 Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for joining me today. I know there were a few really great sessions at this time, so the fact that you're all here in this one is a really big complement. My goal is to make you feel like you made a good choice by coming today. I'm going to be talking about the freelancers guide to client onboarding. I don't need to introduce myself because I just had a wonderful introduction there, so I'm just going to skip right into it. Today, I'm going to show you how you can design an onboarding process that wins you more projects, delights your clients, and solves some of your biggest client headaches. So it's a tall order. And the presentation has three parts. So the first part, I'm going to really briefly go through what onboarding is and why it's important, just to get everybody on the same page, so really, really quickly go through this. Then I'm going to talk about the four things that make a really great onboarding process. And then in part three, which is the meat of the presentation, I'm going to go through an example of a really good onboarding process that you can copy and use in your own projects. So what is onboarding and why is it important? Well, onboarding is basically the process that moves a person from being a lead into being a client. Now, a lot of people see onboarding as just that part of their proposal has been accepted, and you are getting the client familiar with working with you and starting the project. I actually see onboarding right from first contact all the way till the project starts. So I see it as a slightly longer process. And onboarding is really, really important. I think it's one of the most important things you can do, and that's for three main reasons. First off, you can set expectations during the onboarding. So you can basically prevent so many problems that freelancers have during the onboarding stage. Some of the most common problems that I get asked about all the time are things like clients who are micromanaging, clients who are, you know, there's scope creep happening where they're trying to get more things into the project that they haven't budgeted for. And you can prevent a lot of those things. And actually, prevention is much better than trying to fix them as they actually happen. And you can do that in the onboarding. Secondly, onboarding makes you look really good. So first impressions are so, so important. And how you start the project is really going to set the scene for how the rest of the project goes. If you start on the right foot, your client is going to think really well of you throughout the whole project. If you have a bad first impression, it's a lot harder to recover from. So it just makes sense to just try and get yourself started, get yourself the best first impression that you can. And finally, onboarding is a really quick win. So it doesn't take much to have an onboarding process in place. You don't need anything too fancy. You can get it done really, really quickly. And also the onboarding for every client stays the same, basically everybody. So it can just be, it's kind of like the low hanging fruit, if you like. So that's what onboarding is and why it's important. Now I'm going to go through the four things that make a really good onboarding process. Or really a really good process in general. So a great onboarding process should be useful. It should be reusable. It should be profitable. And it should be delightful. And what I mean by those is, by useful I mean it should be useful for your clients. So there shouldn't be any fluff in it. We're not doing an onboarding process just to tick a box. You're doing it because you want your clients to actually find it useful. So if it's not useful, it doesn't need to be there. But also it needs to be useful for you as well as a business owner. Because as a freelancer you wear a lot of different hats. You're trying to do marketing, you're trying to do case studies and all these different things alongside doing your client work. And that can be really challenging. But you can bake into your onboarding process things that are going to really help you with all of these. And a really good example is something like testimonials. So a lot of people don't realise that actually during the onboarding stage is a really good opportunity for you to ask for a testimonial. You don't have to wait till the end of the project. And actually at the start of the project it can be a really good idea to ask for one because the client is really excited and you've made a fantastic first impression. You can also set the scene for creating a case study. So you can have maybe a questionnaire or something in place. So you can create your case study throughout the entire project rather than just trying to do it and remember at the end everything that you went through. So next it should be reusable. This one's pretty obvious. You want to reuse as much of your onboarding process as possible because that's going to save you time. You don't want to be redoing the same things over and over and over again. It just doesn't make sense and you don't really have the time for that. But actually I'd argue more importantly making things reusable makes it easier for you to delegate things out. So if you don't already have some kind of assistant I think that an assistant, the onboarding getting an assistant to take over the onboarding for you is one of the easiest things that you can outsource. And I really think every freelancer should probably get an assistant sooner than they think. I didn't and I really, really regret it. I think even with a couple of hours a day having someone help you with these tasks that you put in place is just going to take so much off your plate. Interesting. Okay, well the other one was that it needs to be profitable. So this one's pretty obvious but like I said I talk about the process being from first contact to the start of the project so you want to actually win that project first and foremost. But you also want to bake in things into your onboarding process that can help you make a profit later on. So the thing I always like to remember is that every lead is a contact and even if you don't end up working with that client you should still be saving them somewhere if you don't already have some kind of CRM which is basically a database to store people. You should create one even if it's just a spreadsheet. And every time you do a discovery call with a client even if they don't accept the project they should be a lead in your database because as you're growing your freelance business you're going to be becoming more proactive in reaching out to people and you need a network of people that you can reach out to when you have different offerings available. And so baking these little things like this into your process that you can't rely on yourself to remember as you're doing it is just going to be really helpful for you long term. And then finally it should be delightful. So experience is really important and I think it's something that as freelancers we tend to forget. I used to work in a design agency an in person one and we used to bring clients in and we used to give them spreads of food and show them presentations like with the big boards kind of like mad men's style and they loved it and they would pay so much more money to work for the agency than they would potentially have to pay a freelancer but they did it because they liked the experience and I'm not saying that freelancers need to do any of that we tend to work remotely so it doesn't always work out but I think if you can bake little in little bits of your process you can bake tiny bits of delight it's going to really really help you and build those relationships that last for a really long time. So now we're going to get into the example. So this is my sixth step on-boarding process and you might be doing a lot of this already but these are really the six steps that I would do every time a lead first contacts me to when the project begins. So step one, we want to first qualify the client and that basically means that we want to weed out any bad fits as quickly as possible because I'm sure we've all been there where we've spent time and effort doing a call writing a proposal and find out the client had a budget of 50 euros or something like that and it's really really frustrating because you just feel like you've wasted a ton of time so you want to kind of get rid of those if you can and just pull through the people who are going to make really really good clients for you. But the second goal really is you want to respond as quickly as you can so when you're knee deep in client work it's really hard sometimes to respond to all these new leads that come in but responding quickly is so important because now I'm on the other side of freelancing I tend to hire freelancers more than I don't work as a freelancer anymore I tend to hire them and there's something about that first freelancer who responds to me that almost automatically shortlists them and back when I was freelancing I didn't respond quickly because I didn't want to seem like I was too desperate or too keen and now looking back I can see that was a big mistake responding quickly is a really easy way to just get yourself that little bit ahead if a client is potentially looking at a few other freelancers alongside you. So this is what you want to do when a new lead contacts you you basically just want to have a series of templated emails ready to send out now I know there's a lot of information on this slide so don't worry too much basically I had to cut a lot out of this talk to get it to fit within 30 minutes but what I've done is I've written down these four email templates that I think everybody needs as a minimum so we've got the initial response email where we've got five pre-qualifying questions to make sure that they have the budget they have the deadline and a few other things to make sure that they're a good fit working with you you have a template that if they do not pass that initial response and you think no they're not a good fit you want to have a really nice rejection template that doesn't burn any bridges because remember every lead is still a contact they might not be a great fit for you now that does not mean that they're not going to be a great fit for you one day in the future then if they are a good fit you want to have another templated email to book a discovery call and you know how that will work what the schedule is and then finally you want a templated follow-up email to just nudge them to book that call and I've got a link to download these templates at the end there's no catch there's no I don't ask for an email address or anything like that I just couldn't fit them into the presentation so now we've done the qualifying the client let's say okay they're a great fit we want to work with them now we're going to book a discovery call with them and some people don't think discovery calls are important I personally think they are and that's for three reasons first off you're going to build rapport with people so we're working with people and I think any opportunity you can have to humanise yourself and humanise them and build a kind of connection is going to be really helpful I think in-person is the best kind of thing you can do for basically everything every good thing that's happened in my business has usually come down to some kind of in-person event or some kind of relationship that I've made as a freelancer in-person isn't often possible so the next best thing is to get on a call where you can see their face they can see yours and you can chat you also want to provide value on this call so show them how great it would be to work with you but without necessarily turning it into a consulting call so another thing that freelancers often say to me is they do these calls, they're really really helpful and they're spending like an hour, two hours maybe even more just helping the client giving them so much information and they're super super pumped and then their client doesn't even hire them and they're so disheartened because they feel really really taken advantage of so when you're doing these calls you want to have them mapped out and remember that it's your responsibility to make sure the call only lasts maybe 30 minutes, 45, whatever you decide keep it on schedule so have something templated in your script, in your head for when you feel it turning into a more consulting call you can then push it to maybe say something like oh this is a really great topic I'd love to get into it with you even more let me send you some information about this package that I've got that could really help you and you can send them a package to book a consulting hour or two hours with you so that's another thing that's really important with the call and then finally you want to get all the information that you need for your proposal so I'll talk about this next but we're going to be writing the proposal immediately after the call so I actually think throughout the call really the most important thing is the follow-up afterwards and the reason I think this is the most important part is because first off hopefully this is where your clients most excited but secondly this is something that no one really does at least in my experience even though it's so so easy so what you want to do is you want to do three things you want to follow up via email immediately just send one quick email that said it was so great talking to you I'm really excited about this project I'm going to be working on the proposal today and I'll get it to you tomorrow that's it and then hit send in my experience people don't do this and it's such a... it's so disappointing as the client because you don't really feel as valued and the next thing you want to do is add them to your CRM so I say this a lot and then the third thing you're going to write your proposal straight after the call while it's fresh in your mind and you're going to proofread and send the following day which leads me to step three so the proposal two goals here you want to show how great you would be to work with you are saying I'm going to get this proposal over to you tomorrow you are then going to get that proposal to them tomorrow I think doing it quickly is really important don't make them wait too long because you might miss that moment that they're really excited and secondly you of course want to win the proposal so I recommend everybody block out time if you use Calendly or some kind of calendar scheduling tool block out an hour maybe just 30 minutes after the call to write the proposal and hopefully you've got all the information you need you would have a really solid proposal template where most of it is the same and you can just quickly add things that you need to throughout the process so you need a really good process for writing proposals don't put it off like I used to do just get it done straight away nobody likes writing proposals but make sure you wait sleep on it, send it the next day proofread to notice any mistakes and then send it so then let's say proposal gets accepted so we're going to send them the paperwork, send them the deposit send them the contract, this one is super easy basically you want to get paid and you want to cover yourself if there's any problems so getting paid getting paid a deposit is another thing that I hear a lot that is really hard for a lot of freelancers because most people aren't ready to work with their client right there and then there may be available a couple of months in advance but they need the deposit then so you can secure it into your calendar but a client is thinking well if I'm not going to start for a couple of months what incentive is there to pay now I'm just going to pay in a couple of months so I use this email a lot it doesn't work all the time but it definitely helps and there's a couple of things in this email that I think really helped it I can't start till May or whatever month but we can start working together now I'll get familiar with your business you can do some data collection homework all these things that we've got to get started so we can start working together now which helps them pay their deposit right there and then and then I say sound good if so as soon as the deposit has been paid we'll get going and then I add this but at the end so I recommend paying the deposit as soon as you're able to secure your spot and like I said this doesn't work all the time but it does work some of the time especially if you have an expiration date for your proposal because then you can send a couple of follow up emails to that date to create a little bit of urgency you can say there's other people waiting so your spot's going to go and you really need to pay it now if you want to get that booked in otherwise it's going to be a little bit of a longer wait so the next step once we've sent all the paperwork and hopefully got paid is we're going to set up our working environment I like to do this as soon as the deposit's been paid and this is another reason that having an assistant is going to be super super helpful because they can do all this for you and just make all these checks to make sure that you are ready from day one to get going and really the goals for the setup is to preempt any common problems so things like can you log into things you need to log into have they sent you a Google link do you have the correct sharing permissions all that kind of stuff I don't know if you've experienced it but I have so many times where I've been getting started I'm so finally able to start a project I try and open a Google link and it says oh you need to request access from the client and it's so frustrating because often they're not in the same time zone so I've blocked out this time and it makes me look bad right so you want to preempt all of these as soon as you can and just basically be ready to go from day one makes you look super super professional and so the way I do this is pretty simple I set up a structure of folders on my computer so I usually have three phases for a project this is for a website project where I'd have a discovery phase which is all the research, the homework I'd have the website this is the meat of the project and then I'd have documents and assets all those brand assets and contracts and all that kind of stuff in there and oh this slide doesn't work either and so this slide was a slide for a tool I use called posthaste but don't worry because it's in the link at the end I think I linked to it as well but there's a tool called posthaste and it's a free tool basically just allows you to create templates of your of your folder structures so you can just one click have them populated every time you get a new project so it makes it super super easy and then the other thing I'd recommend when you're doing this welcome packet is to just have a single or getting the document set up can't remember or working environment is just try and have a single source of truth for each client project so have somewhere where the client can go to access everything and this could be a Dropbox folder it could be a Google Drive folder it doesn't really matter where the plugin that I have is like basically to solve this problem but it's a portal plugin but you could use a project management tool or something like that just as long as your client has somewhere to access all those things whether it's a link, a file contract, the deliverables whatever it might be then finally the last thing that I like to do for my onboarding is to send a welcome packet and this is my favourite part welcome packets basically level expectations so we talked at the start about any common problems that you see cropping up throughout your project have a think about them they might be different for everybody but there should be something in your welcome packet that tries to preempt them before they potentially happen so if scope creeps a big issue then can you have something in there that says hey, here's what to do if the scope increases in the project that's totally fine but here's the process and how we get this new feature added and quoted for and added to the timeline the welcome packet also helps start the project so if you have things for your client to do intake questionnaires or maybe they need to write the content for the website they can start that there and then finally I think a welcome packet is a really good way to kind of surprise and delight them because not many people do this and it just shows your client that hey you're a professional you've done this before, you know what you're doing and it's just really nice because a lot of the time the experience of working with freelancers might be a little bit might seem a little bit unorganised and that's obviously because freelancers are busy they're doing a lot but to the client it may seem a little bit unorganised so it's always nice if you are working with a freelancer who seems to just know what they're doing and they've done this before so I collect welcome packets because I love them this is my friend Franz he sends these to his client it's just basically some printouts of information about how he works and he sends them like this really nice little bar of chocolate to just welcome their clients into working with them I thought that was a really nice idea I also recently got a quote to get our garden to get a deck for our garden and they sent us this welcome packet and it had these things like the process timeline so a lot of the time clients don't know what the process of working with a web designer or a developer might be so have a process timeline it's got some success stories an agenda for the meeting they even have a little magazine they actually even sent us a hamper a chain and chocolates and all that kind of stuff you don't have to go to that extreme I actually recommend most people with their welcome packets start with a google doc a nicely formatted google doc that you can change and edit and tweak until you've got something that really really works for both you and your clients is the best thing that you can do and you can then polish that up later on if you need to so here are some other things that could be included in a welcome packet because I'm short on time but you could have a getting started guide you could put your paperwork in there information gathering client homework any useful links is really important to maybe if you use I don't know Pinterest for collecting inspiration or something and then any handy guides so this is for things that if you struggle with your client doesn't give you great feedback could you have a little guide on how to give great feedback that you can really use and finally we want to use this as an opportunity to just build a little bit of delight into your process so I always like sending a welcome gift I see loads of people do this and I just think it's really nice you can send like Franz did some chocolate one of my friends I know he sends a book you know a really good book that's been really integral to his business he'll send that to his client some people send coffee beans this is Lauren Hooker from Ellen Company she sends a gift card to a local coffee shop or a Starbucks and just with a note that says hey I'm really excited to work with you I know you need to write your content and that's really really hard but just take a morning use this gift card go to your coffee shop and get your content written for me and I just think that's a really nice touch but also remember that being thoughtful and building delight you don't always have to buy things just be thoughtful throughout the whole process so always be thinking about how you can help your clients how you can build connections throughout be really really helpful and that's just a really nice way to be memorable to your clients so that's my 6th step onboarding process and basically when you're designing your own you need to ask yourself is it useful is it reusable is it profitable and if it does all these 4 things then you've got a great process on your hands so I would recommend everybody if you haven't already spend some time planning out your onboarding experience so from first contact it doesn't have to be as fancy as this just scribble it down spend a morning in a coffee shop in your favourite coffee shop and just spend a morning or an afternoon thinking about every interaction with your clients down to the most minute detail and see the parts that you could template or make reusable and it's going to really really help you it shouldn't take a lot of time the emails I think are the most important things to template the other stuff you can do gradually so that's it from me thank you so much for joining me like I said I've got extras here thank you if you want to download them the link is bit.lywceu-le that's an L not an I but yeah I appreciate you coming and yeah thanks very much alright thank you a round of applause please that was great so I guess the audience they are itching to ask you questions because we need to get more clients and make more money so that's very important you have any questions please let me see your hands ok one anybody else two three and four ok let's start with those four first person please so the mic thank you I'm Kevin Roberts by the way oh hello I noticed in the slide when you showed the email templates using one of those automator template things do you use something like I forget the name of it yeah there's a couple so there's text expanded so that's the really big one that's like super great so many features the one in the screenshot was actually one called A Text which I've used both and I've switched to A Text A Text is so much I think it's like $5 a year or something it's really cheap and it ultimately does the same thing it doesn't have all the features of text expanded but I really like A Text because it just does what you need it to do which is have these templates there so yeah there's that and now I use Help Scout just because I use Help Scout for my emails and that's got the save replies in there as well but yeah A Text is great and the text expander is really good thank you next person okay hello it's here go ahead you mentioned already uncomfortable situation when a client has a low budget how do you filter that in the nice way so client will not feel uncomfortable because you already starting speaking about the budget and you don't want to spend one hour and they have just $50 so in the pre-qualifying email one of the questions is do you have a budget and is it over X and I think the budget thing is really difficult because we're often told ask the client the budget don't tell or show your prices which makes sense to a point but a lot of clients don't know what their budget is because they don't know what a website for example should cost so it can be really difficult to ask that so I find having is it over X amount is a really good way to just make sure that they're in the range or you could say is it between X and Y or you could say websites vary wildly it could be anything from this to that does this sound about within your range and if so where about and that kind of gives them a starting point because I've been in the situation where I'm trying to get a quote for a project and they ask me my budget and I say I don't know like I don't want to offend you by saying something really low I don't want to say something crazy high in case you think oh there we go I'll just say that so I sort of see it from both sides so that's how I go about that then if they say no unfortunately I can't work with that budget I always try to recommend them elsewhere I might either recommend them to someone I know who could work with in that budget range or maybe even just say you might need to try up work or something yeah you're welcome okay next person the mic please hi you mention you have a plug-in to do all that right sort of the plug-in is it's really a place to store deliverables so it's basically if you have a welcome packet and you have all the different files and folders and links dotted around everywhere it basically just keeps it all together for your client so they just have one login and they can see everything it's not a project management tool in the sense that it doesn't do it doesn't have any of those extra bells and whistles mostly because I found when I had project management tools my clients weren't using them so I switched to something a little bit more simple but yeah it just keeps it all together yeah alright there was one more person okay hi there how do you handle like clients slightly bigger maybe they have like an RFP or something where they want you to kind of go down deeper do you kind of put them into your process to kind of work a bit around just maybe some stuff on there so with RFPs I don't I've never answered them personally because when I worked in an agency I learned and I don't know if this is just either maybe it's England I don't know but I found that with RFPs a lot of the time they already know who they are going to work with and they just have to get other quotes they have to get X amount of quotes from people and so you almost never end up winning them so I always just ignored them if you did need to do that I think to be honest it's a little bit out of my expertise range because I've never the only time I've answered one was when I worked in an agency and we had the team members available and they take like maybe a junior member of the team to work on the RFP and they'd have it signed off by a senior member I think it's easier for agencies to do that route but I'm sure there are people who do it successfully I just I wouldn't actually be able to help much with that because I've never done it I'm sorry Thank you Someone read back please Hello How do you differentiate your onboarding process based on whether the client is like non tech savvy or whether someone needs to speed things up because they are comfortable with onboarding themselves meaning that I have seen cases that they feel the onboarding process is really slow because it's really in depth and welcoming for a non tech savvy person but they are frustrated just because of that and on the other hand if you try to speed it up it's much more difficult for a non tech savvy person so how do you differentiate it between these two types of clients That's a good question I think For my onboarding process it was never it was never too slow I think the only thing I would potentially do is if I had a really non tech savvy client I would maybe add in an extra call which would be more of a welcome call where I would go through the onboarding process with them so you know I would go through because I would send the documents and then it's really up to the client whether they read them or not if I got the feeling that this client really had never done the project before and I think one of the questions in the initial question email might be have you worked on a project like this before that kind of gives me an indication of how much hand holding they might need I might just like spend some time and book in an extra call with them and go through all these problems and how it works and go through that way but I would recommend probably having your onboarding process be really really fast and streamlined but slowing it down if you think a client needs it rather than having it really slow and then speeding it up if you feel a client doesn't need it if that makes sense thank you very much do we have other questions please okay good hi I just have a question about when you sent a proposal I learned actually two other tricks that when you send a proposal make a short video explaining the proposal for freelancers and they were talking about actually presenting their proposals on a call in person I found that was quite interesting actually because it's not something unless you do paid discovery which is basically where the client pays you to do a proposal which for that garden design company is exactly what happened we paid them to do a proposal I'm actually very pro paid discovery it's just too much to go into in the talk but yeah I think anything that you can do with like a welcome video is a great idea to just walk them through it or I'd maybe even change what I say and say maybe go through the proposal on a call with them and get them to commit to it there and then but that's not something I've tried but I can see it working really well but the video is a great idea because it's like a mix between the two it's not a live call that you have to do but it's not just sending a proposal and hoping for the best so it's a good idea maybe in the admin bar sorry? that's exactly it, yeah that's it you saw the same thread thank you thanks I'm going to watch that again that was great do you have any advice on writing contracts and if do you ever skip the contract completely or how do you simplify it enough for the client where it's not intimidating so I think that's a good question with contracts what I did and unfortunately this isn't available anymore so I can't point you to the link but there was a service where they, well it wasn't a service they had a contract and then they had a guide to the contract where the contract was rewritten in plain English that just explained what each term meant and I went through it and where you need to tweak it, it was for freelancers where you need to, I think it was Paul Jarvis if anyone remembers him years and years ago he did a lot for freelancers and that was really helpful for me because I felt like before I felt I had a contract that was kind of a standard one that I'd found but if a client ever challenged me about any of it I don't know if I'd be able to really say oh yeah what that was so I really liked having being confident in knowing what each part of the contract was for and why it was there that said, with contracts it's really difficult because depending on the price of your projects how enforceable they are is I've never been in the process where I've had to enforce one and when you're working with clients in different countries I think unless you're doing really really big projects I don't even know if it would be worth enforcing it like if a client didn't pay like I don't know what you could do so it's one of those things where I think yes it's important to have a contract because it just adds a little bit of cover for you in practice how much it would help you I don't know because you'd have to get a lawyer it costs a lot of money maybe it would cost more than the proposal itself and it depends what you're charging I don't know if I would not have a contract yeah it's difficult I think that's just something you'd have to decide for yourself yeah you could potentially not have a contract and just go for it I think yeah thank you very much any more questions please okay have one hi Laura really great talk, really enjoyed it thank you very much when you come to proposals there's acceptance, rejection and ghosting what happens with what sort of process do you go through when you immediately get an email saying oh thanks I'll be in touch and then you know like chasing it and what have you so you know what I mean I know what you mean I do have a couple of follow up emails that I'll send usually you can kind of tell if they're not really going for it if you really think they're just ghosting you I would instead of trying to win them back I personally would try to get to the bottom of why so I'd say something like you know it looks like you're not interested or you found something else would you mind telling me why like why it didn't work out just to get feedback for me to know like where did I go wrong in the process I think that would be more valuable than actually even winning the project in a lot of cases because you don't always know like what you're doing you think you're doing everything right and you don't know what your client's thinking but yeah the ghosting is really really tough the other thing I would say is that's why the pre-qualifying is really important and hopefully by the time you get to the discovery call if your website's really good as well and that's going to help have your clients hopefully ready to work with you you would hopefully be fairly confident in the discovery call and then if not you don't want to have spent much time writing the proposal so it's why I recommend maybe like 30 minutes max to write the proposal after the call have it super super templated and a couple of follow-up emails and then just use it as a bit of a learning experience and like I say the way I just try to think of these things just to make me not too depressed when they happen because they do happen is that every call is another practice at a sales call and every person that you interact with can be added and they might end up using you in the future like it's not wasted as long as you haven't put too much time and effort into it it's not fully wasted but you can't control whether a client gets back to you or whether they accept the proposal you can only control what you're doing and giving the best proposal that you can and doing the best process and just trying to like get feedback on like how you're doing and then doing things like learning about sales learning about how to do calls and just keep practising but I don't think there's really another easy answer for it unfortunately I'll exactly the same just very quickly follow up on what sort of like timescales do you kind of go like okay I've not heard back in like two weeks or something is there any sort of timescale I don't have a specific timescale I suppose I would probably I think yeah two weeks I think sounds reasonable it depends on the size of the project as well though in the size of the budget like bigger projects bigger budgets bigger companies might have a different process that could take longer so it's going to be a little bit of trial and error you know if it's kind of a smaller company maybe you're just talking to the founder I would say two weeks is reasonable if it's a bigger company maybe you would want to find out from them what that process is for getting things like this approved because there might be extra steps you need to take it might take a little bit longer and all that kind of thing so yeah two weeks to four weeks I would say yeah all right thank you I'm afraid that's all the questions we can take thank you Laura once again please a round of applause that was wonderful I totally enjoyed that from you