 Good morning, everybody. I'm going to prepare you. I'm going to give you a fire hose of information, but the links to everything are at the end and the links to the slides and all the links are actually in the slides as well. When Nathan asked me to do something here, I'm thinking, I'm going to do something on proposals because it's actually something I don't like doing. So I'm like, I know there's other people out there just like me. Well, who am I? He kind of went over my bio. I'm the co-owner of Adcott Creative Group. My husband and I work in our business together. I've been a full-time freelancer for eight years because we were laid off together. We worked at a church in Mobile, a large church in Mobile, Alabama, and we were laid off in 2010. We expected one of us to get laid off, but not both of us. So we just decided, let's try freelancing because nobody was hiring then anyway. I'm a former art teacher and a former IT director, and those sound very polar opposites. But if you think about it, web design is kind of like we're right in the middle. I've been a speaker and there's my email address, but I'm going to talk a little bit about that. That left-brain, right-brain thing. If you're not familiar with it, right-brain, the creative side. You think of artists, you think squirrel. Their brain is like trying to nail popcorn to the wall. And then you have the analytical side. Well, I've done many, many of the left-brain, right-brain tests. I'm exactly in the middle. I am 51% right-brained, 49% left-brain. So web design is the perfect job for me. What are we going to go over in this short amount of time on proposals is who, what, when, how, why, and where. Okay? Now, not necessarily in that order. There are going to be some who's, what's, why's all over the place, but why? Why am I doing this? Because I hate writing proposals. I'd avoid it for as long as possible. I'd put it off. I'd put it off. I'd put it off. I'd spend hours on them trying to make them exactly perfect. One thing Nathan Ingram taught me as my business coach is done is better than perfect. Yes. Okay. That's better. Okay. I wanted to automate and expedite the process because I didn't like doing it, so I wanted to find a way to make it faster. And I did that with, with templates and questionnaires. I'm going to share what I've learned about writing proposals. Okay. Who gets a proposal, first of all? Not everybody. You have to pass a test before I'll even write a proposal for you because I'm not going to waste my time writing for a proposal for somebody who can't afford me or when somebody already has somebody else and they're just looking to fill the, I have to get three proposals. And I can pretty much figure out who those people are. Okay. Who gets them? I qualify my clients. I have a scorecard. I score them on their budget. I score them on their project. And I score them on their respect. Are they going to respect my processes? When you're talking to them the first time, you can get that gut feeling about that client who's going to be the PETA client, the pain in the ass client. Now, you may be, you may need the money. Well, then that way you know that, okay, they've got a really good budget and it's a really interesting project. They're going to score low on their respect, but then you can build those fences to contain that, that renegade client. The first time they hear a price should not be in your proposal. You don't want to give them sticker shock. What is a proposal? It's not a quote. A quote is just a piece of paper with a price on it. It may have a list of items. That's not what a proposal is. A quote is like an invoice where a proposal positions you as an expert and a problem solver. You've listened to what they need and you're presenting a solution to their problem. And it also presents that you're giving them value. Not just, you're not just the person that's doing the coding. That's the difference between just hiring a developer who's just going to build it exactly the way you say it and somebody who's actually going to build a website that works for them. Okay, what not to include? Avoid the technical terms. I did this a lot at the beginning. I'm going to install this plugin. I'm going to install Yoast SEO plugin and I'm going to do your on-page SEO and they don't know what a plugin is. They don't know what Yoast is. I'd say 97% of them don't even know what SEO is so you have to explain it to them. Instead, you're going to do on-page search and optimization so it'll make it easier for Google to find their website. That makes more sense to them than getting all technical. Don't list plugins by name. You don't want to finch yourself in. I'm going to use the all-in-one events calendar yada, yada, yada. Then you find down the road, you find a plugin that works better. You don't want to finch yourself in unless they specifically ask you. They come to you and say, I want you to install WooCommerce on my website and configure it for drop shipping. Then I would get specific and don't itemize costs. If you're one of those people who charge by the hour, first of all, stop charging by the hour. Second of all, don't list it because that gives them the ability to take a red pencil and mark that out. I can get this website down to $2,000 if I mark all this other stuff off. Well, yeah, they've got a theme and they've got their stuff, but they have no functionality. If you do value-based pricing, then you don't get them the ability to lower the price. You can always lower the price by removing value, removing functionality, but you don't just lower the price because they ask for it. What to conclude? This is what I include. Now, obviously, this is me. This is my opinion. This is what I include on my website proposals and I'm going to kind of itemize each one of these on the way down. I give a business snapshot. That is basically, I'm telling the client exactly what they told me about their business. It shows that I'm listening to them on the phone call or in the meeting. I know exactly what their business is and why they need a new website. Why do they need a new website? What problems are you trying to solve? Who is the website for? Because the website is not for the owner. The website is for the audience. Are we going to provide to the audience? Who is the audience? Are they young men, 25 to 35? Are they young families looking for a church? Are they an 80-year-old person looking for a retirement community? You're actually building the website for them and you may have multiple people that you're building for, so you need to list that out. What's the scope of work? What are you going to do? You need to list out exactly what you're going to do so they can't keep asking for more because you can say, well, that's not in our original scope, but we can quote, give you a separate quote at the end of this project and we can make that phase too. Because they're making a financial investment in their website. And then I have investment and fees. Fees are the optional things, website care plan, website hosting, additional things that I'm going to offer them that they can upgrade to. Your process, let them know how you do your job. Don't just say, you don't just disappear for two months and then come back and say, here's your website. Let them know what the process is. And then the contract. If you weren't in the session yesterday on the liability, make sure you look it up on WordPress TV because you need a contract. How? Let the clients write it. If you ask the right questions in that client interview, you can whip out a proposal in 20 minutes because they're going to give you all the answers to write that proposal. I set up templates. I do a lot of church websites. I do a lot of ministry websites. I do retirement community websites. I do other websites. But I have templates for those. And I have a template that has everything I can possibly think of. So when I did a proposal on Tuesday for a church down in Florida, I actually timed myself. It took me seven minutes. Seven minutes to write this proposal because I had a template for churches. I did a retirement community a couple of weeks ago. Took me about 15 minutes to write that whole proposal. And we're talking a multi-page proposal. Looks super professional. Website worksheets. Go to my website and look at my website worksheet. It's under Getting Started or it's under Web Design. I just reorganized. All my pages kind of link to that. I actually have a separate one for churches and a separate one for retirement communities that ask all the questions I need to write the proposal and to understand their project. Sell a discovery session. If they want you to come in person, they should pay you for that opportunity. Last retirement, the job I got that I'm starting next week, the $23,000 plus job, they actually paid me for three hours of my time to drive to Atlanta and have a meeting with all the marketing heads of all the different retirement communities in this network. So I could ask them all the different questions about their communities because I've only been to two of their 11 communities. And I wasn't going to drive all over the state to look at them when we could get everybody together in Atlanta. And that price will actually be credited towards their final invoice. Only write a proposal if you have a chance. Again, ask with their budget first. Usually one of the first three questions, what's your budget? If they say, well, I don't know or I don't have a budget, then I always say, well, so you have an unlimited budget. We can really make a spectacular website. They'll eventually meet it. Oh, no, no, no, I'm thinking about $3,000. I'm thinking about $5,000. I put that on my website worksheet. And I actually get really good answers. Sometimes I get the $500 and I just, I'm nice. I'll call them or email them saying, yeah, that's not my price range. My prices are. And I have it on my website. My websites start usually at X amount of dollars. Get a verbal OK before you write a proposal. That's my closing question, OK? I'm thinking in the ballpark that your website's going to cost somewhere between $4,800 and $5,500. But I need the answer to this question before I can actually write this proposal. That was the one on Tuesday because I needed an answer to a question about their church management software. And if you get me that answer, then I can finalize the number and get you a proposal within 24 hours of getting that answer. So they're like, oh, excellent. That's perfect. That fits right in with what we want. And so now I know I pretty much have the job. I just have to get the proposal signed. Now, here's kind of an example of a business snapshot. This is from my retirement community template. I put the things whenever I put the name in the community. I put it in bold so I don't actually leave one out. Name of community offers an energetic, carefree, and independent retirement lifestyle enhanced by unrivaled slate of first class amenities, activities, and cultural offerings. I got that from their current website. It's a premier continuing care retirement community providing a full range to its services. They need an updated website that functions as a powerful marketing and communications tool because it's a really, really old website. And it doesn't represent the fact that they're an outstanding senior community in the Atlanta area. So it provides a go-to source. I'm telling them what this new website's going to provide for them. OK, business needs. Now, this is just the last four bullets in that business. The business needs on this one was like this big. So depict it as a premium community. Present the amenities. High level of service. Present it as a sustainable brand. And that is a sustainable because a lot of nursing homes and things, they pop up, and then they get built, and then they immediately get sold. When it becomes like a not a profitable thing. This one has a long history. We want to show that this is an established community. Another target audience needs. Now, that one's another long list. I just did the bottom ones. The target audience need access to information about the services because they offer personal care, assisted living, skilled nursing, home care, memory care, and rehabilitation services. You want success stories and resident testimonials. You want to highlight all the great features. This is an awesome community. I mean, I would like to live there right now. It's an awesome community. And so I'm telling what the audience is. For retirement communities, you have a vast audience. You have the 80, 90-year-old. You have their kids, which might be in their 50s and 60s. You have their grandkids. So you're doing every kind of marketing imaginable. You're still doing newspaper ads and direct mail. You're doing email marketing. You're doing Google ads and Facebook ads and remarketing there. You're doing the whole gamut of possible marketing for retirement communities because you're marketing to them, their kids, and their grandkids. OK, the scope of work, again, very short list for a very long list. This is how I would word things. I email sign-up system to encourage members and visitors to sign up to receive updates. Notice I'm not saying install constant contact or MailChimp plug-in. And they don't know what that means. Install and figure an event system for the internal residents, as well as the marketing things that they put on to get new residents in. Build a resident story section. Build a document repository where people can go and download forms. Install and configure form systems for online form submissions. And I'm going to rebuild all the existing forms on the website. Install and configure a transactional email system. This is one of those things that they asked for because they were not having reliable email delivery of online form submissions in their current website. So we're going to set up a transactional email system like MailGun or Syngrid to make sure that all the emails are delivered. Project timeline and process. Outline your workflow. Let them know how you work because you're going to have to bring them in in certain sections. No code before deposit is received or content is received. Now, there are a little exceptions. I'll explain that. Phase one is design. If we're doing a logo, I don't need all your content for your website to do your logo. I just need the information enough to do the logo. But I always say, OK, we're going to start with your logo. We don't need content now. You have two weeks because your logo will probably have your logo finalized in two weeks. You have that much time to get me your content. Because once we have your logo done, we will not proceed until we have all your content. If you can't write that content or can't get it, we can provide you a copywriter. Now, it's going to be x amount of dollars. Are you interested in me quoting a copywriter? So I'm asking, do you want a copywriter? Do you want to see a quote for a copywriter? So we can do that content and get this project out even faster. And then once we have all the content, we have their logo, we have their content, we have all their information, we start development. Now, depending on the size of the site, it can take as little as a couple days to build, which we don't say we're done in two days. We usually wait until like a week, week and a half, and say that we're done. All the way up to a website, I just finished a project because it was committee-driven, took nine months. It was a big website. It was like 200 and some pages. But it just kind of drug on and drug on and drug on. But it was a lot. And then comes the revisions. And we spent at least a month on revisions. And then launch. I actually have a process for launch as well. And then phase five is the training. You've got to train your clients how to use their website. If you haven't heard of WP101 or video user manual, get one or the other because you can put videos in the back end of your website and the dashboard of your website to show your clients how to use their website. I use video user manuals. I'm a member of WP Elevation. And I get that as part of it's by WP Elevation. I get a part of it, access to that because I'm a member there, but you can buy it separately. But I can put custom videos in the back end of my website. Very easily. You can with WP101 as well. But it has the page builder. So I use Beaver Builder to build my websites. It actually has videos already made for Gravity Forms, Yoast SEO, WooCommerce and Page Builder, Beaver Builder. Already built into their system. So I don't have to record those. I only have to record the videos of the things that are specific to their website that I can put in the back end. I walk them through, I train them. I show them where the videos are. And I tell them, you know, if it takes more than 20 minutes to figure something out and you still don't get it, you know, contact me if they're on a care plan. And I will either do a quick video, walk them through it again, or get on the phone with them. They have 30 days to basically get to learn their website for tweaks. I give them 30 days of kind of tweaks and help hand-holding before either a care plan kicks in or they're off and then they have to pay for extra time. I ask for referrals. Make sure I ask, at that time, I ask for testimonials that I can put on my website. Okay, a contract. Now, I started out with no contract and then I started using the one provided by WP elevation and kind of tweaked it. And then as I'm going along, I started adding more and more and more. And every time I get a problem client or something that comes up, I add it to my contract. So my list has really grown. And this is not everything on my contract, but you'll have a copy of it if you download my sample proposal. But it talks about time frames. It basically says, if you don't give me what I need, I can't meet my timeline that I've laid out in this proposal. Suspended and abandoned projects. You have that client that doesn't exactly answer your emails maybe a week or so later. You hear crickets for a while? I have a suspended, okay? I haven't heard from you in 30 days. I've called you in left messages, I've emailed. I haven't heard from you in 30 days. I'm taking your website down from public view or from the dev view. And you have to pay me the second half for me to pick up your project again and put it back in my workflow. You may pay me, but it's gonna go at the end of my line because if you're not working on your project, I'm moving on to the next project. Abandoned projects. I don't hear from you in 20 days. We start the process all over again. You don't get credit for what you deposited. We start the process all over again. You get a brand new proposal. I've never had to do that. They usually just kind of guy and go away. And I never hear from them again. But I've at least got their deposit. And I've taken their website down. It's funny because I have one. I have a website that's not live. That's literally four years old. But I take it down off the dev server. And that's when I get an email back. So you've taken it down. What happened to it? Oh, you haven't paid me. The site's live. I said, I'm not putting this last time. I'm not putting it back up until I get paid for it. And it was a pre-WP elevation project. That's how old it is. Actually, that would make it like five years old. And it's a great website. I'd love it for my portfolio, but it was an 85-year-old lady who raises rabbits for food, for restaurants. And I think she wanted a website just to sell her business. Go over late payments. Go over what you do to collect out-of-scope additions. If it's not in the proposal, it's out-of-scope. Refunds, I don't give them. It says that. Termination. I can fire you if you're being a big old jerk. You can fire me, but you're not getting your money back. See refunds. Compatibility. Define what a bug is. Just because the event system doesn't work the way they thought it was going to doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it. It's just, a bug is something that's, it's throwing an error. It's not working. That's a bug. Just because it doesn't work the way they expected it doesn't mean it's not a bug. Changes after launch. What are you gonna cover in that 30 days? That grace period. Doesn't mean I'm gonna install WooCommerce because now I get 30 days of free stuff. I actually outline what it is. Really include this, third-party images. I have this conversation when we talk. Do you have images for your website? No, but I'm going to get them. Do not Google images and steal them off Google. That is called sniping. It is illegal. You will eventually get caught. And if you get, it happens to be a getty image, they're gonna ask for $1,000 to $1,500 per image. They don't do a cease and desist letter. They send you a bill. If you want us to provide you stock images, we do one stock image per page. It's $10 per image after that, and so on. If you don't have your images right away or you're gonna hire a photographer, I'm gonna build the website with some stock images so you can get an idea of what kind of images we need. But I said over and over, do not steal, do not Google images. You can get free images off of Unsplash, Pexels. If you deposit photos, has great sales about every other month for 100 images for $100. And they have pretty good images, and some of those same images are on Getty images on iStock Photo. I have a subscription for iStock Photo, so that's where most of my images come from. I have an account with deposit as well. That's where I get my images. So my clients are getting images that have the right to use. What's your terms of use? Can they take your design and use it on another website? No. That said, who owns what? The intellectual property. Talks about that WordPress is open source. They don't own the code. Plugins and licenses. If you're on a care plan for me, all the premium licenses that I've used to build your website are included. The renewal fees are included in your care plan. However, if you're not on a care plan, I'm gonna give you a list of all the licenses you have to buy after launch because I'm going to be removing my licenses and you have to buy your own. And that's another incentive for them to be on a care plan. Website security. Outline what you're going to do to protect their website. You're gonna install a security system like WordFence or you talk to them and tell them they're gonna be getting emails from their website that talks about security, that their plugins need to be updated and all that stuff that you're gonna handle in training. Website updates. That they're, who's gonna be responsible for the website updates? You're on a care plan. I'm gonna take care of that for you. If you're on it, it's up to you to do it. If you do not subscribe to one of our care plans, it is your responsibility to make sure your website stays updated and it's not our responsibility if it gets hacked. Backups. Now like I mentioned yesterday, every client I've ever had, I have an automated backup. If they're not a care plan client, they get an automated backup to my Amazon. I keep like a monthly backup for each website and it has saved a client or two and they've been very grateful. It took me five minutes maybe to set up but I want that insurance back there so cause if something happens to their website, I'm gonna be the first person. Well, you were on a care plan. I'm sorry, you're SOL. Sorry, you weren't, you know. Well look, I have a backup from last month of your website. It's gonna take me two hours to probably reinstall it and get it back up and we gotta make sure that that backup doesn't have any malware on it. We'll get it back up and it's gonna be $150 an hour paid up front before I do it. And then I try to talk them in if they're not gonna be on a care plan, at least get security or some other system that will guarantee cleanup for them. It outlines my care plans. Okay, for $99, you're gonna get this. For $299, you're gonna get this. For $499 and up, you're gonna get this. Anything beyond that, multiple websites, we can discuss that as a separate proposal. Third party services. When that marketing company goes in there and messes up the website because they put in the tracking pixel wrong or in the wrong place. If you have to go in and fix something that somebody else has messed up, they have to pay for it. The choice of forum, very important. If somebody decides to sue you, because you know you can work for them anywhere, for any client, all over the country, if they decide to sue you, for instance, somebody decides to sue me, they have to come to Coweta County, Georgia to do it. I'm not traveling to settle a lawsuit, so put your choice of forum in there, the county and the area of where you live, so they have to make the effort to come there. Your liability, what are you liable for on the website? Talk about GDPR and the privacy policies, your terms and conditions. And I have some, I kinda ran out of space so I kinda stopped right there. But you're gonna get a copy, you're gonna see, and the best way is you have to go get a contract ready. What you think is a good contract, then go to a lawyer. Don't go to a lawyer and say, I need a contract. Give them one and let them edit it. It'll lot cheaper, lot less time, and they can actually change the wording to match your state. So the one you're going to see on my download is the one I had from Florida. I just moved back like four months ago to Georgia. So I haven't met with an attorney in Georgia yet, so I'm gonna have to take it and meet with an attorney and have them kinda tweak it for Georgia. And all I did was go in and change the forum from Florida to Georgia, so that's my update on it so far. And guide the client. If they're really a newbie, get on the phone and walk them through the contract. That to me, that's optional. Nathan does that in person for every client. I don't do it for every client, but I kinda get a gut feeling of which ones I need to do it for. And again, get the deposit before you do any work. That right brain part of you wants to jump in and be creative and build something. Listen to the left side of your brain and say, show me the money, okay? Get the money before you do any work. Okay, tools. I'm the shiny object girl, you know? I love tools. Anything, I like to look at tools and find things that make my life easier. If you're just starting out, you don't have a lot of money. Hey, there's word, there's pages. You set up a template, you use that. Send them as a PDF. Do not send them as a Word document or a pages document. Save it as a PDF. Better proposals. That's my Better Proposals referral link. That's what I use right now. I got this shiny object from AppSumo. If you're not subscribed to AppSumo, App, A-P-P-S-U-M-O, AppSumo.com, go sign up today. They do really, really, really, really good specials on software. I got Better Proposals for $39 lifetime deal. Two years ago. And I was using BidSketch at the time and I was paying $30 a month for BidSketch. Now, if you think, oh, that's a lot of money, but if you get one $5,000 project a month, $30 a month is not that big of a deal. Both these systems, every time the client opens the proposal, you get an email. You get to see how much time they spend on every page. They get to sign online and agree to it. They can even, on Better Proposals, pay you the deposit online, right then and there. And it's great, you just look in your email, oh, great, I got that job. And that's how the retirement community, I knew I was gonna get the job because they had fired the advertising agency, they had hired in Atlanta and told me verbally that they were gonna hire me and I filled out the proposal. And he hadn't signed it and he was asking me to, like, when were you gonna see designs? And I'm like, well, I haven't got the deposit and I haven't gotten the signed proposal. Oh, I signed it, no, you didn't. I'm looking at it right now, you're not signed. So like in five minutes I had it signed and a note saying that the check would be cut on Friday. And I'm like, well, when I get the check, then I'll start. So BidSketch is a lot like it. I found better proposals easier to customize than BidSketch. It's easier to add pages and customize colors and I found BidSketch a little clunky in that. A friend of mine used this Proposify. I've never used it, never tried it, so, but I know about it. Now, 17 hats, it's a pretty cool system. It's kind of a CRM proposal, contract, email thing. It was built for photographers, but you can use it for web design. Now, it's really expensive except during Black Friday sales. So go and sign up for their emails and then wait until November and they have a free trial. So go look at it. You can actually set out your whole system of onboarding and everything and all the emails in this system. I looked at it, but I decided to do it with better proposals because it was $39 lifetime, but they have a great deal at Black Friday. They've had it the last three years where you get their ultimate plan with your own branding and all this stuff for a fraction of their normal price. Plutio is another shiny object I picked up on AppSumo last year. I haven't used it yet. It's kind of a combination of a CRM, a client-relation manager and Trello. I'm a big Trello fan. I love Trello, so Plutio does that as well, but it doesn't integrate with anything. So I'm holding onto it. I'm waiting for it to integrate through Zapier where I can make it do other things and hook into other things. So I'm holding onto it. I bought it, $39. I'm gonna see what it does once they get the integration and I check for it about every month and I've asked them to integrate with Zapier. So I'm gonna show you a sample proposal, but I put these links in here so if you download my slides, then you'll have the links to the proposals as well. So I'll let everybody with their cameras finish. Okay, and okay, I'm gonna come back to this. Let me go ahead and show you my proposal here. This is a sample proposal for a retirement community. Let me make it bigger here. So first it talks about the snapshot. It's all in pages. They get a link to this and this is what they see. They can also download it as a PDF. So this is my template you're actually looking at for my retirement communities. You'll see that it's there. It talks about the snapshot, what I've talked to them about. They go down to the business needs. These are all the needs for that business that they had discussed with me on the phone. I take notes. You can also, if you do Zoom, you could record the call. Just let them know that you're recording it and then you can take the notes from there. I'm a really fast typist so I take my notes and Evernote when I'm talking to them. What the target audience needs are. I usually put those on one page. Sometimes I break it out into two if it's a really long list. What's the solution? This is everything I'm going to build for them. This is the scope of work that I'm doing for this project. If it's not on this list, I'm not doing it. What's the timeline? It's gonna take two weeks for me to come up with the initial design. And then I'm going to do what the design is. I'm going to do a homepage. I'm going to do a general inside page. I'm gonna do, if it's a network of retirement communities, I'm gonna do a community page. I'm gonna do a service page for whether it's memory care or assisted living. So they can get an idea of what it's gonna look like. Once they get the okay and they've signed off on it, we've done all the edits, then the development. Now the development, if it's a small site, it might take three weeks. It might take four weeks, five weeks. Depending on the size of the project. Revisions may take one week, one month. It depends on the project. And then testing, we test everything. We go in there, we test the mobile responsive. We're testing for accessibility. We're doing all the testing. We're making sure everything's right before it goes live. Making sure we turn off the test mode on the e-commerce store. We have that checklist for everything that we do. We have a checklist that we go through when we do launch. What's their investment? I can actually hear on this show that the project's gonna be $8,500. But you need good hosting. You're hosting right now on GoDaddy. We're not gonna host on GoDaddy. We're gonna offer you WP Engine hosting. And it's gonna be $299 a year. But that's optional. And see, it's got the little optional tag. Business website care plan. I'm gonna recommend to you that you need the business website clear plan because you need more help than the basic one requires. So it's going to be $299 a month. And that's optional. But my contract explains what they get for that. So it's a one off total of $8,500. And then they can actually select whether or not they want those right now. They don't have to select right now. But generally, I'd say 90% of my clients will choose both. And here's my contract. Okay, my master services agreement. It talks about who we are, who I am, who they are, the project, proposal of services. I'm going to do what's in that list you just saw. I'm not gonna do anything else. The time frames only work if you follow and do what you're supposed to do. If you want it rushed, it's gonna cost you 45% more. If you want it in a hurry, suspended and abandoned projects. It explains what a suspended project is. It explains what an abandoned project is. And what happens if that, we have to invoke that. Fees and payments, most of mine, I require a 50% deposit. Big projects that are over $10,000, I usually do 30, 40, 30. And my hourly rate and so on and so on, refunds, all the things I talked about, see it goes on and on and on and on. You think this is long. They're not gonna read it. Well, this is there to protect them. It says what I'm gonna do, it's there to protect you. So they don't go crazy. And then the next step is for them to how to proceed. You sign it, you pay me, we get going. And then the last, here, let's go ahead and do that. Where? I got most of this, like I said, I'm a member of WP Elevation. They just had an intake and it just closed. They do three to four a year. Best money I ever spent on my business taught me the importance of processes. Having a process for everything and each process might have sub-processes. Got me very organized. It's easy to do web design when you're doing one project at a time. It's difficult to do that when you have seven projects working at the same time. You've gotta have a process for everything. Nathan Ingram, the lead organizer here, he's my business coach. I can't highly recommend having a coach or some type of support system. I've stayed a member of WP Elevation because I'm a member of a private Facebook group. That is my support net. I need a plugin that does this. I can post it in there and I'll have instant replies from people all over the world. If I need help with a piece of code, I post it in there. I have access to help immediately. To me, that is worth the monthly fee I pay. Nathan, on the other hand, helps me dig deep and find the problems in my processes and fix them. That's a more personal one-on-one. My website, adcottcreativegroup, you can contact me through there. There's my email address and there's the link to my slides right there. And if you don't get them or you can't get to it, you can always email me and I'll be glad to send them to you. So, okay, let's have questions. Yes, now some people split them up. I like them all together because I want them to see my process and it explains so much. So I do them all together. I know Nathan does them separately, but he sends them at the same time but they're separate documents. Yes. There's three of us. My husband, who's a graphic designer. Awesome graphic designer, completely right brain. So getting to him, he's an awesome designer but he's not a web person. He doesn't have a process. His process is piles on his desk. And I have a VA. I have a virtual assistant who's a designer, kind of implementer. Sometimes I have him work on designs. We generally, I'll do a design and have him build it if it's a really small project or like I don't have anything for him to do, I'll say, hey, rebuild this old client site and we'll sell it to them. So that's what I'm having him do right now. And so there's only three of us. I'm the lead designer. I'm the lead developer. My hand is on every project. So eventually not. I wanna get out of that. I'm gonna end, my current VA will become the lead designer once we trained him enough. He's young so he likes all the whiz bank stuff that you don't put those on retirement communities. So, or churches. And we're training him, what kind of style of websites we want. And eventually he'll be the, he's very organized so he'll become like the lead designer and project manager and then we'll hire a developer. So we, I kind of have a plan. Well, this is a dev site. If they don't pay me, their site's not going live. When, if there are rears and web hosting, I've never had a client, a rears and web hosting. They pay their bills. How do you take their site now? I usually, what I do, I don't take it down. I put a splash screen up. There's a plugin for that, a coming soon thing. And I just put it up. And so nobody can get to the website. Well, they haven't paid me, they don't own it. Oh, I'm talking about development. They haven't paid their final bill. Okay. They're not on their web server. No. It's on my development server. The retirement community. I know that I need to wait for a check for them. Now, they're a client of mine so I know they're good for it. Churches also have an internal PO system. I have some clients that require a monthly invoice. So I got this really new shiny object from some app sumo called Billy, which allows me to do the reoccurring invoices because I was terrible at remembering to do the invoices. So I set up for those clients who want just an invoice sent to them every month as a reminder to pay me, I set that up and I forget about it. So I mean, the checks just come into the mail and it's like, yay. Or they pay it, because it has a link that they can pay it online. It comes in, I get the email from Stripe. They've paid you $2.99. So, oh yeah, I'm very flexible because sometimes you just have to deal with what they have to work in. Yes. No. No. And if some people have asked about specific things, I've clarified, I've gone in and changed the wording on theirs just to make them feel better. And just to clarify for them and talk through, that's why for the bigger ones, I like to walk them through and kind of explain. Yes. Yeah, it's Billy app. Yeah. Like Billy, a little boy, it's a little boy's face, Billy. Yeah, I bought it a couple years ago. No, I have a form, a gravity form on my website. So when they sign up for a care plan, I send them the link to the gravity form and that sets up a subscription in Stripe for them. Yes. Is there a possibility? I got it for $39 lifetime. You can hook it to your business account. I don't do any of that. All I wanted was a system that would automatically send invoices. And PayPal doesn't do that. And well, Stripe does it now. So I'm probably, oh, yeah, Stripe does that now. When I bought Billy, Stripe did not do that. Stripe does that now. So I'm probably just going to be moving them over to Stripe and getting rid of Billy. Yes, I didn't want to pay for fresh books. So since Stripe does it, now that I have a system that's going to do that and Stripe just introduced that a couple months ago. So I just haven't moved it over. AppSumo, AppSumo, A-P-P-P-S-U-M-O. Like Sumo Wrestler, AppSumo. They send out deals every week. Now, beware, don't buy everything. Some of it sounds, oh, this is a really good deal, but it's not a good deal if you're not going to use it. Now, I got a great one last week and it might still be up. It's called CloudApp. It allows you to do screenshots and animated gifts from your desktop and it automatically encodes them, uploads them to the cloud and opens a link on your desktop. So if you need to record a quick screen thing of showing a client how to do something, boom, boom, boom. Within two minutes, it's done. I have a link and I give it to my client. Loved it. It was, I think it was $49 for that one. Awesome. One more question. Yes, links. Yes. Mm-hmm. The top one will send you to the proposal I just showed you. The bottom one is a PDF of the same thing. If you end up not doing it, tweet me, email me. I'll give you the links. If you have any questions after that, just email me. And I'll be glad to help you. Thank you so much.