to explain hey this was a lot harder than I had expected that it would be on me and so I'm not going to be able to hit this deadline I'm really sorry and by letting her know that the situation was coming in a very gentle kind of conversational way she was already kind of prepared that this maybe would happen it also keeps it from sounding like a lame excuse because she already knew before there was a problem that that was a situation instead of like I missed a deadline and I'm like this thing happened so that's helpful and then I also told her like hey I'm cleared out by next week and we're going to take care of getting caught back up and if we haven't told her this yet if we don't end up getting caught up because of this I'm going to give her a discount on the final project and that's just kind of how I'm handling that particular situation I'm going to bring her favorably to it and it's not really causing too much problems alright so these are some tools and tactics that we can use for setting expectations alright the first one that's super important is timelines these can be really simple and honestly simple is better because they're quicker for busy clients to read but we want to make sure that those timelines are very straightforward and be sure to include feedback periods in these timelines so usually if you're working on a project you're going to need to send stuff away for client approval before we move on to the next phase and this is a great expectation to set as well how long do your clients have to get you feedback is it a couple of days, is it a week is it two weeks, make sure that's clearly defined ahead of time so that way they know and then work that into your timeline so that way they can also see very clearly when I get my homepage mockup at this date I need to have feedback on what changes I want to have made by this date and that helps to keep everything above board and easy to do next is buffer that schedule so this is probably most important thing you can do for positive client relationships is buffering the schedule and I actually learned this while I was on film sets one of my jobs was to be the first assistant director and what the first assistant director does is they take all the shots, they figure out how long it's going to take to shoot those every single day and then they're on set making sure that everyone stays on time and what I learned to do was add in an hour or two extra buffers every day because inevitably things would start to run late what that did is it made sure that it set at people's expectations that they would be done with work at a certain time and usually we would wrap out half an hour early even though technically we were running an hour and a half late and so what that buffer did is it made people feel really positive because they were stoked they got off work half an hour early everybody's really excited about that instead of timing it exactly the way I thought it would probably go which would make everybody really upset because they were working an hour and a half late so using this buffer and technique is really helpful so let's say you think you're going to take a month to be able to turn around a website and buff that out to a month and a half and then if you finish early your clients will love you because you finished early that's awesome and then if you finish late which is actually then on time for what you told them then you're safe and you're covered and nothing really wrong has happened so buffering is a great tool to use to make sure that those client relationships go well specifically surrounding deadlines next is to collaborate on a list of deliverables and this is really important to do with your client together clients will if you sit down and you collaborate together they feel that their voices have been heard and that the things that they actually need are going to be included in their project so if you just hand them a list of deliverables there's going to be a little bit of that fear response again they'll be unsure of do they really know what I need do they really understand my business but if you sit down and collaborate with them then there's a better understanding of oh I've been heard my needs have been met I can trust this person with something that's very important to me next is including next steps so every time that you deliver something to your client or that you almost every time that you communicate with them really it's important to include next steps this not only helps the clients know exactly what they need to do so they don't panic and think they have to do everything or get really like laze about it and feel like they have to do that thing so you keep that pace of the project really clear but in addition to that it also shows that you who are in control of the project you know what's going on because you have given them the next steps to do and they know that if they do those steps they can trust you to take care of everything else and that also continues to facilitate that feeling that you are a leader that they can trust in this project and then finally encourage questions questions from your clients are great and ask them like encourage them to say hey if you have any questions about that please you know reply to this email or if at some point along the way you're not sure how this is working or you're not sure if the colors are right please ask and just continue to encourage that dialogue not only does that keep good conversation going so that way as pain points or troubles come up you're able to jump ahead of those and kind of answer those before they turn into big things but it also encourages your clients to frame their requests in sorry about that but it encourages your clients to frame their requests in the form of a question which continues to put you in the driver's seat so instead of saying I absolutely need that FAQ page they'll more likely say so what would you think about adding an FAQ page and it's just a totally different conversation instead of having to come straight out and give them a hard no you can say something like yeah I think an FAQ page would be great it's not quite included in the scope so let's maybe have a phone call and talk about how we could include that for you what puts you in a position of being able to be helpful to them instead of feeling like a roadblock to them and that's all done just by facilitating question asking alright next up is edges which is also known as boundaries alright so talking about why boundaries matter I already talked a little bit about the culture of respect so we'll move on from that one but just again if you set out with your own boundaries respected your clients are much more likely to also respect your boundaries the other one is that boundaries help both parties not to take advantage of each other so if you have very clear boundaries on the project as well as on yourself personally that's going to help your client not take advantage of you and it's also going to help you often unknowingly keep from taking advantage of them and it just helps that relationship to stay very clean and above board and everybody feeling like they're being heard and respected alright so there are two types of boundaries that you're going to want to set one are project boundaries and the other are personal boundaries so for project boundaries these you can see are all based on expectations that we set previously so the first one is stick to your deliverables once you have that written list of deliverables do not vary from that unless there is like an exceptionally good reason to do so and I actually can't currently think of what a really good reason would be to vary off of your deliverable list people are going to your clients are going to ask you to do it they're going to say oh but it's just a small thing oh but it's just a small change stick to your guns on what that deliverable list is otherwise as soon as you say well okay I guess we could do this extra thing included in the project you're kind of lost at that point you're going to go downhill real fast they're going to start asking for more and more and you're going to have to eventually be framed as the bad guy and step in and say no by using your deliverable list as the bad guy it keeps some of that negative emotion off of you and on that agreed upon list and kind of pushing the negative feelings towards inanimate objects also helps to keep the relationship much more positive another one is just to watch scope creep so scope is the agreed upon boundaries basically of the project it's exactly what you said that you would do it's basically your contract but much more detailed in terms of what you will be delivering to them scope creep is something we talk about all the time in project management because it is so easy for either the clients to ask for something or for us to think that hey we could do this cool thing and it would actually be better but don't do it that's not within scope of the project you want to keep your scope really carefully defined and if you want to add extra things talk to your client about that talk about it as an add-on or something you can change but don't just let that project start to balloon out otherwise again you're going to have hours and hours of unpaved work that you're just never going to get back and that really sucks lastly the power of a polite note when you need to set boundaries always just make sure to do it very politely but very firmly so if they are calling you at like 9 o'clock at night unless you really like answering client calls at 9 o'clock at night the great thing about freelancing you can set whatever hours you want if that's your jam go for it I'm not going to answer client calls at night so if someone is constantly calling me at 9 o'clock later in the tomorrow the next day I will usually send them an email just so you know I don't take calls after 5 or 6 p.m. but I'd love to set up a call with you today what can we do so it's very politely letting them know what my boundary is and again giving a positive action plan forward of how we can meet their need without breaking the boundary and that kind of goes into your personal boundaries so the first personal boundary that you need to be very clear about for yourself is what is your availability again the great thing about being freelancers is we do we get to set our own hours if we want to spend all day hanging out at Disneyland and work until 1 o'clock in the evening or I guess technically the morning we can do that that's great but just because we're working at late at night doesn't mean that our clients need to have access to us late at night so setting those availability boundaries is really important do you take calls over the weekend do you not take calls only during a certain number of hours during the day do you only talk to clients Monday Wednesday Friday however you want to set it up that's totally in your ballpark or in your court that's your job you get to decide what it is but once you decide what it is stick with that and do not let anything push you out of that unless again there's like a really good actual emergency reason for it the next one is response time when a client sends you an email it's really important to consider not responding to it right away and the reason for that being that if you constantly respond to emails right away over and over and over what you're actually doing is setting an expectation that you are constantly available to your client if the client has paid for you to be constantly available to them that's awesome answer their emails right away but if they aren't paying extra for that constant access consider letting it sit for an hour or two before you respond to it just to kind of build in some boundaries so that way they know that if they email you you might not respond right away and that that's okay the next thing is professional distance this is especially important if you are working with clients who are also your friends so a lot of times when we're starting out as freelancers we are working with our pool family and friends to get our first projects and that can get really dicey because we're working with people who we know and what can be really helpful is to have a conversation ahead of time about this and say hey we're working on the project we're having a professional relationship and all other times it's our personal relationship and setting a really clear divide between those two things and when you're working with your clients and it's on client time don't talk about personal stuff your client is someone who would like to be your friend that is awesome if you want them to be your friend but wait until after the project is done and then start to pursue more of that friendly cadence and conversation with them otherwise your clients are more likely to make inappropriate requests of you because they feel like you're their friend instead of someone that they've hired to do a job for so you just want to keep that line really really clear until the project is over and then do whatever you like and that comes back to the last one which is be helpful but not too nice so always be helpful helpful though does not always mean saying yes so you can be helpful and still say no and that's really important your clients do not need you to be nice to them they need you to be helpful and keeping that distinction in mind is really important now when I say they don't need you to be nice that doesn't mean that you should be a jerk but you don't have to do everything they ask you don't have to constantly be there and be trying to please them that's not actually a helpful dynamic to cultivate in a client relationship instead you should be the expert who is incredibly helpful to them and that is a better position to put yourself in alright so here then what do we do when a boundary is crossed so first you need to ask yourself have I set an expectation if you didn't set an expectation then it's important to use this as an opportunity to jump in and address that expectation then you'll want to collightly address the problem suggest an alternate way that the client can have their needs met and then again just stick to your guns do not cross boundaries unless you have to do so or unless they're paying you extra alright we're going to jump through education pretty quickly education is pretty straightforward by educating our clients it's helping to remove some of the fear that they feel again a lot of clients don't understand how the internet works or how WordPress works or how design or online strategy or marketing works by helping them to learn as you go through the project educating them along the way what you're doing is you're empowering their success because ultimately your goal is for them to take their website and go use it out in the wild away from you and if they don't know how to use it then they're going to constantly be nervous and afraid about that situation which means they're going to constantly be emailing you asking you to do things and hoping not to pay you for it so you can avoid that by empowering the basic everyday maintenance or understanding of their website and then saying hey if you need something bigger done or if you just don't want to bother with the maintenance of the site let me know I charge X amount per hour and you can move forward come there and then just a couple of quick touches on finding educational moments the first thing you want to do is gauge your client's knowledge base if they are someone who knows absolutely nothing about the internet explaining they're going to be building out their website and HTML and CSS with a little bit of JavaScript and Ajax thrown in isn't that going to be helpful instead just say hey I'm going to be coding your site this is how it's going to work you want to give them a surface level understanding that they'll be able to work with if they know more go deeper that's awesome and kind of let them set the pace for how much knowledge they feel like they need to be confident and that's going to be a give and take you're going to have to kind of go along and you'll get them to know your client and you'll know how that works also stable oriented so you want to educate them towards their success and make sure that they're clear on that it's success that they are the reason you're teaching them these things is so they can be ultimately successful explain everything before you do it so before you jump into designs explain to them what the design process looks like before you give them a brand for and explain to them what branding is so that way they have some sort of corporate whatever deliverable you're about to give them and lastly continue encouraging questions just like we stopped about in the setting expectations section so the last thing I'm going to talk about today that is empowerment so the reason that these three major aspects of good client relationships matter is because what you're actually doing is you are empowering your clients to succeed and when clients feel empowered they do not feel like they need to grab that power away from you because they already have it so if you set them up to be successful if you set them up to feel like they know what's going on not only are they going to have a better relationship with you but they're also more likely to just feel really awesome about having worked with you on this project because they started out not knowing how to fix a problem in their business and they ended after working with you feeling really empowered and amazing and like they know how to solve their problem now which leads to them probably recommending you by maintaining this good client relationship by empowering your clients to be successful through setting those expectations by keeping clear boundaries and by educating them along the way you're going to get a really solid client experience that will likely lead to more word of mouth and your business will grow and grow and grow and that is why we bother having good communication with our clients not only are they more successful but we also become successful on the other side of that alright so we've got about I think six or seven minutes left so before we wrap everything up for today do people have any specific questions about any of this yeah go for it yeah so I feel like sure sorry should I stand sure go for it I feel like a lot of stuff is great but I feel like it's very hypothetical like what you should do like me and my coworker we actually work in an agency and there's a lot of us not interacting directly with the client so a lot of this stuff is like internal access and it's stuff that we can obviously we can deal with and we don't mind the grouping because like these people are like our workers we have to limit them every day what would your advice be to kind of just say no can you yeah no no no do clients or like to client worker costs or to your co-workers to our co-workers and say like as like instructions tell them to just start saying no or like to take stuff like this oh so like telling your co-workers who are engaging directly with the clients to say no to them should I tell them to come to work camp 2019 yes you absolutely can the other thing to do is you can always frame that in terms of how it will help you yeah so people tend to like being told that they're good people and so if you can frame being told if you can frame the no in terms of allowing them to do a good thing they will tend to respond a lot better so one thing I've definitely had to deal with that before especially when I was just starting out I wasn't liaising directly with my clients and so like scope creep was just happening like crazy and so what I did was I sat down I asked if I could can we sit down for coffee or something because at that point it was a bigger thing if it's not a big thing then just you know save it all way the project is kind of ballooning out a little bit and I don't know that that's good for like the overall budget of the company because we need to make sure that it stays within what we agreed on otherwise you know we're going to be losing money and then asking them is there you know I'm noticing that I'm doing a lot of extra stuff that we weren't agreeing on is that something that they're paying for or are we or am I actually like doing stuff that is losing the company money and you can kind of frame it in terms of letting them feel like they are making something better for your company and then that no becomes a lot easier because they can be like that's true I do want to save the company money and then they go out when they say no yeah okay so one of the things I've really been wondering for like a long time is how do you price additional deliverables for clients and how do you like is there a formula and how do you like soften the blow to clients that adding a certain piece of functionality is going to be very expensive and like what are some like cheaters of services that you would charge more based on like the level of difficulty and what would some of those more difficult services be that you would be able to charge a client more for that's a great question so the question was if you were adding something to the contract how do we charge for that first off you have to decide if you're charging per project or if you're charging by the hour I tend to like to estimate things by the hour and then turn that into a per project cost so whatever your hourly rate is estimate about how many hours you think it's going to take you to build that buffer at a little bit and then charge them down now and then what I usually do is include anything that I think they might want to add as add-ons in my initial proposal so that way they can see how much it will cost beforehand and then they can decide no initially if they want to and then when they inevitably decide they want to add it there's already a price point on that and so you don't have to be the one who's coming in and saying well that's a thousand dollars or that's ten thousand dollars or however much it's going to be they know that ahead of time and then also by seeing how much those extra add-ons might cost if they end up asking for something that's not on that list you've already kind of set an expectation for about how much extra stuff costs that would be my suggestion what would be like an hourly rate you can like save a client just like as something that why you're charging that much so I'm just like yeah so there's a huge range and it depends on what you're doing what your experience level is I feel bad giving you like a straight number like I know people who successfully charge anything from like fifty dollars an hour to like a hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars an hour what you might want to do is actually since we're running short on time let's chat about this afterwards if you have a couple of minutes and I can kind of get a better feel for what it is that you're actually offering to your clients and I can get you a better ballpark thank you so much yes last question how do you break up to the client that's a great question especially for us yeah they're crazy so first off I hope they're not your friends because if they're your friend it gets infinitely more complicated if they are not your friend I've actually had to do this I've had to tell a couple of clients now we're just done with this project usually I try to keep a list of reasons why that something has not gone well and then again trying to keep it really positive so if you feel like the relationship can handle you explaining again very respectfully what boundaries are being crossed and why this makes it no longer viable to work with them you can do that another reason is and I don't like doing this but sometimes some clients are really kind of crazy I just need to do this just get real busy just say hey I'm not going to be able to complete this project I've had some other stuff come up you can be kind of vague about it it's okay you're hopefully not going to have to deal with these people again I'm just telling them I'm so sorry I can't work is a great place go to Upwork and find another free one and you're still giving them a solution for how they can solve their problem and sometimes you just have to do that but yeah I would say gauge them if you feel like they're really crazy people just be busy otherwise if you feel like the relationship can handle it give them a list of the boundaries that they have broken and explain why you're at this project alright thank you all so much for coming