 So let me set the scene for this talk. I'm a project manager. I'm a team lead of project managers. I've been a solo operator, and I've worked on large scale projects for really, really big clients. And I've come away from all of that work with all kinds of stories. I'm sure if we had a show of hands, how many of you have got client horror stories? How many of you have changed your process as a result of your client horror stories? So what you're going to hear today are some of my stories and some of the changes that we've made to our process or my process to help alleviate the stresses of a client horror story. And hopefully you can learn something from this to avoid your own horror stories in the future. This is what we're going to walk through. It's a little bit of a roadmap of client relations. I don't think it's an exhaustive list. I'm sure if we get time for Q&A, you may even be able to add to that. But these are some of the things that I've found through our process. So let's start before you actually start the project. How do you currently qualify the leads that you get and in making, what do you make sure you're working, what do you do to make sure you're working with quality clients who aren't going to turn into massive horror stories? You're putting up a detailed questionnaire on your website. Are you outlining in those conversations or on those web forms the kinds of budgets that you're prepared to work with? Are you just getting a vibe from an initial phone call? Or are there other things that you can do? Sometimes even if you put a whole lot of processes in place like adding a minimum budget to a contact form or making a contact form a lot more detailed to read out the time wastes, you may still have to qualify clients after some conversation. So I'm going to show you a few red flags to look out for. The call goes something like this, hey, we're interested in getting a quote for your services. You might respond, great. What sort of services are you looking for? And the client in return says, before we talk about anything like that, what do your services cost? This is a penny pincher. They don't see the value in what you do yet. They need something, they may be resentful that they're going to have to pay for it. They use phrases like we picked you because we heard you were cheap. Or we wanted to insert the name of the agency here, but we couldn't afford it. You can pretty much qualify these people straight away with some really early conversations about the kinds of projects that you've done, the kinds of budgets that you've worked with. And you can gauge the suitability for the work that you want to do through those conversations just by their responses. If they get squirrelly, if they avoid talking to you about it and they reply with phrases like, oh no, I don't need anything fancy. I'm sure it won't take you long. You just need you to tweak things a bit. I'm pretty sure we're all going to go, yeah, I don't think this is going to be a really good idea. You want a client who understands your value, not just your price. Another phone call. Would it be OK if we do a remote screen sharing session or something like that? And me, responds, actually it wasn't me. This is actually from clients from hell. What, for the visitors on the website? So it's not really kind of what we build or how it works. And the client goes, no, no, no, for you, we want to watch you work. My wife is really protective of the code. They're a micromanager. They have trust issues. They're giving you their baby. They're terrified you're going to drop it. Now, for some of us, this might actually be a non-starter, depending on how you kind of frame that conversation or depending on the extent to which you feel comfortable being able to win their trust. But this is one that would make me fairly cautious fairly early on without actually being able to dive in and really work with them on being able to communicate to them that they can trust you with what they're building, with what you're building. And then there's the tire kicker. They're a bit vague. They won't give you any details. They want to use up your time. They haven't spent a lot of their own time thinking about what they actually need. So you talk to them about their budget and the value they hope to gain out of their project. They can't articulate it. They haven't prepared, and they're just getting a vibe. Maybe they're shopping around. And so you can spend a huge amount of time chasing after them, but the end result is you're not actually sure you're really going to get the gig. So there's a couple of ways to approach this. You can decide what you are prepared to give for free. And this is something you decide before you talk to this client. But it is something you need to figure out. If you're in the business of working for clients and you've got people contacting you, decide what your limits are. For some people, it might be 20 minutes. I'll give 20 minutes consultation, and we'll get to that point. And I'll line that up front with the client and say, this is what you can get. We can talk about this. I can help you for this limit. But if you don't have enough information or this is where I can send you off to go, but you can't spend your whole time chasing around after somebody you don't know isn't actually really going to turn into a genuine lead. What's their timeline if they don't have a fixed plan? Trust your gut. I mean, I'm sure we've all got stories that said, had a feeling they were going to be trouble. It may just be that they need help getting their thoughts together. Send them a website worksheet to help them prepare. And here's one I prepared earlier. Now, if you were in Jane Tweedy's talk yesterday, hers is probably way more detailed than mine. Mine's pretty. It's an interactive PDF. It's free. You don't have to give me your email address, because if you gave me your email address for the promised weekly newsletter, you'd be waiting a really long time. So I'm like, stuff it. You can just have it. If you want the InDesign file, let me know. I'm quite happy to send you that. I haven't touched it for a while. You'll ask them all of those questions. If you want e-commerce, what does it look like? Do you have your domain name already registered? Who is your domain registrar? All these questions that you can spend hours trying to get stuff out of the client from. This way you can spend five minutes, have a chat with them, say, fill this in. It's really going to help you plan. And it will turn them into your favorite client, because then they actually know what you're offering them. Ask the right questions. Listen to their answers. Be prepared to walk away. I know certainly in those early days when I was freelancing, every client or every possible client might have been the next person that was helping me pay my rent. And so it's really, really easy to fall into that trap of saying yes to everything and ending up in some sticky situations with tricky clients and still not always ending up with the money to pay the rent. So doing all of that early qualification work is helpful. Building insensible business rules, and I'm not going to do a talk about that, but things like having contracts, getting money up front. All of those things help you before you even get to the point of having to deal with them when they are actually officially a client. So we've gone through all of that. We've qualified the client. We are prepared to work with them. They haven't got scared off by your quote. How do you dig a bit deeper? And the thing that I have found, and I'm going to tell you a little story about how this worked, but is actually getting an understanding of where your client is coming from. It's so easy to be reactive when a client is being problematic and difficult and they're painful and you don't always take the moment to think about where they're coming from in all of that. So the key to making yourself indispensable to your client is not always to bend to their every whim. It's to listen to them. It's to try and understand where they're coming from because even if they're being difficult, it actually isn't always about you. It starts by having an understanding of what they're trying to do, the pressures they're under and an ability to account for that and the planning that you're doing. And this also means getting into detail about not just what they say they want, but actually finding out what they need. So that means really detailed discovery and conversations, particularly with clients who've got bigger budgets and who have big clients that are relying on them to have a decent and quality website. Sometimes you have to be the person that they need, not the person that they want. So I had a client who hated me. She, I actually, I had lunch with her a month or a couple of months after the end of this project. She said to me, we sat down, we had lunch and we had become friends by this point. And I had a feeling that in those early parts of the project, she really didn't like me. This project had come to us. I was working for a different agency at that time. This project had come to us and it was an absolute mess. They'd had somebody come in and build something for them or there's somebody on the internal team had built this thing and it did everything that they wanted. But the host said, you're not putting that on our servers because behind the front end, it was a disaster. And so they brought us in and they said, we want you to fix this. Now this girl's job was writing on this. She was due to have a holiday in about two months time. She knew that if it didn't get resolved before she went away, there was every possibility that when she came back, she might not come back. There had been a huge amount of money spent on it and they actually wanted us to come in and fix it. Now we sat there and we looked at it. It took two weeks for us to figure out the spaghetti code and to actually come up with a solid, valid plan that was going to do what they needed to do. And every day, when's it gonna be done D? How much is it gonna cost D? When's it gonna be done? Is it gonna be done? Do you think you can do it? Is this gonna be done by the state every damn day? And I had to just keep breathing and go, I really wanna tell you what you wanna hear. I cannot tell you what you wanna hear right now because what you need right now is for me to tell you that we are looking at it. We will get there because when we give you the answer, we want it to be the right answer. We don't just wanna give you what you wanna hear. She wanted me to hear say, yeah, it's gonna be fine. I didn't know that. It's a huge amount of money and a huge amount of time writing on this. In the end, we figured out what we needed and like I said, that took two weeks and we sat them down and we said, this is what we think we can do. This is how we think we're gonna, this is how we're going to solve it. This is how much time it's going to take and this is how much it's going to cost. And they had to take a deep breath and go, right, okay, yes, we're prepared to pay that, we're prepared to do it and we built the solution for them. We delivered what we said we would do. So by the end of it, we were her favorite people because we'd got her out of this huge pickle but the pain in the beginning part of that really relied on me being able to understand that this was not about me. Her getting shitty with me was not about me at all. This was about all of that pressure that was writing on her. So it's really important when you're dealing with clients to remember that it's not about you. Actually, most of the time it isn't about you at all. If the client is being impossible and difficult, actually have to think about what might be going on on the other side of the conversation that's putting that pressure on you or putting that pressure on them that they are then transferring to you. So this is another really interesting one in the sense that it's really, when you're starting out, this is a difficult thing to do because again, you're in that position where you need the money, you need the work, you wanna prove yourself and clients over and over and over again, I have discovered are like cats, they are liquid, they will move to fit the shape of the container that you put them in. So again, all I have learnt around this has come out of experience and stories. And I transitioned out of freelancing and working as a solo operator into agency work at the end of 2016. And I got approached by a friend who knew that I did websites and I was in that transition between going from my income as a freelancer, money up front to a new job that got paid monthly at the end of the month. And I started of course at the beginning of the month so I thought, great, I'll take this quick job, it's a really easy straightforward full commerce build. I should have known by then that it wasn't gonna be quite that. But anyway, I took this job on, I got the money up front, I had a little bit of money then to keep me going through that month while I waited for my salary to kick in. And I was working on this outside of office hours. Client signed the contract, we went through all the terms and conditions. We did finally actually build this website, it got finished, the challenges and the boundaries that I had difficulty with was actually not while I was building that project, it was afterwards. So we get to the end of the project, that signed off, we had had the final check and then every so often I'd keep getting these emails. Hey Dee, you know when you built the thing, oh it's not doing this or it's not doing that or it's not doing the next thing. And I, in order to get her out of my way, I kept doing them. Oh, we thought you were gonna do the updates. This was in April, I'd finished this in November. And I wrote a very strong and careful email that said, no, the responsibility is yours, terms of the contract state that this is your responsibility. We don't have a retainer, so you haven't paid for me to keep looking after this. Anyway, fast forward until just a few months ago, 18 months after the project was over, I get an email from the client, Dee, we've been talking to our new consultant and what they say is that this should have happened and that should have happened when you built this and I could feel myself getting pulled right back into this trap and I thought, I don't need you anymore, these are the kinds of things that I'm thinking and I know that as soon as I jump and say this or I do this, that you will end up, this will just go on forever and ever, so I wrote them an email and these are some of the things that were in the content of that email. Unfortunately, I cannot be responsible for what you have assumed and I pointed them back to their contract and said, this is what we agreed. Furthermore, in April of last year, I advised you of the importance of running WordPress and WooCommerce updates and referred them back to that email and I said, I strongly suggest you find a provider that can do this for you and I sent them three referrals of different people that could do their maintenance for them. But the last sentence is the one that I'm most proud of and it was, the site was built with the best tools and experience I had at the time. Things and people move forward, I strongly suggest you do the same. Never heard another word. I have to laugh at myself. I mean, after all of these years, I was a freelancer for nine years. After all of those years, I still hadn't really learnt that lesson and now, particularly when I'm working with large scale clients, it's even more important to be setting those boundaries because I'm working with a team. It's not just me anymore. If I'm not setting those boundaries correctly and it's just me, it's only me that has to pay that price. But if I'm not setting those boundaries with the client and I have a team working for me, it's them that ends up paying for it, not me. They're the ones that have to do the long hours. They're the ones that have to work faster and I am the one that I'm supposed to be shielding them from that. In order to be able to set that boundaries, I think the most important thing is you have to understand your value. You have to know when you're prepared to say no and you have to back yourself and back yourself up in those conversations because you can say no. You actually have to mean it. You have to know what's on the other side of that but it's so important to be able to say, I'm sorry, no, we cannot go here with this. It's going to be better for you if we do this. And again, to be able to deliver that, you have to be able to have that empathy for the client as well. It's not just about you. It's also been about doing what's best for them. So the lessons that I took from this are basically this. Decide what your limits are. Articulate those limits very clearly and do that all the way through the project. It's all very well to have these conversations at the top of the project, particularly if it's a long running project, you have to keep reiterating what you're doing. You have to keep in communication with the client and ensure that the client understands these limits and a sense to them, which is why you have a contract. And if you haven't got a contract, you need to have a contract so that the client understands what these boundaries are and then you have to stick to them. So now that the ground works in place, we've got our attitude of empathy. We've got the boundaries together. We've got a platform to working together with this client. They've accepted your bid. You've got a signed contract. They've paid their half upfront. What are the important things to keep in mind and practice while you're actually doing the work? I have another story. There are a lot of stories. I got an email early this year. We signed a new maintenance contract. We have a 12-month maintenance contract with a big client, a multinational based in Singapore. And they sent me an email. Now that we have this contract, we know where we're going. We know the kind of work we're gonna be doing. It's constantly sort of business as usual work to keep their site up and running and then to innovate and add new solutions to help keep doing them, help them keep doing what they need to do. But the title of this email said, Do Better in 2018. I was affronted. I'm like, we had this great 2017. So I read that email and I thought, I'm not gonna respond while I'm feeling offended that you think I need to do better. I mean, that's probably partly personality as well. I mean, some people will look at that and go, I see this as an opportunity. I see this as an insult. But we had been delivering great work for them, but they can be a really challenging client. They're often light on detail. They rely on us a lot of the time to figure out the answers to their problems rather than collaborating with us. So our new contract had kicked in. It was the first time we had an ongoing commitment. So it felt like with this email that right out of the gate, we were gonna have difficulties again. However, on the second and the third reading, it became apparent that the areas the client wanted to improve were all valid and were issues for them because of the people that they were reporting to further up. So it just became again this moment where I had to have empathy for where he was coming from and then actually read through what he was asking for. Because what they wanted, they wanted to know what we were doing. They wanted better transparency. They wanted us to outline what our focus was gonna be for this year. And they wanted to do the same in return so that we were all on the same page. They wanted better planning. They wanted us to take initiative in bringing improvements to their system based on the changing landscape of web. They wanted innovation. And they were giving us this perfect, beautiful opportunity to actually really partner with them and deliver some amazing solutions. We were given this opportunity to make ourselves indispensable to them. So it doesn't matter if you're servicing big clients with huge budgets or a freelancer supporting single clients. At the end of the day, everyone wants value for their money and they want to know that you've got their back. They're investing money in you doing the work they need and they wanna get some return on their investment. Clients can be frustrating. They don't understand what you do. They don't always know how to articulate what they need, let alone what you need from them. And our job isn't to let ourselves get irritated and frustrated by that. If we're putting ourselves first, our job is, if we do, we're putting ourselves first. Our job is help untangle all of these things, make them feel less dumb, use what we learned to make not only the end result, but the process of working it with us. Something that delivers, not just something that they ask for, but something that they really, really need, that builds their business or blog. And whatever we build for them, then turns us to a partner rather than just a supplier. So for this client, first, the easiest way we could give them what they needed was increase the transparency. So we work in sprints. We do two weeks of work. We set at the beginning of the sprint the work that we're going to do and then we do everything we can to deliver that work within that time period. So at the end of the sprint, we do a review and we show the client what we built in that period. We send out an email that says, here's what we did. Here's how much time we took. Here's how much volume or velocity that we achieved or the work that we were doing and we have some tools that we used to measure that. Here's what's happening in the next sprint. Here's what's happening this month in terms of who's available, who's going to be on holiday and we send that as an email. And all of a sudden, the client has something that they can then show their stakeholders that are further up the train going, well, what are human made doing? We don't see anything. And now they've got this document that they can send out. So already, we're winning with them. They're like, this is awesome. I'm giving something that helps Michael. He's not having to chase me for this information all the time. So that was just an easy, simple place of regular reporting. At the end of the day, and obviously in the course of the work that we're doing, we've negotiated and worked with them in terms of what we're actually going to be building next. We're doing all of that. We're taking the opportunities where we can to look at other things that are happening out there and offering them thoughts and suggestions about what else that they can do. So they're starting to feel very much more like we're partners. And they actually said to us recently, so we found another $340,000 and we wanna spend it on you. And if we hadn't been taking those opportunities to respond when he was asking for that kind of thing, they might very well have chosen to spend that money with someone else. So one of the enduring characteristics of a lot of the projects I've been on that have been difficult. We've had crazy deadlines. We've had huge software spaghetti messes. We've had to come in and fix. We've had difficult clients who have had their trust eroded by unreliable devs or providers in the past. At the end of the day with all of them, that I found one consistent way for our team to get back on side with them is to communicate really, really clearly with them. And these are my not-negotiables of communication. Own your mistakes. When you've blown it, be honest and upfront with them. Don't make excuses. And that's just a thing that I hate in general, but as soon as somebody starts making excuses, you're not owning that mistake. Take initiative. Make plans. If you go, okay, so we've got a problem here. Let's take the initiative and figure out how we're gonna resolve that and communicate that with the client. Be honest when you're communicating with them. Communicate often. Keep reiterating what you've talked about because you have one, I don't know how many times you've been in a session or you've been in something like this and you'll take all of these notes. You don't always remember, you don't almost ever remember what's going on. So if the client and you have been in a meeting and you've worked through some stuff, continue to reiterate what you'd resolve to do going forward. And did I mention be honest? I've also said, did I mention don't make excuses because I don't know how many times I've had devs or clients come to me and say, oh, this thing happened, but it was because so-and-so did something else. I'd much rather somebody came and say, this thing happened. It's in the past. We'll deal with it, but we have a plan going forward. This is where we're going. Just own it. Because being the kind of provider who doesn't just do what you're asked for, but who listens, learns, collaborates, puts you on the front line of building trust with the client. Saying what you mean, meaning what you say. And not letting the client work all over you makes you valuable to work with. And if you're working with your customers to solve not just their problems, but the problems of their clients and their users as well, you have the power to make yourself indispensable to them. This turns into repeat business and into referrals. And if you take this attitude into all your work going forward, you become increasingly attractive to work with. And better still, price it in a way that shows you that you understand how valuable you are. Thank you. Thanks so much, Dee. That was a great topic. And I'm sure we'll have some questions. Please wave your hands and we'll bring around the microphones. Here we go. Great presentation, Dee. And I think it has applicability outside the word development world as well. Yes, I think so. My question is really about when you're doing work for not-for-profits or indeed for people that you've had relationships with in other ways. Does that present particular problems for you? This is like when your mum says, hey, son, I need a website or... Oh, Dee does websites, we'll do them. Again, you have to start with being prepared, know what you're prepared to do and outline those boundaries clearly. If you're prepared, I've done some not-for-profit projects. There's a few things that I've done. For some clients, I've said I will do this. This is what the scope of the project that I'm prepared to do is. This is what I'm prepared to do it for, whether that's nothing or something small. And I will have contracts for that. So it's really, really clear and direct about what you are prepared to do. For some clients, I've done barter work where I'll do a proposal, I'll price it at my normal rates or whatever rate I'm prepared to do that and then I will barter for the same kind of value. So if I've got a project that I'm giving to them or doing for them for $5,000, then we'll work it out. But again, contract it. Make sure those boundaries are really, really clear because what tends to happen and I've seen happen over and over again is, oh, I'm doing this website for free and then they will keep asking for more and asking for more. So if you haven't set those boundaries up front, you're asking for trouble. So that's the smart thing to do is to make everybody understand what the lay of the land looks like. Hi, Dee. Is it working? Linda, hello. I'm interested to know like if something goes wrong in a project and it's not necessarily your fault, it's, you know, you maybe can't pinpoint the problem, what happens there when hours and hours are lost looking for something and, you know, it could fall into hosting but the clients asked you, yeah, I quite often just get lumped with all these hours that I can never retrieve and I'm not quite sure how to deal with that. I think that starts with communicating at the beginning, having those conversations with the client, how far are you prepared for me to go for this? If I, I'm happy to spend two hours looking for this. If I don't find that in the next two hours, what do you want to do next? And having those, if they say the sky's the limit, I would still be saying to the client, oh, so I've done two hours on this, just want to remind you that this is how much my hourly rate is. Do you want me to keep going? Right. And then you, I mean, you get to, it depends on where you find where the problem is, if it's a problem that you've caused, if it falls under warranty of the work that you've done, you then need to negotiate with them about what that's going to look like. But for me, it's always a case of I need to go back to them and I've had projects where I've given them a quote at the top, they've gone through, it might have been the project took longer and I've had to figure out where my compromise point is going to be. Am I prepared to keep working on this because it's taking longer and use that work as a learning experience or am I going to go back to the client and say, look, we talked about this is what it was going to cost. These are the issues that we've come up against. Can we talk about that? And some clients will be like, yep, totally understand new from the beginning that this, you know, that there would be these kind of inconsistencies and other clients will be more difficult. But I think if you understand, again, what your boundary is and communicate really, really clearly as you're going through that process, I think the worst thing for a client is to go, I've asked this person to solve the problem and 12 hours later, you've solved the problem and the client gets it with sticker shock at the end to go, I had no idea it was going to take 12 hours. So it's much better to have that conversation early on. How long are you prepared for me to work on this? If I get to this point. They don't really want to pay anything for it, they just wanted to work. Well, then that, again, that comes down to you understanding your value and being prepared to walk away if they say, no, I'm not prepared to pay for that. Yeah, yep. You just have to have those hard conversations and go, understand? And you don't always have to be, and it's really easy to want to be liked by them. But again, finding your place where you're comfortable enough and strong enough in yourself to be able to say, right now I'm telling you what you need, what you need to hear is, this is a problem that is caused by so and so to fix it is going to take this long. Are you prepared to pay for that? And if they're not, you say, I'm sorry, I can't do it for nothing. Yeah, cool, thanks. So customers and invoicing, I'm sort of picking that you've had that customer that hasn't really paid their invoice, either late or probably never. How have you dealt with that particular customer? I have to say I've been really lucky in that I've never had to send an invoice to a debt collector. I structured, when I was freelancing, I structured my payments, so it's 50% up front, 30% in the middle. So once design and everything had been happened and we were ready to go to development, once it started development then 30% and 20% at the end. So that if anything did go horribly wrong, I was only out 20%. But most of the time it's all, it's conversations. I've had a few people I've had to call them up or I've had to resend. And I realized at one point that I hadn't set zero up to automatically remind them that this bill was overdue. And so I had quite a few that were outstanding for a really long time and I hadn't realized. It's just a phone call. That is possibly partly the qualification at the beginning and actually working with people and getting that relationship with people. And if you've got a relationship with your client, you're not just this weird voice on the end of the phone who only talks to them when you need something. It's a lot harder for them to go, oh yeah, I actually really like that girl. I don't really want her talking badly about me so I'll pay my bill. Got one over there first. Percentage wise, how often would you find the client's job was on the line? Oh, that's not very often. That was pretty unique, that experience. And I'm not sure how true that was. That was certainly what she was telling me. She may have just been trying to use that as a lever. And as sympathetic as I was, I wasn't gonna let her do that. But I'm sure it does happen. That was a huge project, it was a huge amount of money. There was a huge amount of future business that they were planning to get out of what we were building and they were six months behind because of it. So it was real. You were talking about the time you had the spaghetti code and it took you two weeks to fix. I was just wondering, it sounds like you had no idea how long it was gonna take you to figure out how long it was gonna take you to fix it. And I'm wondering how you managed the expectation of the amount that it would cost them in that situation to get to the point of knowing how to fix it. I think they always knew it wasn't gonna be cheap because they were bringing us as an agency in and when you've got an agency rate of $12 or $1300 a day per developer, they knew it was going to be expensive. What we were doing was we were taking a website that somebody had built in a commercial page builder, like a page builder that you bought from Envato to solve a problem for a large, huge bank basically. So, and it was this easy thing where you put all of these bits in and you can build it however you want and you can customize your own blocks to actually do what you want it to do. But when it came to performance, that was just like, and security was just an absolute non-starter. So how do I manage that money? Well, there was a sense in which I didn't actually have to. All I had to do was manage the team because we had an account manager who was the money person. So I didn't have to be sitting there going, well, I have to worry, I don't have to worry about how much this is going to cost. All I have to worry about is how we're going to solve the problem and I let the account manager worry about that. Which is a little bit of a luxury when you're working at that kind of scale. It's not it's so easy to do when you're a solo operator. I'm not sure if that answered the question, but. Have you ever had to fire a friend and if so, how did you go about it? My traditional method is upping the price until they decide to sneak away, but I'd like to hear alternate options. No, because partly, so I have one friend situation I'll tell you in a second, but partly that you get into that situation when you haven't set the boundaries at the beginning. So if you're working with a friend, it's even way more important than it is when you're working with a stranger to actually have those boundaries in place. This is what I'm prepared to do. This is what my rates are. And renegotiating every time. And if your friendship is robust enough, it should be able to handle that. And because the friends are obviously, anyway I won't even go where I was going with that. So that's my response to that is you actually have to have those boundaries in place. But I have worked with a friend and who ended up in a situation where she wasn't able to deliver what I needed. And that was scary and terrifying for her because she needed to communicate to me that this wasn't going to be something that we could do. That she was just capable of doing in that moment in that season. And I had a client relying on the end results of that. So I don't design, this is my designer. And we, but we had to have that honest conversation. She had to come honestly to me and say, really sorry, I just can't do this. And then we, and it was like, and I had to separate the emotional side of that to go, okay, what can we do? What do we need to do to get it to a point where I've got something that I can carry on working with, with somebody else? And can you do this for me? And she's like, yes, I can do that for you. And she delivered on that. And our friendship is still as robust and as strong as ever. But we had to be, you have to be honest. And you have to separate that personal relationship from the professional stuff and just put your head down and get on with it. It took a while. I mean, there was a moment, it was difficult. I was annoyed. She was embarrassed. It was hard, but we worked through it. And we are still great friends, so. Great presentation. Thank you. That's almost a follow on from that question. Obviously you're pre-qualify clients and help you to understand how to say yes and no. You talked about gut feeling and what about the situations where you just don't wanna work with someone because you don't wanna work with them? How do you go about saying no? Have you got any tips? Because if you're qualifying them and it doesn't fit in your services and it's really easy to say, oh, that's not what I do. Or you've got things like price points and they qualify themselves and go, I'm not actually the right fit. I will often, I've had those conversations. Like, look, this is not my field of expertise. I don't think I'm the right fit for you, but I think you should talk to this person or this person or this person. Unless I think it's, so you have two sides of that. If you think they're gonna be an absolute disaster, you don't wanna refer them to one of your friends. Right? So I will only refer people that I think trustworthy or that I think aren't going to be complete disasters. Some people, you know, anyway, at the end of the day, you just have to be up front and you have to be, okay, I'm happy not to take this even if it means I'm not gonna get the money from this work, but you just have to say, this is not. This just doesn't fit within my set of skills. I think there are other better people that could help you with this. So long. Farewell. I'll be pushing out by asking a second question. Also, what about like old clients? They come back to you and if you've updated your processes, do you have any tips on handling, you know. You just have to tell them. You just have to communicate with them. Say, happy to work with you. Would really like to do the work. This is what the new, this is how we do it now. And this is what my pricing is now. You just have to tell them. It's all right. Just moment you mentioned, you said almost something bad to the client story I have is my own fault. It's my fault. But sometimes you are correct. Yes. You are really good. Yes. But this is a bad client and the customers, he always complain with you, always argue with you. What you can do. Oh, so he's referring just for the rest of the room in case you didn't hear. He was asking if that, you know, I put that post up that said all of my worst clients or my client horror stories were my own fault. What happens when you, it isn't your fault. When you are the one who's in the right, how do you deal with a client who's always complaining and always complicated. So I'm always on that side of trying to win them. And sometimes they won't. And sometimes you just have to go. In fact, Maeve and I were having a conversation about this last night. Sometimes that's just the way they are. Sometimes you have to have that hard conversation and say, understand, this is what you want. This is what you need. I'm looking after a team here. The way that you are operating with me is not okay. So let's stop. I'm prepared to walk away from this work unless you are prepared to change how you talk to me. This is what I, this is actually, this is not my story. This is Maeve's story. And maybe Maeve should be answering this question. But she had that conversation with somebody and said, it's not okay for you to keep talking to us like this. We want to do the work. But they were prepared to walk away and have the client walk away. And they actually had that hard conversation and said, this has to stop. And the client stopped. And the client was a different person after that conversation. So that's a hard conversation to have. But it is okay to say to the client, this is not okay to keep talking to us like that. And if they keep doing that, it's okay for you to say to them, I don't want to work with you anymore. This is not how I want to do business. And for you to walk away as well. I think we've got time for maybe one more question. Is there a lucky last? There's one at the back. Hi. Why did you move out of freelancing to being part of an agency? Thank you. Thank you. No, to be honest, so yes, it was about the money. It's so nice having a secure paycheck at the end of every month. But it was also, I did a talk at WordCamps in Shun Coast in 20, something, a few years ago. And I was starting to see the landscape of WordPress change. And this was as they were starting to look more and more towards JavaScript. I knew what my skills were. I knew that I could deliver at a particular level. But if I wanted to go further, if I wanted to deal with bigger clients with more money, I had that choice in my business. I could either start building an agency or find another job. And I don't like, I can do business and I've had to learn to do business. But I didn't want to be a manager. I wanted to keep having my hands on the tools. And so I went looking, I got approached actually for opportunities to kind of dig into working with some of those bigger agencies and to get access to some of those big enterprise type clients, I actually needed to do it through someone else. But it's so nice, just get to the end of the day at five o'clock, close the door and not have to be then sitting down and doing zero or bookkeeping or thinking about marketing or what I'm gonna do next. When you have your own business, I got into it because I wanted the freedom and then it turned into less free and I thought it was going to. And now, but then I have the luxury of that I have a job that gives me all of those same freedoms, but I have a paycheck at the end of the month. So I got a bit lucky there. Well, thank you so much today. Let's have a huge round of applause. That was a fantastic presentation. Thank you.