 Okay, so how many of you guys work with clients? Then you're in the right spot because we're going to talk all about problem clients today. This is one of my favorite talks, Building Fences Around Friendly Monsters. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm from Birmingham. I'm the host at iThemes Training. We do two or three live webinars a week, most of which are free. It's like going to word camp all year long online. All kinds of WordPress related topics. Lots of fun. I'm a freelance web developer and have been since 1995. I started a million years ago when it comes to web. I'm also a business coach for WordPress Freelancers and the lead organizer for Word Camp Birmingham this year, which is coming first weekend of August. So write down wpyal.com best domain and hashtag ever and join us over in Birmingham in August. Now, I always like to start a talk like this with a slide, something like this that says I'm not an expert. I'm a learner. I am constantly learning how to improve and better my process is in my business. I'm a process guy. I believe in process. I believe even as a freelancer, even if you're only working with one client, you need a process to your business. You're going to become better. You'll become more efficient, more productive, more profitable if you have a business. My qualification for speaking this morning is that I've already made all the dumb mistakes. So if you can learn something from me and save yourself the headache, awesome. Now, this talk divides into two parts. We're going to talk in the first half about what a friendly monster is and how to build some fences around those friendly monsters so that these problem clients don't trample the rest of your world. Then we'll pause for a little bit and take a few questions right there. So if you have questions, hold to the middle and then we'll do Q&A again at the end. And the last part is going to be talking about five. It's actually four because of time today. Four different monsters you want to know and how to contain them in the fences that you're building. By the way, there's a resource link NathanIngram.com slash WCATL. If you want to download the slides and there's some other stuff there. And you can tweet at me, I'm at NathanIngram hashtag WCATL. By the way, for those of you who are of the Twitter sphere, it's really encouraging to speakers if you tweet out stuff like during their talk. It's just as a person who speaks at work camps a lot. I know a lot of speakers won't tell you that, but if you enjoy what a speaker is saying, tweet at them, they appreciate it. So let's talk about, this is kind of the big idea for today's talk. Clients are friendly monsters. Some not so friendly, but some most are pretty friendly. What you've got to realize is that every client has the potential for transformation. How many of you have ever had that first initial meeting with a client where you're sitting over coffee or you go to their office or they come to yours and you have this conversation and you're like, this is awesome. I like them. They like me. We're going to get along really well. We're going to be knowing each other 10 years from now and our families are going to barbecue together. It's going to be great. And then three days into the project, this other person just like, they transform into this whole other person. And you're thinking, where did this person come from? It's a total Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation. So every client has the potential for transformation. All clients are friendly monsters. And if you look, even, okay, the laser point doesn't work on there, but if you look, even friendly monsters have teeth. So you got to be aware of that. So we as WordPress business owners need to build fences around these friendly monsters. And by fences, I mean a business system to protect ourselves from friendly monsters. We have to mitigate the monster effect or we're going to waste our time. We're going to waste money. And most importantly, we're going to waste emotional capital. How many of you have stressed out over problem clients in the past? Lord knows I have. How many of you have, you've snapped at your spouse or your kids or your friends because that client just got under your skin? So we're going to talk about building fences around these folks so that doesn't happen. Now by the way, you're going to hear me talk about system and process a lot in this talk. How many of you don't show your hands, but how many of you would say, yes, I have a consistent process that I use in my business for every client, every project, every time? If you do, you're ahead of the game. I've given this talk all over the country and most freelancers I've come to know because I is one, most people who are working with clients in the WordPress space pretty much run things by the seat of their pants and every project's a little bit different and that there's not a consistent process. But I'll tell you, the difference in having a process and not is the difference between, listen, owning your job and owning a business. And those two things are very different. So let's talk about building fences around our friendly monster. There are four fences that we're going to talk about that are incredibly important to keep this monster fenced in. The first is what we'll call clarity, clarity. The second, and we're going to dive into each of these separately, the second is commitments. The third is communication. And the fourth is documentation. So four fences to fence in the friendly monsters, got it? Clarity, commitments, communication, documentation. Let's dive in and start with clarity. Clarity is critical because in my experience, the most common reason that client relationships suffer is a lack of clarity. And don't confuse agreement with the client with clarity. Don't confuse the fact that they've signed your documents clarity, because those are two very different things. There can be agreement without clarity because there's no meeting of the minds. Because a lot of times, we're guilty of using technical jargon that muddies the water. We assume, you know, we live in our own little bubble, our own little tech bubble, and we assume that clients understand what we're talking about a lot of times and they don't. And whose fault is that? It's at least 50-50, right? It's at least 50-50. So one of the things that I encourage every freelancer I work with, either in a coaching situation or in a teaching situation, I encourage every person I work with to start to develop the skills to ask the right questions. Because if you will learn how to ask the right questions and keep digging a little more past the point where you thought you might need to stop, keep digging and asking more clarifying questions, that one single skill, I promise you, can set you apart from all the other web developers out there. If you'll ask the right questions and understand what the client really wants, that can set you apart. Now, the lack of clarity often comes from making assumptions. What is the client assuming in the project that you're going to do? A lot of clients, I mean, once they write the check, they think it's on you. Now, we know, hopefully you know, that's not the case. If I had to ask this question, and I do this a lot, where do client projects tend to stall? It's the same answer across the country. You know why? Because we all work with the same client. They're all kind of the same. Yeah, the client sometimes just assumes, once they write you the check and they sign your paperwork, hopefully you've got paperwork, that you're just going to, you know, magically wave your magic mouse around and poof a website appears. I mean, it's WordPress after all, right? So, digging into these assumptions and finding what the assumptions are is critical. So, look at your process, and you do have a process, right? Every client, every project, every time. What are the assumptions in your process? I mean, really, if you were to sit down right now and write down in bullet points what your process is for building a website, and I'll have a little graphic for mine up here in a little bit, if you were to write down what your process is and really think about, okay, where has this process failed in the past? Where do I always seem to get jammed up? Why do I always seem to get jammed up? Where are the assumptions in the process? Where I'm assuming the client is going to do something that they don't do, or the client is assuming that I'm going to do something that I don't think I should do. These little assumption holes can cause a real problem. So, the key to clarity is specificity. Specificity. A consistent intake process is absolutely critical. I've got another talk on that. But you've got to have a consistent checklist when you start with a client. Because if you do the same checklist with the same client for every client, every project, every time, you know you've asked the questions already and you know you cover these things already. Don't rely on your memory to ask all the right questions, especially in that initial client consultation. Because chances are you'll do like I've done, which is walk away and go, I forgot to talk to them about ongoing WordPress maintenance and who's going to pay for that once the site is launched. I forgot to talk about, oh, this or that or whatever. Or the client calls you back two days later and goes, can we do e-commerce in this? Will that affect the price much? So you've got to have a great contract that is so crystal clear on what your process is, how it works, and what the expectations are on both sides. What happens in the scenario where the client, I mean I'm sure this will never happen. None of you guys have ever had a problem with the client delaying getting you the content, right? If that ever, you really want to have that covered in your contract, right? So in my contract, for example, there's language about what happens if a project gets suspended because we're waiting on the client or abandoned six months that the client hasn't done anything. What happens in that case? A good contract is a balance between expectations and consequences. What we can expect from each other. It's very specific in the scope of work, in the contract, from the very first conversation with the client. You've got to get consistent in the questions you answer so your process flows. The second fence we need to build is the fence of commitments. Now, if you understand anything about relationships you know that every relationship is based on healthy commitment from both sides. Otherwise it's not really a relationship. It's more of a slave master situation, right? Bad news. We're going to have a relationship together. And it takes a relationship with a client to build a website, right? Both people have to do some work here. It doesn't work otherwise. Now for me, for years, I was stupid, y'all. And I did things the wrong way. For me, for years, it was like the one thing the client had to do was sign the check. And when I got the check I was just going to make it happen. Anybody been in that place before? I was just so happy to get the work and the money in the account. I would move heaven and earth to get a project together. What I've come to realize is that every client needs clarity on the commitments that I'm going to ask them to make. Because I'm going to ask them to make a lot of commitments through the process. As a matter of fact, I don't even write a proposal for a client anymore until they've made some sort of commitment back to me. We'll talk about that in a minute. So from the start, your process needs to include opportunities for the client to commit at key points. So when you're thinking through what your process ought to look like, you want to give the client multiple opportunities to make multiple commitments at different waypoints throughout the project. So you can always go back to that last commitment and go, yeah, but this is what we talked about two weeks ago. Here's it for example. This is the client game. How many of you like board games? Every Friday night at my place was board games when I was growing up with my parents, it was great. So this is the client board game. Actually it's just a graphic I found that fit this purpose very nicely. But here's the client right up there at the top left. They are the pawn there. So we're going to start off in the process with our first contact. The first contact looks like, hey, this is what we need. This is what the project looks like. I have a consistent intake form that we use for every client, every project, every time, a set of questions that we ask all the time, every project. It never changes. So in that first contact, we're going to end that consultation. I actually skipped something here. The first contact is if they call us on the phone, before we'll even meet with them for that consultation where we're going through this checklist, we start out with, you know, the minimum price that we work with is $4,000. Our website started $4,000 and go up from there depending on complexity. So we always give them that baseline price. And if I had people referring clients to me, they understand that. If you're going to work with Brilliant Webworks, it's going to be $4,000 to start. And then depending on what you want to do, it could go up from there, right? So before we even spend the time with the client to go through that checklist, there's the initial phone call where we at least give them that benchmark price. We're anchoring them to at least some price point so they know I'm not going to waste their time. They're not going to waste my time. So we're going to have a consultation where we're working through that checklist. And we end that consultation with something I picked up years ago. I think I read it online somewhere, but I've made it part of my process from here forward, and it's so important. How many of you have waste time making proposals? You've, you know, you've written a proposal and, you know, the client never responds back or you put a proposal down and it's like, you know, and you've agonized over it, right? It's like, do I make it $3,700? Or, no, $3,750. No, no, no, $3,775, because the pricing psychology says sevens are awesome, right? Oh, no, maybe I should do 41. And you go, three hours later you don't have the proposal done yet, right? And then the response you get back from the client, well, I was thinking more like 500 bucks. And you spent three hours writing this beautiful proposal that the client is even going to consider. So anyway, all that to say, we end the initial consultation with a phrase, something like this, if we come back with a, you know, this feels like about a $4,000 to $5,000 project. If we come back to you with a proposal in that range, are you ready to start? That ballpark price saves so much time because if they're not going to commit to that price point, I'm not going to commit to spend the time to write a proposal. Commitments, one little step at a time. Then we move into, once the proposal is done, we get a signed proposal in contract. At that point, the client makes the big commitment which is 50% upfront period, right? When they commit to us with signed documents and paperwork, we move into the content phase. Now years for years and years, I started with a design phase and then did content. You know what happens when you do that? You make a beautiful design and the client's nine months later and they still don't have the pictures for you or the content or somebody's about page text or whatever. So we made this change where now our philosophy is content first. Content first. Content first. Did you get that? Content first. Why? Because I'm not going to move an inch on this project after I get my initial payment until I get all the client's content. All of it. All the pictures, all the video, all the text, all the everything. When we get that content, then we move into a design phase and we're in the design phase until they approve the design and sign off on it. Then we go into development where we're actually building the thing. We get a look at the review and testing. They make another commitment to us on, yes, this is what we want. So we'll make any final changes and move into launch. We don't launch the site until the entire bill is paid. You do it that way. By the way, you don't have any collections problems. Because the client sees, hey, we've got a great website here now. Let's write the guy a check. Then we move into a maintenance phase where we hopefully care for them for years to come at a recurring revenue maintenance plan. I'm still refining this process over the years. There's little tweaks we'll make here and there, but this is basically how we run every project. Every client, every project, every time. To me, it makes sense to you. It may not make sense, but you find your own project where you can get some consistency. Just make sure it includes opportunities for the client to commit at multiple points along the way. It's give and take throughout the whole process. In your contract, like I mentioned earlier, you need to clearly define the expectations and consequences. At strategic points in the development process, let them know what you need from them, what they can expect from you. It should be in the contract, they sign at the beginning, but it's also got to be verbal or by email. And by that, I mean you need to be reminding the client because you can tell some clients one thing one time and those clients don't stay told. Right? Have you met those people? You can tell them, and I like my teenage daughter, you can tell them, but they don't stay told and you've got to keep telling them and reminding them. By the way, we still need your content by this such and such a day or we're going to have to say the project is suspended. And when the project is suspended, bad things happen. We don't do anything else on your project until we get the balance paid in full. By the way, that's how you stop the client from delaying content. That's another talk. All right, so that's commitments. Let's talk about communication. Communication is critical. The previous presenter had some great stuff and it was really great. So there's a wonderful quote from George Bernard Shaw who says, the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has occurred. It's very wise. But I'll also tell you this, that few things can improve the client's experience more than clear, regular communication. How many of you have discovered that if you hit a problem in the client's project, your first inclination is to go hide in the cave and you hope the client doesn't call or email asking what's going on with the project. And you can go dark, sometimes for weeks at a time because you don't want the client to ask and that's exactly the wrong approach. Because what's going to happen is you're going to be late probably on the work and they're going to be mad because they had no idea that was coming. So if you'll communicate regularly, bad news, it turns out not to be so bad. But without clear, regular communication, clients make assumptions and they usually assume the worst. That's human nature by the way. In the absence of information, we tend to assume the worst. I don't know why that is. We're goofy people. So this is a discipline that I started doing years ago, which is what I call a three-sentence email. I didn't invent this. I picked it up. I'm like a ball of duct tape rolling through the world picking stuff up from all places. I don't know where I got this. If I knew where I would attribute the author. But it's brilliant. And it's simple. If it's simple, I can do it. And this is what I do every Friday. Every Friday afternoon, it's what I call my CEO time. I don't do any client work. I work on my business. Friday morning, the last thing I do on Friday morning before CEO time, I send the three-sentence email to every client with an active project. And it works like this. It's past, present, and future. Past is, this is what we did this last week. Present, this is where the project stands right now. Future, this is what we're going to be working on next week. If you have any questions, please let me know. This email is where you communicate if there are any issues with the project. Last week, we had trouble getting that stupid UPS API working with your WooCommerce website. And God knows when we're going to get No. By Tuesday, we're going to get that worked out, probably. This is where you explain to the client when the project goes off track. Right? And clients would much, I'm telling you, from personal experience, clients would rather understand that this is where you are, even if it's not perfect, let them know where you're at and what you're going to do to solve it. And this is how that's going to affect the rest of the project. We hit the snag we should have worked out next week. We don't anticipate this delaying your project at all. They just want to hear. Clear, regular communication. Okay, last. Documentation. I saw a couple of hands pop up. We'll get to questions in just a minute. Documentation. If you don't document, you're relying on your own memory, which is usually a bad thing. What's worse than that is relying on the client's memory. Get used to communicating and writing. And by writing, I mean email, right? Unless you handwrite things, which God bless you if you do that. I want my clients to be able to read when I write. So I email. Get used to communicating and writing because written communication is referenceable. There's a certain client type that never remembers any of the commitments that they made. And having an email to refer back to is critical. And so also, if a decision is made verbally, so if you're in an in-person meeting or if you're on the phone with that person, you send an email to follow up just to recap our conversation. This is what we decided to do so that there is a written communication that is later referenceable if this client conveniently forgets that we made that decision. So, not only this, but you need to implement some sort of system that can easily capture all your project communication. Now, I know there's a million of them out there. There's a ton of them. Here's the only thing I'll say. Don't just use email. Seriously. If don't just use email because the one time you need to find something you're going to have trouble finding it. There's a bunch of different project management solutions out there. Pick the best system for you. The best system is the one that you will consistently use. Let me tell you something I've learned watching my own habits and by talking to people around the country. We, how many of you self-identify as a geek? In a great short, it says geek right there. I love it. It's great. Here's the problem with us geeks. We will spend six months building an elaborate client communication tracking system and then never use it. Find something that works and then just use it. It's not ever going to be perfect. Consistency is better than perfection in this case. Find something that works for you and use it. Alright, so clients are friendly monsters. We've got to build fences around these friendly monsters. Otherwise they're going to break out and they're going to trample the rest of your life. It starts with clarity, commitments, communication and then documentation. Before we do questions real quick, before we get to the second part, let me just leave you with this. Don't tear down your own fences. How many of you are nice people? Don't tear down your own fences. I promise you, if you take nothing else away from this talk, remember this. If you're a nice person, you need stronger fences than everybody else. Because here's what's going to happen. If you're a nice person, you will tend to let clients weasel their way out of the commitments that they've made. And you'll make excuses for the client. Why do we do that? We make excuses for, oh, they're busy, oh, they didn't read it, oh, I should have done that. And we let them weasel out of the commitments that they made. You build fences, you have a process and the client breaks the rules. And if your tendency is to be nice and just give them another chance, you've got to have strong fences. You can hold the client to his or her commitment and still be a nice person. You can. Because here's what's going to happen. If you let the client weasel out of their commitments, initially you'll feel okay about it. But then like 10 minutes later, see if this sounds like you. Like 10 minutes later, this little fire starts in your chest. How many of you, you know what I'm talking about? And you start getting resentment burning in there. And it gets worse. And then you just get bad. And it's the end of the day and if you're like me, you walk upstairs and I'm not a pleasant person to be around in that situation. And I'll snap off at my wife, which is never bad. And I'll say something bad to my kids. I'll slap at the dog, why? I will be angry at the people in my life who are closest to me. So I can be nice to the client. Now that's insane. So instead of forcing a stranger to live up to the commitments that they made, instead I'll be a jerk to the people in my life that are closest to me. That's stupid. So build strong fences, right? Let's take a few questions here then we'll move into the four types of problem clients. Yes. Yes, content first. Did y'all get that? Content first. The messaging that they composed between them and the client. And it's the work going around in circles. It's like, well, okay, I'm reading the messaging and they're expecting me to come up with the concepts based on the messaging. And it's like, well, who goes first? It's like, well, you do this and then you write it and it's like, but I think it should be the other way around. Okay, so how many of you... So the question for the recording is we're working with a marketing agency, you have messaging but no content and they want you to do something... Like a wire frame or come up with concepts to show the client and based on just a page and a half of the messaging. Yeah. Okay, so when you're subcontracting it's a little stickier. It's hard to use your process because you're not in control of the system, the situation. So I only subcontract in very rare circumstances where the person I'm subbing for will let me use my process. The minute you break your own rules, you're going to regret it because those rules are there for a reason. Okay, so in this case what I would suggest is, well, maybe you need to add when next time you do work for this company, you need to add some time to accommodate for that because otherwise you're going to be doing a bunch of work and you're going to get redone and... Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Other questions? Yes. That's the design phase, yeah. So typically for me, I still do things old school. I use Affinity Designer. I make a flat graphic layout, usually of the home page and just a sample inner page. I know some of you guys are way beyond that. That's okay, I'm a geezer when it comes to these things. What I find is helpful is that the... Getting the client focused on this is what it's going to look like, helps us to make all the content ahead of time, so that's all done. The content's done, we just roll into development and we do it out. So yeah, UX happens at the design phase. The systems you're talking about for communicating, documenting, all that? You're right, they're a million of them. What's your favorite? I use Trello and Evernote for different things, yeah. Really? It's a whole other talk, yeah. Yes. Yes, great. Okay, great point. Right. But they need a little guidance. So the question for the video is how do you get content when you're not quite sure where you're heading yet with design of the site? It's a great question. So normally what I do, when the client hires me, the first thing they get from me is my content guide, which is I gotta tell you, there's a million ways to do this. I use a Microsoft Word document because everybody can open it. I could design this brilliant system and drive a notification. You can do all that. I use a Microsoft Word document. It steps through every single page of the website. It has a site map with a little tree. This is kind of the pages we're going to do. It steps through every page of the website and asks proactive questions like, this is your about page. What is it that makes you different from your customers? What is the history of your company? Do you have an owner's bio you'd like to include? It asks all these questions proactively because quite frankly, most clients are not like, let me say this. How many of you have tried to rebuild your website and it took you six months or nine months or a year? And you're the professionals! You mean you can't even explain? It takes us forever to make our own content. It's hard work, which by the way says maybe you need to build in content creation as a service to add on to. Or maybe you started a higher price that includes content creation with them bringing a writer, if you have the chops to do it, do it yourself. And then maybe if they need a lower price, you take that away. Oh yeah, absolutely. So they get that document and then all the instructional documents that we have to go along with that, yeah. Okay, so it is probably 60% custom for each client. Like the about page questions are all the same. There's a preliminary that talks about this is how you get us access to your domain name. You know, this is some options for your email, which we don't do email. If you do email by the way, if you're trying to manage email for your clients, run. That's another talk. But yeah, so it's probably 60% and that is in a course, sharing that document is in a course that I'm in the process of creating right now on my website. It'll be at NathanIngram.com. Like right now my contract and my proposal template and all that is already in a course out there. But yeah, I don't have the content guide yet. I'll give you one more question and we'll roll to the next section. Anybody? Are we good? Yes. How do you convince the owner of an agency to do content first? Are you an employee of the agency? I would go back and look at the last six months worth of projects and see where they've all stalled and it's always going to be content. But here's what happens. How many of you, it takes you six weeks to build a website because you're doing one page here and one page there and three days later this page over here. How much more efficient could you be and how much more efficient could the developers in your agency be if you gave them and said here, build this. Three days, you're done. The last website I did, two half day sprints and it was done. It's efficiency. That's how you sell it. Okay, let's move on to five monsters. I forgot to correct that. Four monsters you should know. We don't have time for the fifth. So the first is the invisible man. You've all met the invisible man, I promise you. Identify the invisible man by the fact that he expresses great interest repeatedly and then disappears. You get the call and boom, it takes you three weeks to meet with them. That sound familiar? They repeatedly reschedule planned meetings or they take a long time to respond. You email them and they were hot. They're a hot league and they're like five days to get back to you. This is how you start to tell you're dealing with an invisible man. What I've learned about the invisible man is that he's usually well-intentioned. They're not bad people. They're just busy. These are often small business owners who are wearing like 86 hats. The website on Tuesday is a top priority. But on Wednesday, something else has become the top priority. Or it is now one of their six top priorities, right? It's just the nature of small business life. I mean, I commiserate with this person. I understand that. But here's what's going to happen. If you start sensing invisible man tendencies in the initial workings with this person, don't think they're going to change because they're not. And what they're going to do is they're going to disappear on you in the middle of a project. They're going to take six months to get you the content. But then what's going to happen is they're going to reappear and want everything done tomorrow. Because now it's really a top priority. So this is what I say. The invisible man at that point turns into what I call the stealth bomber and they appear and drop bombs all over your world. And they want it all done today. Now, I used to get really angry at these clients. And then I had this moment of clarity where I thought, why am I getting angry at these people? The only reasons they're causing me trouble is that I'm letting them. That's when I started building in language into the contract that defines what happens when you delay content for more than 30 days. So that is actively working on it with you or something going on. I was letting them ruin my life. See, every problem in your process is an opportunity usually for a service to solve the problem in addition to website creation. So what I realized with the invisible man, you know what, if I would just get them to hire me for half a day and I'm going to sit in his office and I'm going to work through that content guy with all those questions and we're just going to work at it right there at the desk and he'll hire me for four hours and we'll just get it done. Hey, I just made several hundred dollars there that I wouldn't have made otherwise. And the website gets finished quicker and everybody's happy. Does that make sense? Invisible man, you'll see them all the time. So, here's the containment strategy. You got to focus on clarity. It's the clarity fence that really appeals that really helps to contain the invisible man. You got to make sure that the client understands your process in the contract and in verbal reminders. Create that process to deal with disappearing clients. Suspend it and abandon projects. This is what happens if you delay on us. But again, you got to keep telling them because like I said earlier, some clients don't stay told. So you get to remind the invisible man and this happens by the way in the three sentence email every week. Your project gets active. We haven't heard from you in three weeks. We haven't heard from you otherwise this is going to happen. Weekly communication. So I have clear wording in that contract describing projects delayed by the client. Okay, here's the second one. This guy's actually my favorite. The question mark. How many of you have dealt with a client that loves to ask questions? And you meet with them and you're sitting across the table at Starbucks and they're asking you a question, followed by another question, followed by another question, followed by a three part follow up to that and they keep going and they're dreaming and they're having so much fun exploring this wonderful new idea that they have. And the problem is three hours later you're no further towards getting any money out of this person than you were earlier. So the question mark what I've discovered is they don't know what they want. They have no idea what they want. Or they want everything. They ask endless questions and they really don't have any sense of goals or a budget for their process. Now here's what we have to do. With the question mark we've got to focus on commitment. Because these clients are classic time wasters. You've got to get a commitment from the question mark. Otherwise they're going to waste all your time. You can invest hours and hours in this client before they ever even think about making a commitment your way. So what do you do? Use that intake form, that intake questionnaire, commit to them for a one hour consultation. That's what you give them. If it goes longer than that, the magic words are discovery phase. Because if I don't have the answers to all your questions, by the way the client consultation is not the time to answer how questions. When you're meeting with them for the first time you're trying to ask what questions. What are we trying to accomplish? What are we trying to do? The how you don't get the how until I've got some money. Because how is intellectual property? What is what you're giving to me? I run the client meeting. I don't let the client monopolize the client meeting. I'm giving them an hour of my time or you could phrase it this way. You are spending an hour of your time with the client. What do you charge per hour? You are spending that much money meeting with the client right there. Rearrange your thinking if you don't think about it that way. So I'm going to run that conversation and I'm going to get to price early. If somebody starts peppering me with questions listen, this is what I've learned. The quickest way to shut up a question mark is with a dollar sign. Promise you. Because as soon as you drop the bomb on the table if it's going to cost this the question mark shuts up. Because it just got real. If we can't get their questions answered or if we can't figure out what the project is supposed to be or to do within that hour then we need to have a discovery phase and they're going to hire me for a thousand or two thousand dollars and at the end of that discovery phase they're going to get a document that's actionable of this is what you need and you can hire me to continue that process or you can take it on to somebody else. I call it a client consultation. Discovery phase is the how. You're trying to figure out how to be paid for that. Yeah, so for example of discovery phase type questions is helping a client think through their pricing strategy on an e-commerce site. How do I deal with shipping and tax and fulfillment? Don't do that for free. No, that's information that has value. That's a how question, not a what question. What questions are free? How questions cost money? Okay, got a roll. Here's the next one. I hate this guy. This is like the best stock photo ever. By the way, this guy right here I was given this talk in Tampa in 2016. And a guy came up to me after he goes, I know this guy. Yeah, we've all met the question mark. He goes, no, I know this guy. He goes to my church. His name's Kevin and his wife is a stock photographer and if you look on stock sites you'll see Kevin doing different poses. That's his thing. Okay, so this guy, you've got to feel sorry for this guy, but he's the perfect boundary buster. The boundary buster, see if you've met this one. The boundary buster sends you 3am emails with a 7.30 follow up wondering if you got it and have you gotten it done yet. The boundary buster all the time wants after hours or weekend meetings because they're too busy otherwise. They work weekends and holidays. They expect you to do the same. The containment strategy is communication. It's all about communication. I work during normal business hours. I do not work on weekends and holidays. I've got a family and they are far more important to me than any work you're going to bring me. And depending on the jerk level of the boundary buster, I will sometimes say it that way. If you need me outside of business hours for a true emergency the dollar per hours are double. The plumber charges you that. Why wouldn't you charge that? How about this? You get a 10pm email from a client and you're sitting there watching Netflix and you get your phone or you get your laptop open and you get an email from a client 9-10 o'clock at night and it's a simple question. So what do you do? Fire back off a response and you pat yourself on the back for having this great customer service. What have you done? You've just trained the client that you work at 10 o'clock at night. You have fed the Mogwai after midnight. You have created a monster. I never know if that's going to work in a crowd because some people, I'm old y'all so alright. But you create a monster. We train clients often times that our boundaries can be stretched. So what do you do? Set the tone in the initial client meeting. Unless it's a genuine true emergency and reschedule the initial consultation it's going to be two or three weeks before I'm going to meet with them again. My time's important too. Set the tone from the initial meeting because the boundary buster is going to test all of your fences. This is the one that you really have to remind yourself. Don't break your own rules. Don't tear down your own fences. And listen sometimes you have to fire the client. I think there's a session on that at this word camp. Make sure though that that situation is covered in your contract. Otherwise you might find yourself enjoying an appearance in the court of law which is not any fun for anybody. This client by the way is an excellent candidate for what I call the PETA surcharge which stands for pain in the asterisk. If I want to work with you it's going to be worth it. Okay. Last one. This is the drama queen. I have a one person I'm coaching calls these her diva clients. I need everything. Yeah. So the diva clients are tough to deal with right? With a diva client everything is an emergency. Their favorite word is now. I need it now. We have to do it now. Can we do it tomorrow? Can we do it now? By next week at the latest can we do it now? Because it's all right here right now. Me. Me. Me. Now a lot of times what you hear from this person is complaints about a previous developer who did everything wrong. Have you heard that? You better dig into that with a big shovel because now look I've been around our community enough to know if there's some really knuckleheaded developers out there that it really I mean I shake my head sometimes at some rescue work that I get on WordPress I'm thinking I mean they had to try to make it this bad. I mean it's bad. Bad. But as soon as a client starts complaining about a previous developer I'm going to dig into that sharply because if I'm not careful six months from now she's going to be sitting across the table from some other poor shmuck complaining about me. Right? So it's a red flag. Everything is now. Look the drama queen. What you have to do this is the one you have to focus on documentation because system trumps drama. When you've got a system that you use for every client every project every time the drama queen may explode but she stays inside the fence. We don't break that rule. I'm sorry I know you want it tomorrow but unless you're going to pay double we don't break that rule. Stick to your system. Keep great records because the drama queen forgets the connections she had in the past. It's all about right now. Oh I don't remember us having that conversation that we were going to go this direction. I want to go this direction now. Well on the email last Tuesday at 2 23 p.m. this is what you told me. So if you want to go that direction that's fine but it's going to be a change order and it's going to cost more money. That make sense? All right. So clients are friendly monsters. We have to surround them with four wonderful fences clarity, commitment, communication but today if you had to answer how strong are your fences? Do you have a great process that keeps these problem clients in check? If you don't start working on it. Start working on it. Your life will be so much better. Your business will be so much better. The fact that you can keep your business contained and walk away from it and not worry about things is a possibility when you have a great process and a great system where problem clients stay in check. Thanks. My name is Nathan Ingram. We'll take a few questions. Once again presentation slides some other resources. Nathan ingram.com Also I'm back at 2 o'clock today down in the purple room for what I wish I'd known about freelancing. One thing before anybody leaves it's about to be lunchtime and I love nothing more at a word camp than sitting around and let's have lunch and I'm serious about that. I'm heading to lunch so if you guys want to chat let's do it. We have how long for questions? Any questions? We have 10 minutes. Awesome. Questions? Yes sir. I heard that presentation you use to add your terms like sprints. How much of your process do you use? Very little. It's pretty much me. In the build side of my business I'm the one executing the projects. I have folks that handle any hard core development that we need and I have a client support manager but me my strength has always been building the site so I do that. I just block out the time and do it once we have all the assets. Yes. The fifth monster is the penny pincher. The penny pincher is the one that doesn't want to pay you any money. They're the ones that want to... How about this? In the previous session I got this great business idea. I'll give you 20% of the sales if you'll build the website. So what they're saying is you want me to invest $5,000 of my time in a project that you're not even willing to invest $5,000 in. Other questions? Yes ma'am. These guys are awesome. They are the heroes of WordCamp. What company are you guys with? White Coat Capture Me. So in the previous session we talked about recording client meetings. Just hire these guys to come sit there and do this. It's like a stenography on steroids, right? I was watching you guys last year. It's remarkable. Anybody else? Let's have lunch.