 and retaining long-term clients today and myself, I'm Owen Lansbury for those of you that haven't met me before. I am a co-founder of previousnext, I was MD of previousnext for 10 years before handing over the reins to Jason Codland last year and a lot of my focus these days is going into the Drupal South Steering Committee and I've also just been appointed to the Global Drupal Association Board so I've got a very heavy involvement in the community and its success and you if you're sitting here you might be thinking of starting a agency yourself any hands up? No? You're not allowed to. You might be running a smaller agency of your own and be looking to grow that. You might work for a larger agency or organization and be frustrated with client turnover and the chaos that generally comes with running projects but no matter who you are I hope there is some takeaways from this talk. Now I did deliver this talk in Amsterdam so I've got a bit of a gardening theme going on, the Chuluk capital of the world but I think thinking about business in this way is obviously much more interesting than having some click art of people sitting in offices but it is about this notion of how do you seed clients, how do you nurture them and then grow them over time. But before we get into that what does make your business sustainable? It's kind of a fundamental question and what things you should be focusing on to keep it sustainable. So the first thing is yes we should all be doing work that we're interested in and working on things that we're passionate about but if you're a business owner or a business leader ultimately you're responsible for your staff and the mortgages that they're paying and putting food on the table for their kids and that's an immense responsibility but for myself it's also the most rewarding thing and I told my team the other day that my favorite part of previous next is the random channel where people are announcing their babies and their weddings and the houses that they're buying and for me that is by far the most rewarding thing about running a business. But to achieve this you're having a focus on the numbers that keep your business running is by far the most important thing that you can do as a business leader. So the first thing I wanted to talk about is what's your capacity model and by that I mean as a services company you're probably employing staff who work on a head hours basis for clients and how are you fulfilling those head hours in terms of your capacity. So the example that I've used before is if you've got a five person agency you as the founder you're probably running around trying to get clients doing payroll marketing working on strategy for clients etc etc you're probably rarely going to be able to be more than about 30% billable yourself but then your team you might have a designer you might have three developers and you should be aiming for 80% or above in terms of their billable capacity and I wrote a blog post last week on the previous next blog around how we managed that capacity model and billable model in terms of actually contributing code to Drupal as well in that other 20% time so feel free to read that. But if you are charging at kind of average rates and fulfilling about 6,000 hours of billable work a year your five person agency should be doing about a million dollars in business in terms of raw revenue and then what's your profit model from that so out of that million dollars you're probably spending 600,000 or so on wages another 200,000 or so on operating costs rents flying people through south etc etc and ideally you should be aiming for around a 20% profit margin if you can achieve that which is going to leave you with about 200k and I think the important thing especially in the context of the Drupal world is profit shouldn't be a dirty word it's your safety buffer from rough patches but also your freedom enabler and if you do make profit it's then up to you to decide what you actually do with it so you might have a profit share scheme with your staff you might be donating that to charities that you're passionate about or you might be reinvesting that into both the Drupal community and also into your own business but I think in the meantime with the example that we used of having a million dollar business with a five person agency unless you're doing more than a million dollars in business you can't go off and hire someone new because that's just going to start cutting into your your profit model and if you do consistently start dropping below that threshold of break even unfortunately you have to do the hardest thing in running a business and probably let someone go and by that action it is definitely the hardest thing that you will do in running a business but you need to make those decisions early enough to ensure that it's not the other four people that get affected by holding off too long on that so I'm just going to give you a run through of our own experience over the past decades so in our first year like every new agency we took on any project that we could get our hands on and at the end of that first year we found that we had two clients that accounted for two-thirds of our revenue so that obviously creates a lot of risk in the business if one of those clients dropped out there's a third of our revenue gone and likely one of our employees and I think the other lesson that we found from that first year is that more than half of our clients will be in build under ten thousand dollars each but they still took up a significant amount of time in terms of managing them and the classic example I always give is the client that we had that was paying the least amount of money was the one that was calling me up to ask me how to fix his iPhone at eight o'clock at night and of course in that situation you're going to say yes you want to keep them happy but ultimately that's just going to be eating into your time in terms of servicing your other clients and then we fast forward five years we've got a nice little orchard starting to bloom and we found that at the end of those five years we had 20 clients that accounted for almost 90 percent of our revenue so that's an amazing way to defray risk in your business if you've got that volume of clients that are accounting for that proportion of revenue but we still kept saying yes to small clients and we still had almost 50 clients that were paying us under ten thousand dollars a year at that point in time and while that sounds like a big number in aggregate the amount of effort that you have to go through to service that many clients is incredibly complex and time-consuming and then we just ticked over ten years earlier this year and what we did a few years ago was we looked at our our clients on our roster and looked at the ones that were really just ticking along at that low billable rate and we retired most of them if not all of them and we did that by referring them on to smaller agencies we had one agency take off I think about 20 of our small hosting clients and incorporate them into their own platform and that's a good outcome for everyone they're off our hands as a company we're not servicing those clients as well as we should be anyway they're now working with people that are really enthused about working with them and everyone understands why that needs to happen so in terms of where we're currently at we've got ten clients that account for about 80 percent of our revenue and I think the important thing is that we've only got about 30 clients in total only a small number of those are being billed under about twenty thousand dollars a year and I think importantly for us we've really focused on how do we build in retained revenue from those clients and we're now almost at 50 percent of our revenue is paid upfront at the beginning of the year and then we burn down that throughout the course of the year as a company we're fiercely independent we've stated consciously at around 20 staff we've resisted the urge to grow for the sake of growth and I think the lesson that I've had from many people is you might grow to 50 or 70 people but your profit margins get massively eroded as a small company and the challenge of maintaining that type of pipeline of work is extraordinary some people can do it and have been very successful at it we've chosen not to go down that path at this point in time don't say it won't ever happen though so as we get into the kind of guts of the talk I want to go back to that notion of seeding or business with clients and before you do that you really need to define who your ideal clients are there's a common saying is that your clients define you but you do need to be proactive as early as possible about saying we're really good at this we're really interested in these types of things let's identify the types of clients that we want to go after and work out how to how to find them so a wise person once said to me a mentor that we had in our business for quite a long time that you should always be thinking of the first project is about 10% of what you might bill over time with a client and this is a great lens through which to view opportunities with new clients i.e. can you foresee billing another 90% on top of what you've originally built in terms of ongoing projects that you might have with them and that doesn't mean that you turn clients down that don't fit this model but it's a great way to identify the really golden clients that you are going to have those long-term relationships with and one way of looking at long-term clients is what attributes do they share so when you started to talk to a client do they tick things off like do they have really complex needs that's a sure signifier that they're going to need a lot of your services do they have multiple divisions within their own organization that are working on lots of different things at once do they have their own large internal team so they might already have Drupal developers in in-house and working on existing platforms but do they need those teams to be augmented or assisted from a kind of higher expertise perspective do they have ambitious targets so do they have ambitious sales targets are they looking to secure new customers do they have new products that they continue with continually rolling out and I think what this all leads to is that these types of clients they have significant technology budgets and it's quite easy to find out what type of budgets they usually dealing with but they usually in the millions of dollars and as I said before we put a lot of focus into identifying what types of clients are going to need retainer-based services and I'll talk a little bit more about that later so unless you enjoy herding cats upselling to these types of clients is always going to be far easier than establishing an entirely new client relationship and the effort to extract revenue from a few big clients is far easier than lots and lots of smaller ones and a great example is what's going to be easier doing two projects with five hundred thousand dollars each with two teams that you're dealing with or fifty projects with twenty thousand dollars and there's an obvious answer there so one of the things that we do when we're starting to talk to a new client is going through a client qualification checklist and this is about paying close attention to how well a new client fits your preferred model before you even start talking to them or pursuing them and it's as much about you identifying that you want to work with the client as the client identifying that they want to work with you and so the method that we use is just a simple checklist we don't even refer to the table anymore it's just in the back of our heads all the time but what's the strategic opportunity of working with this client is it going to complement our existing client base is it complementing an existing vertical that we work with are we moving into a new vertical that we want to work within does it help us disable a competitor if we win this project what type of program of work are they likely to have over time is there going to be more projects past the first one will they need managed services will they need us to continually improve their platforms for them do they have an internal team that we we can augment and then what's our likelihood of actually winning this thing have they gone out to tender and there's fifty respondents and we've got a less than five percent chance of winning that in the first place have they identified Drupal as their preferred CMS upfront or open source in general or are they going out to market for a general CMS showdown tender and you're actually having to sell Drupal before you sell your own company and what's really important for us is what's our rapport with this client early on what kind of cues are we picking up from them in terms of the relationship we're likely to have with them are they being obstinate and dictatorial with us from the word go or are they approaching this is looking for a partner that's going to share their same goals for delivering the project budgets obviously important and the first question I always ask a potential new client is what's your budget and many of them will say I can't tell you that but the ones that do say well we've got this amount to spend this is what we're expecting that's the best way that you can start a client relationship because then you can say well for that type of money we expect that we'd be able to deliver these types of things because we're going to deliver what we can in terms of value within your expectations is the budget realistic most likely not in many cases but again it's that conversation early on to set their expectations around what realistic actually looks like and then finally what's our resourcing capacity to actually take this on and this is the classic trap that small agencies fall into yeah we got a big new client but we've got no people to deliver it you go through a mad scramble to hire as many people as you can they're not going to be working full capacity from day one so one of the approaches that we've taken which has just been instilled for the last few years and which fonderers a key part of is looking at our resource capacity over the course of the next quarter or next two quarters looking at this new project that's coming in and saying where could we fit this in and being open with the client about that as early as possible to say well we're backed up until March next year if you want to work with us that's when you're going to have to wait until and obviously that's not something that is going to be applicable every time but again having that conversation early is really key in terms of setting expectations building trust and building good rapport so now you've defined the types of clients you want to work with how do you win them so I think the important thing to understand is where you fit into a client's purchase cycle so large organizations they're often going to engage a separate firm to do their digital strategy or they might manage that internally many of these big firms still view UX and designers separate activities that they might go off and get another firm to do before they even start thinking about the technology and like I said before many of them are going to the CMS showdown which CMS should we we choose and we try and avoid that where possible because it's just this enormous time suck and we've potentially got a low chance of winning in those situations so it's always preferable that they've specified Drupal in their RFQs and I think the challenge for us as Drupal services companies as many of these big clients come to you as the implementer and that's challenging because they've already made a lot of strategic decisions about the project very early on they're coming to you saying this is what our website is going to look like here's all the features we know nothing about Drupal now we want you to fit this square peg into a round hole so what we do try and do with new opportunities to is to try and get ourselves as high up that purchase cycle as possible in terms of decision making influence and ideally ensure that they understand how Drupal can fit what they're trying to achieve as early as possible so now we're getting to a bit of marketing stuff how these types of clients going to find you you're this little agency you've got a limited profile in a particular sector and so the things that we've really focused on what is your own profile within that industry sector so if you're familiar with previous next we tend to do large public sector projects we're really good at doing that I think we've currently got about five or six universities on our client roster another university club comes to us because they're aware that we've got that expertise what's our profile within the Drupal community so many of you would be aware that we put a lot of effort into ensuring that that stays strong through our contribution and that's vitally important to our clients in terms of understanding our commitment and capability content marketing and SEO that comes from that's really key for us as well so you'll see our team constantly blogging about either very detailed technical things or quite high level concepts and they're not specifically designed to capture SEO terms but if someone's searching for how do I integrate such and such video platform with Drupal there's good likelihood that we might have written a blog post about that expert marketing by talking at conferences is really key for us it demonstrates expertise that we're sharing with the community and then as we start working down to more traditional methods personal referrals are key for us so if we've built good rapport with the client they're going to be telling their colleagues that might work for competing companies and organizations hey I've been working with these guys they're awesome you should work with them too and there's no amount of value that can actually be put on on that but still have people do business these days and then the things that we find are relatively ineffective are I suppose what you call business networking events where you're trying to run around and shake people's hands and hey would you like to buy a website that really doesn't work for us it may work for other people and cold calling we've never made a cold call ever if you resorting to cold calling your business will probably go out of business very quickly so why would clients choose you once they've got a sense of who you are again it goes back to your company profile and I think the key thing with these bigger organizations and really any organization is they want to be telling their colleagues and their bosses that they've chosen the best possible company to deliver on their projects and there's a high level of prestige around that in terms of clients themselves and I think one of the big learnings that we've had is to demonstrate very early on that we understand a client's needs it's very easy to rest on your laurels and say oh we're one of the biggest Drupal contributors and blah blah blah they do not give a shit unless you can demonstrate how that translates into understanding their needs they're unlikely to have a second conversation with you so any RFP really put that effort into demonstrating how you do understand their goals and needs and that's definitely a hard lesson that we've we've learned demonstrating relevant and demonstrable expertise is obviously key so what examples do you have of things that you've done like what they want to do in the past again personal impressions and initial relationships that you have with these clients it's not about whining and dining with them it's about understanding can you sit in a room with these people for months on end and have fun working on a project with them and if you can't have that rapport early on that's a really big red flag and at the very bottom of that list is price so a client will almost never choose you solely based on price it does happen usually backfires for them and they usually come back to you at the end of the day anyway and I think in terms of you thinking about setting your own rates that should be set in terms of what you understand the markets willing to pay and your perception of expertise in terms of that market we have really rarely compromised on price especially early on in a project if a client comes back to us and says that's way too much our first question will be well what do you want to cut out and many times we don't win those projects but again it's that indicator of what your relationship is going to be like with them so what types of clients can you work with that kind of fit these long term client characteristics so I think we all have aspirations or pretensions to want to work with these big global brands so hey we worked on the Coca Cola website or whatever I think the reality for independent firms is those relationships are locked up by big global digital agencies decisions being made about technology choices etc being made in New York and London and wherever else they're not being made in Sydney or Hobart or or wherever so I think it's very very hard to establish a relationship with those types of clients that are at a local level and I think sure there's going to be partnering opportunities we've often had these big digital agencies call us up and say quick we need help with Drupal and sure they might use you on an initial project if they can see that there's a long term future for them into having Drupal services they're going to internalize that pretty quickly they might buy you to do that but they're not going to give you that relationship and I think that's the key with working with these types of big global brands is that you'll never own the relationship as a small independent firm you're always going to be two or three tiers down the the food chain and that doesn't translate into repeat long term relationships but what we have found success with is challenger brands so you've got say a vertical market like telecommunications you've got the big players like the offices and the Telstra's but then you've got all these upstart players and they're much more willing to engage independent agencies a to kind of keep their costs down they want to work with smaller teams and innovate faster they're open to using new technologies to help them do that and a great example for us is a Mason which you might be familiar with came to us when they were relatively small I think they just gone public really didn't have much in terms of a platform standardized on Drupal 8 I think was the first big Drupal 8 project that we built and now they've got well in excess of a million customers so we've grown with them and they've remained loyal to us throughout that that that process as I mentioned we do a lot of work in public sector but it is a great way for smaller agencies to get a toehold into that market government does have policies around using local firms over big international ones they've especially in Australia and New Zealand have policies around the use of open source and we've seen the results of that with things like gov CMS where Drupal is being able to establish a a very firm foothold in that sector all of these public sector clients will have panels that you can apply to be on and that's a lot of paperwork to go through but you've just got to suck it up get through that paperwork once you've been approved on those types of panels you rarely actually fall off them so once you're on you're on and you can then be applying for these projects that do come up and the tender process for dealing with these types of clients again can be incredibly frustrating and arcane and ticking all every box that they have in terms of compliance and that type of thing but they'll also generally be more transparent in terms of if you didn't win they're more or less obligated to tell you specifically why and I definitely encourage you every project that you never win always talk to the client about why you didn't win and use that for self improvement and we've learned a huge amount by having those conversations with clients that we didn't win but you did win so now what so I think the thing that we do when we first win a client is essentially put up a big fence and set some parameters around how we're going to work together so early on we had a thing called a project charter that had a whole range of detail around who we are as a team who's going on maternity leave through the projects what people's responsibilities are on our side but equally what are the client's responsibilities who on their side needs to turn up to scrum meetings every day who on their side is the decision maker what time do we need decisions to be made in etc etc etc and I think having that conversation at the very beginning of a project with the client everyone's clear on how you've agreed to work together and if you want to sign that in a document that's great that's probably not legally binding but it does set this expectation of this is how we're going to work together the other component here is have the right people having those conversations and managing those relationships so one of my big learnings as a co-founder is I'm not the right person to have those conversations Fonda is and I think identifying that at the appropriate time and delegating that responsibility to someone that does have those skills is really key to success as a business and without people like Fonda and her team we definitely wouldn't be in the position that we are and getting back to this relationship notion treat your partners as clients and try and make sure that they're treating you the same way so I think having this notion of partnership as opposed to this client vendor power relationship is really key to a successful long-term relationship and the first project you do with a client is always going to be the test of that in terms of working together and I think one of the key things is a client is always going to be coming to you saying well we want you to do things this way and the conversation that one is well you chose us because we said we're going to do it this way whether it's agile or waterfall or whatever and if you start compromising your own processes too much early on that's always going to backfire and that that relationship is likely to go sour very quickly so getting this right early on really sets the tone of that that long-term relationship you likely to have and then this notion of value add wherever possible so like I said early on demonstrate that you understand what their goals are in the proposal process but keep demonstrating that through your engagement with them because you're showing that you understand what they're trying to achieve and what their goals are and that should be the whole team that's working on the project that's demonstrating that they understand it not just the project managers so the way that we structure our teams is very open in terms of communication everyone's aware of what the client's trying to achieve and that's instilled from the most junior developer through to the project lead I think one of the traps that we can fall into as small agencies as well as be really precious about our ideas and the things I always like to say is ideas are easy as the implementation that's hard and hopefully your client you've given that idea to is going to engage you to deliver on that idea and then finally on that like I said in terms of partnership you do need to work collaboratively you don't want to have this us and them attitude and you really need to knit that in the bud as quickly as possible because ultimately you're all wanting to be working towards the success of the project and then subsequent projects that you're going to be working on but for all of this there's going to be chaos and I think working with large organizations they're always in flux there's always new managers there's restructured teams there's revised strategies it's the classic thing of there's a new CMO or CTO comes in and says what are you doing on this project and I think the important thing for you is that you're often working on their most important public-facing outlet and you're essentially keeping the lights on for their business so you need to be ensuring that they're reminded of that on a regular occasion but also taking this Zen attitude of you're going to ride out those bumps and I think that the classic scenario is many of our clients we've been working with for five six seven years we've seen tens of different people in their teams and managers that have come and gone we're still there we're keeping keeping the lights on and we are viewed as being indispensable by they're seeing a management in terms of the success of their business as I mentioned before looking for that repeat revenue that you can be getting with clients so where we do discount is if a client says we need X volume of hours from you on a monthly basis sure we're going to give them a little discount to thank them for that and they're going to pay for that up front ideally annually so with many of our clients they've said we need 20 or 40 or however many hours a month they pay for that up front at the beginning of the year and then we burn down and we've obviously got processes on a repeat basis around identifying what they need us to use those hours for and ensuring that we're delivering that for them and I think the important thing about that is that for you as a business you've got the cash in hand it gives you incredible stability in terms of managing your own business but it also provides your clients with strong certainty they're going to be working with a consistent team across the course of the year they've got good relationships with that team and they know what your capabilities in terms of delivering and a big part of that is support and hosting so many of us as small agencies go oh that's all too complicated I can outsource that to a third party as soon as you introduce that third party to a client you've fractured that relationship so the lesson that we learnt the hard way is that you do need to manage that relationship yourself don't hand that over to a third party for them to have a direct relationship with the client and just white label those services if you need to and at a certain point you might be able to deliver those services yourself and as you might have seen before the keynote yesterday we've launched our own little hosting platform that's come out of years of us having that expertise in house and now we're confident to do it ourselves but I think the important thing is if you don't dilute that relationship it does establish you as the owner of everything they're doing with Drupal and they're always going to be coming to you in terms of decisions they're making not to a third party but none of this is without hiccups hiccups are always going to happen and I think your relationships with the client are the things that helps you write out those rough patches so your key contacts within a large organization they're also your biggest light liability if they move on and a new person comes in like I said the classic new CMO they work with another team in the past they're going to come in want to shake things up show that they're making progress in their own role that's a huge risk for you as a small agency so I think what we've tried to do is buffer this by ensuring that we've got multi tiered relationships within an organization so that we're not just relying on Fonda talking to her compatriot on the client side of a project level we've got Jason in there talking to their CMO or their CTO or their CEO ideally and having that multi tier relationship means that if one key person does leave you've still got these relationships higher up the chain and those are the people that are ultimately signing the checks at the end of the day and they understand the value that you've delivered nothing's perfect there will be hiccups in that process but I think clients will always be prepared to accept hiccups and mistakes that you might have made if you've got that strength of relationship and they ultimately trust you anyway and I think another big risk is that your own team's going to change over time so people will just tire working on the same project for year after year and we've definitely had to deal with that situation the issue in that case is the clients have got very attached to that person and one of our classic scenarios was we had our key project manager move on and our key client was like what she can't leave and so having a very strong process around that change management from our side as our team changes is critical and involve your own clients in that conversation hey our key person is moving on they're having a baby they're going traveling whatever moving state moving country have that conversation with your client early on get them involved in the process in terms of identifying what their needs are for that role in forming your hiring process there might be someone else within your organization that's going to move into that role or you're going to hire someone externally but you need to have that that conversation the other risk is the big vendors are here I look at that as a risk and an opportunity so we do have some some big attention from the big four now extension to look KPMG EY they're all in the Drupal space that's a great validation of the technology that we're using they can see the value of Drupal in delivering massive projects but I think the the risk for us as independences they probably already got relationships in some form with these big clients that you're working with they might do their accounting systems or CRM systems or whatever and they can see an opportunity to expand their their footprint and really the only defense that you have against that type of encroachment into your clients is to continually be demonstrating value and the strength of your relationships in that case and sometimes you might win sometimes you might lose in that situation and then the final challenge I want to talk about is clients might want to bring their skills in-house hey we're using heaps of Drupal we should hire our own Drupal developers and I think the classic catch is oh no they're going to drop us completely but what we've learned is that we need to work cooperatively with our clients through that process ensure that you've got clear parameters around how your team is working with their team again going back to this notion of a project charter of if someone of the client team releases code are we reviewing that code or are they releasing it unchecked and if something does go wrong what are the processes around that and in many cases those internal teams will become quite capable but in most cases they're only really going to be capable of maintaining businesses as usual and they'll be coming back to you for the heavy lifting for any kind of big new projects that they're wanting to work on and as I've mentioned before if you've got these long-term relationships with clients they're initiative to build an in-house team it might run for two years they might lose a couple of key developers then they might go that's all too hard let's get you back up to full speed again so don't burn the bridges be kind of sitting there in the in the background and then finally everything has a shelf life so while you might work with a client over a very long period of time there might be a natural end to that relationship at some point but I think the message here is that you want to be careful about complacency with your long-term clients if you've been working with them for a number of years and it goes back to that notion of always demonstrating value but often sometimes things a way out of your control they've made a decision at a head office level globally to change technologies Drupals now no longer part of that mix and they're going to move on from you so I'm going to wrap up five takeaways to go home with number one know what your capacity is and what you should be billing as an agency number two actively define the types of clients you want to work with and win them number three establish a structured multi-tier relationship with the key clients it's going to help you write out the rough patches number four retire small clients in favor of larger long-term engagements and retain a base fees if you're in a position to do so and then finally approach your long-term clients as if each project is your first one so I'm going to leave it there I think we're just on time I've got about six minutes for questions I think ask me anything thanks very much that was great talk I was going to ask in terms of quite often when you dealing with an RFQ RFP you're dealing with a communications advisor or project manager how hard do you work on building relationships up the management chain and and what is the timing of that that's a complete case by case basis so many public sector RFQs they're going to be managed by a coordinator that's got no understanding of what the project's about and what the technology is and they won't let you speak to anyone within their organization they just want to have the document back from you and that's that we view that as often a bit of a warning sign and we really want to win the project if we're going to respond to those types of tenders if we can't have a conversation early so I think that to answer your question look for an opportunity to start having conversations with them and that might be as simple as we just want to have a conversation with your team to ensure that we're clear on what your expectations around functionality are something like that the other thing that we'll often do is run a initial discovery workshop so if a client's open to doing that having something like that is a pre-sales activity with them but it's essentially any opportunity that you can be starting to talk to the people who are really going to be making the decisions is key just blindly answering RFQs is often just throwing things down a black hole other questions with your client qualification checklist how many of these boxes do you feel like need to be ticked in order for it to for you to proceed is it like 80% or how do you go about that it's all managed from here so like I said we initially put that checklist together as these are the things that are important to us but now it's kind of second nature of do they tick these boxes is there something that really outweighs another factor that's going to make us either go for that project or not go for it so again ultimately it does come down to gut feel of yes we think we can win this project yes it lines up with what we're trying to do as a company yes we can see it's a long-term prospect and then we go all in and that's often a conversation amongst the team so we actually have a leadership team that oversees which proposals we go for and they're the ones that make the decision as to whether we actually go for more questions I want that the transparency in your presentation is awesome and so thank you for that that's um relate to a lot of the pain and the and all that's great the the question has the point you made earlier and there's an opportunity that comes you look at your capacity you don't have it immediately they want to start yeah that tension between you know risking losing because they can't wait yep versus the how do we cobble together the resources to make it work and what that process you go through yeah so I think the way that we've tried to deal with that is is this an opportunity that's going to take us as a company up to the next level and as I said early on we've been very comfortable as a company of 20 people for at least six or seven or eight years and sure we've had moments we've kind of bumped up above that from time to time but if we're going to really go for something that's going to take us up to say 30 people we need to be very confident that we can maintain that capacity in the long term and we actually had exactly that situation when Fonda joined us we won a big government project that was substantial to hire a dedicated team for we bought Fonda in on a contract that said once this project finished we have a right to terminate your contract sorry Fonda but once we were clear that we got through the first stages of that project and that we're going to be able to maintain things at that scale long term then we gave you a permanent contract didn't we so there's little methods that you can use there so that you're not putting all your eggs into one basket that you're clear with the team that's coming on board you're specifically engaged for this project if it terminates for whatever reason us as a company aren't lumped with carrying you and I think the other component of that is that you can use those opportunities to really take your business up to the next level as long as you've got the processes in place to maintain that pipeline and that's the tough part as you would know great I've got a couple of questions just well sorry one last question was to first one is have you you were talking about hourly pricing to work at profitability yeah I always think that's such a dangerous thing because we have people working our organization who were worth produced three times four times five times in an hour we use a blended hourly rate which always seems bizarre to me because we should look at a value pricing model if you looked at that the second question if I can just throw it in there's a really quick one when you decided to cut off at your cut-off point and get rid of your smaller clients you consider setting up a second brand a low-cost brand of the low no so the first question is two questions the first one is you've got a whole bunch of people of different skills in your team how do you price them out and as Greg alluded to we found the simplest thing is you have a blended rate that reflects someone might be worth three hundred dollars an hour another person might be worth hundred and fifty and so you kind of reach a happy medium there that makes so things so much simpler in terms of billing as well so you've got a kind of blended rate there and then I think from our own perspective our model of hiring is we do want to get the best people who are working at the highest capacity and the team essentially self-selects out if we bring someone new in that just doesn't come up to the level of the rest of the team that person is often identified as someone that can get a better job somewhere else and it's the team that identifies that because everyone's kind of working together so I think we've been very lucky in terms of having a team that does all work at a pretty similar capacity second part of the question was retiring smaller clients are setting up a small second brand if you like dealing with little 10 to 20 pay projects with peeps of different clients that are all just as demanding as big ones great but it's not our model yet and I think for us it was a great way to pass on work to other companies with passing Murray you taking a couple of clients from us in the past Alex last question so the question was whether we would have a unit that's working with smaller clients as a way of training people up ultimately we want to be working with these big clients and we want people that are capable of working on them and so they need to really have that experience early on working with jing is is really challenging for us because we do have a team that's working at a high capacity so I think one of the models that we have used is higher fuging is and that's essentially a war of attrition in terms of who maintains their position long-term and like I said as a small business you need to make those decisions early on around who's the best fit and who might not be the best fit or just in terms of revenue and again a mistake that we've often made is we just let that drag on too long and by the time you actually make the decision it causes a lot more harm than it might have otherwise so I'm around the conference if you want to have a chat about anything feel free to grab me and thank you for