 Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here at WordCamp Dorino. Thank you very much for inviting me. The organizers are doing an absolutely incredible job. I'd like to start out by explaining who this talk is for. This talk is for anybody who's working with clients, whether you're working with external clients or whether you're working with internal clients because you work in a large company that has internal projects. All of these things can apply. In the 20 years that I've been doing this, I've seen that starting out with a very small company and then growing it to be a large company that works with enterprise clients, the lessons are always the same. And I hope some of these things can help. I've condensed almost a three-hour workshop presentation into 10 slides and hopefully 25 minutes. If we don't get through questions here in the room, I'll be available all day for questions. So the first thing to take in consideration in project management is during the sales process or during the process of starting the project, what kind of client is it? Who is your audience? Is your audience going to be somebody who is experienced, understands the process you're going to go through? Is your audience somebody who needs to have everything explained to them? Is your audience technical? Is your audience for marketing? Is your audience absolutely new to this? What you need to do is you need to adjust how you're going to speak to people throughout the entire process to that tone. What we want to do is we want to make sure that we're getting that conversation across in a very even tone. The next thing to do is understand whether you're, especially if you're dealing with outside clients, what level of documentation or contract. SOW stands for Statement of Work. If you have small clients, you might do just a quick SOW. And then at SOW you want to make sure that you're documenting all the various steps of what you're going to deliver. If you're delivering WordPress projects and you deliver by pages or you deliver by content or you deliver by types of functions, make sure that you're getting that information in there. If you're dealing with a client that's more from the marketing world, they might want a proposal before they accept it. Make sure that in your proposal you're leaving things a little bit vague. So that way when you get to the contract you have a chance to do that last minute negotiation, that last minute understanding of how to bring the project in. But make sure that whatever you left on purpose vague in the proposal you're bringing them in and you're tying it down in the process of the contract. Then if you work with large clients or if you work with a client that's going to give you a lot of projects over a period of time, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to give you money. So the way you do that is you do what's called a master service agreement, MSA. You get one contract that doesn't talk about a specific project. It says in the projects we're going to do, here's how it's going to happen. You talk about payment milestones and you talk about general timing and you talk about the types of things that you want to cover. So that way when you have project one, two, three, four, you have a very small piece of paper that just talks about what the specifics of that project is. These different types, three different types of working with clients will help you compress the amount of time you're spending on negotiation. It'll help you give an opportunity to have more conversations and set those conversations up to set the expectations of the client, setting expectations. Here's the key to good project management. If you can keep the expectations running on a project and you're constantly communicating what the goal is, you will always have a happy client. You'll have a client that will refer other projects to you that will come back for more work. It's always very, very important. This is also the opportunity to make sure that you're breaking from the sales process and you're moving forward into project management. When you're setting the expectation in the first conversations of the project, don't sell your last four projects. Talk about their functionality. Talk about what you're going to bring to them. Every conversation where they say, just like Facebook, I want this. This is your opportunity to say, well, in Facebook they spend millions of dollars a quarter just for maintenance. Let's talk about the scope of this project. Every time they do this in a conversation, you bring it back in. Constantly be communicating and setting those expectations in every conversation. When you do anchor your clients to the correct scope, you will have a very straightforward project. You will have a project where every single conversation is backing up what you've set forth, what you're going to do. You have a project where what you're doing is keeping everything within scope. When they say, I have a question, how about this other function I saw on the website? You're setting up a conversation for a point later where you're going to talk about scope creep or change orders. You let them ask questions. This time is absolutely very important to make sure that you're listening to everything they're saying and you're taking notes. You may not address it right away. You may say, you know, we're going to take a look at that and we're going to get back to you. Remember that you're the expert, remember that they're paying you for your time and your expertise. So if they ask a question, you don't have to have the answer ready. You can go and do the research and get back to them. And telling them that actually gives them a respect for your professionalism. Now, always write everything down. You have the honor of coming from an Italian family. So we do a lot of talking and we talk and we talk and we talk. And if I'm talking to a client, we talk for half an hour and then I put down the phone. Three weeks later the client might go, you remember that conversation right about in the middle when I said I wanted this and that and the other. I wanted to work just like Facebook. I'm sorry, I don't remember that. You're going to have a conflict there. Every time you have a conversation, document it. If you have a conversation about a bigger scope and you're trying to explain to them how it's actually going to work, follow up with an email. For those of you who use Gmail or Google Apps, there's canned responses. I set up a template in canned responses for a follow-up email. Every time I have a conversation with a client, I have a follow-up email that has a few fields on it and it says what was discussed, roadblocks, next steps, key deliverables, things to be resolved. So those things remind me when I'm writing the email from the conversation I just had to document that. This is a very important tool. Now, you're going to have arguments just like these guys. You're going to have a point of view that's different from your client at some point. The key here is my personal philosophy and I get a lot of debate about this in the WordPress world. Never say no. The client is always right. A lot of people in the WordPress community like to tell me, well, no, we're the experts, so if it's impossible, we need to say no and we need to explain why. There's always a way to explain to the client that what they're asking is out of scope. If somebody approached me here later today and said, I want a website as large as Company X, absolutely we can do that. Do you have 10 million euros? Oh, okay, then let's go do this other thing. I didn't say no. By not using no, by helping your clients understand what the scope is in every conversation, you're letting them have the free flow of ideas. That's a very important feeling for clients to feel like they can bring their ideas to you and you're not going to do what some people in California called tech no, as in tech no because people don't want to be told something's not possible. But if you have the patience to explain to them the earlier the better, what is and isn't possible and how that will affect the timeline, the more happy your client is going to be, the more successful your client engagement is going to be, and how you're going to get projects back. So, anybody here ever have a client delay? Okay, almost everybody, I would assume. What ends up happening is you give a client a comp, you give a client a design, you give a client something to look at, say I need an approval for this and they disappear. How do you manage those things? The goal we set at CrowdFavorite in 40 is specifically, if they have a client, if they have an approval they have to give us on Monday, we call them up and we say, hey, how's that going? We'll get it to you. The next business day, we send an email and we say, hey, just to remind you, we need this approval. If it goes on much longer, you might create a delay in the project and that might have consequences on the timing of the project or on the scope of what we can get done. Three days go by, nothing happens. You get to day five, business day five, that's when you're sending an email and you're saying, I really need this, we've created a roadblock, depending on how you deal with your clients, either A, I have to put this project on hold, B, there's a penalty clause that I'm going to have to ramp down the project and work on other things while I wait, and then when I have to pick it back up, you're probably going to have to wait for me to finish another project or you're going to have to pay a rush fee. Or C, depending on the type of client and if you have an ironclad contract, then it's a matter of time of saying, okay, well, we're just going to put the project on pause and there's going to be a late fee for every day late that you get your approvals to me. Now, depending on the size of your business, the size of your clients, one of these three will apply. If you haven't ever done that, again, come ask me how to implement that in detail because we don't have time today and I'll give you some tips. This is the perfect time to take a pause. When you've done a lot of the work and you're about to show them online the beta before it launches, a lot of you hopefully are doing QA testing and then you're showing it to the client before it launches. It's on a staging server or something. Before you have that meeting, before you give them that access, take an hour, take a day, reread your contract, reread everything that you've written back and forth with the client, understand how the project went. This is the time to be reflective about what they were annoying about, where they had scope creep, where they wanted to insert more work. And this is where you want to make sure that you're addressing those things before you show it to them and reminding them of the road you've traveled together as a client and a vendor. And it's also a great time to sell again. What do you mean? We're just delivering a project? No. WordPress, even with our automatic updates, with our great hosting companies, still needs maintenance. It still needs work. Clients get themselves into trouble. At Crowdfavorite, we have a one-year warranty on our code. From the day we launch it, for one year, if there's any problem that the client finds, we will fix it for free. You're saying, wow, that's a long time. It's not if you're actually explaining at this point what a bug is. A functionality that doesn't work is a bug. Something gets updated and breaks is maintenance. There's a difference there. If you explain it before they look at it the first time, before they get into it, if you have these conversations, more often than not, you'll be able to either sell them on a maintenance agreement or explain to them what will fall in and outside of you helping them post-launch. This will save you from having a client who, after you get the work out the door, comes back and is very unhappy. Make sure you're doing these. Make sure you're having these conversations. Scopecreep. Scopecreep is a very American term, but it means when the client wants to do more than what you contracted for. This is not a bad thing. This is, again, an opportunity to sell and to do more. So what we're going to do here is when a client comes and says, you delivered these 10 things, but I want 11, 12, and 13, you have an opportunity to not argue with them about how this is different, but to explain to them how in your conversations to date, 11, 12, and 13 were not coming up in conversation and you weren't aware of them. This is also a great time for you to talk about how to trade off the difference between this could push the project longer or with a little bit more upsell, maybe we can do something else, always be negotiating, always be trying to understand what they want. If your first reaction is always, that's a problem, they're going to feel that and you're not going to have a good client experience, and good project management sets you up for sales of your next project. Last important point before we get to questions and conversation. You guys are the professionals. There's a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt in what happens out there. Your clients don't understand the process as well as you do. So expect at some point in the conversation, I was talking to Francesco yesterday and he was saying, at some point I always get an email where the client is mad. Here's the key point. He knows it. Don't reply. Make yourself a rule, depending on your personality, it might be 20 minutes or it might be 20 hours. Read the email. Take it in. Don't reply. There's no reason to react to a mad client because probably they're upset, they're mad, they're frustrated because they don't understand something. Even if they're saying they're upset about time or they're saying they're upset about whatever it is, probably once you start talking to them, you will find out that it all has to do with them not understanding something and walking it through, you'll be able to get through that. So when you get these emails, if you can, do not react by writing back the email. Even after you have the time to digest it, I suggest getting on the phone, getting on a video conference, having a face-to-face meeting first, and then following up in writing because nothing will replace the visual of you being with them on video conference or in person with a helpful, smile look on your face. It's very important. Now, I've rushed through a lot of these just to try and get to a point where if somebody has some specific examples, just some specific questions, we could work on this in a workshop-type setting because that's how we like to do it. A lot of this seems like, well, they're nice theories, but I had a particular problem or I had a problem with a client. How do you address that to this? So I'd like to be able to make it open to the room. Okay, so we're going to take questions, but I'm going to start with the first one. Please. You run a large company compared to many consultants or small shops, but you come from a small shop, right? Do you think it's important or how would you do this? How would you set the right size of the client to take and the right size of the project to take? Because sometimes I've experienced small shops taking projects that were way too big for them and so getting into trouble because of that. Or companies that they think that they have to take everything and they take stuff that is too small for them and that runs into another problem. How do you set the right bracket and how do you give yourself the right bracket for the size of project to take? Okay, so that's a very good question and it gets a little bit complex, so I'll use an example in some of the talks I give. We talk about verticalization and specialization. How many people in the room are more design-based? Okay, how many people in the room are developers? I hope you were looking around because designers meet developers, developers meet designers. Don't try to do it all yourself. How many of the room are project managers professionally? Anybody? Okay, meet the other guys too, right? The busier you get, the more projects you get and I don't care if they're five-year-old projects or five million-year-old projects, the more projects you get, the more you want to specialize in what you're doing. And when you verticalize, on what you think you can do well, you will do much better. Find people you can work with and partner. Even when I was a small shop of five people, we partnered for things that we didn't know. We didn't try to fool the client and say what we did. Today, as crowd favorite, we actually partner even more because we have to be very careful about making sure we deliver well. If you deliver a project badly, you've burned that client, you've burned that project. So if you verticalize, you can make sure that you're delivering that well. It's about finding the right relationships and the right people. And as Italians, I'm sure you can do that. So that's how you verticalize. But then how do you gauge the size? It depends on what your prior experience is. In the WordPress world and economy, we've seen the last five years in the United States grow exponentially. People who are taking projects of a certain size were doubling every six months the size of projects they were taking. And they were able to take more and more, and then they would hire more people. Be careful how you do that. That's why I say verticalize. Be careful about what you do take on. Don't be afraid to give a referral to somebody else, which is why it's very important at these WordCamps to network and meet other people. Because if you find somebody, even if you think they're competition, if you find somebody who's as good as you are, then not only can you refer something to them, they might refer something back when they're busy. And then if you've done that well, when there's a project that takes two different people, you might partner well. It all feeds itself. I hope that answers that. Okay, I'm sure that there are questions from the room as a rule. If you want to ask the question, is it in Italian, no worries, because he will reply without even a translation needed. I'm a freelance and I work as a technical consultant for small companies. Do you think that most of the advice that you provide does can be helpful to freelance as well, more than to companies or large companies as yours? Thank you. Every single slide I put up here was specifically starting for a one-man company. Absolutely. If you're an engineer or you're a designer and you're doing just one-on-one consulting with very small businesses, every single slide on here has something of value to you. Even the contract slides. If you're all by yourself, I hope before you start a project, you're writing down a list of functionalities or a list of specifications of design before you get it out to the client, right? The key is when you get your 10th project and you need to work with the person sitting next to you on the next project, if you've gone through the documentation on that smallest type of contract, you might decide, okay, this is where I need to get to the next level of contract. I may need to have to do a proposal, or once you start working with a group of people, you might say, okay, we need to do an MSA because this is a client who's going to have 10 projects over the next year, right? So hopefully every single one of these slides has something that can specifically help. Don't be shy. Oh, come on, there's got to be something. I'm sure there are. I'm going to go in the back. I'm going to take a question from this area. If you don't raise your hand, I will pick. You see? It works every time. I have a slight issue with managing expectations. And in particular, I was wondering, how do you deal with... I get the part where you have to help them self-select a realistic path, okay? It's actually what I would like to be able to do. But my issue is with the frustration that sometimes the clients feel when they realize that they cannot afford something they fell in love with. How do you manage that? So the first thing to do, and there's nothing special in telling you this, is talk about a phased approach. If a client comes in with 500 euros and actually wants Facebook, there's not a lot you're going to be able to do. But if a client comes in and says, look, I really want a site with a learning management system on it. And you give them a price where you're going to put in Lyft or LMS or one of the other LMS systems, and they say, I can't afford that. I can only afford half of that. That's when you start talking about a phased approach. You say, okay, well, this is what we can do, for instance. We can design your WordPress site in mind that we're going to add the plug-in later. So I'm going to take that design into consideration. But for this first budget, I'm only going to be able to afford doing X. Now, that also depends on if you're charging fixed fee or by the hour or how you're doing things. There's different ways to sort of negotiate with them. But the first thing to do is to talk about a phased approach in setting those expectations. And then they come back and they say, well, I'd really like all of that at the same time. You go, well, I wish I could, but that's why I was saying, using the space time continuum. You can only get so much time, so much done within a certain amount of time with a certain amount of work done. And if you want that, I'm going to have to bring in other people. Even if that's not necessarily the case, I'm going to have to bring in other people. And to bring in other people, that's going to raise the cost. So it's really out of my control. If instead of saying no to the client, you say, look, I'm trying to help you with everything that's in my control, you have a much better reaction. It's like, it's a common problem for us. Your problem is you don't have enough money. My problem is I don't have enough time to give you without that money. Let's solve that problem together. I hope that helps. I think there's a question back over here. If you're doing a good job when you do that step of beta and UAT testing, where you explain the difference between a bug and maintenance slash new functions, there at that moment the argument begins of, okay, when I'm a client, when I want to go forward, I don't want any more new functions. I'm sorry, I'm trying, guys. No problem. I can't talk in English. I'm trying. I'm doing my best. And other clients say, yes, after lunch, I want a small function every month. Normally, for example, what we do after lunch, instead of a fixed bid, we sell you a retainer of certain number of hours. If the hours are only maintenance of the code, maintenance for a marketing site is very low. For maintenance, you've made more development of specialized plugins and a bit higher. So based on that, we try to say it's 10 hours a month or 30 hours a month for a contract of 12 months. A advice of mine is not to let the client give you a contract month by month, blocked for a year. Because otherwise it becomes difficult. Next one. Hi. Hey, Omar. I was wondering if you have any advice on how to deal with failure on our own account. What if something in my team goes wrong? Yes. Thank you. Great question. So let's say you are in the middle of a project and because you overloaded, because you promised something that you couldn't figure out how to do, you've blown a deadline or worse, you've got a bug in the system that you need to go and find some help on. This is the time to be completely open and honest, be completely transparent with your client. About, when was it? It was two years ago, almost two years ago, there's a famous WordPress product company that had a security breach right before WordCamp Europe. And instead of not saying anything, because the way that it happened, they could have cut everything up. The first thing they did is they said to their clients, we screwed up and this is what we did wrong. We did something really dumb but we're going to make it better. We're going to fix this problem and we're here to support you. Yes, there's always going to be one or two clients who are you're fired, you're out of here. Those type of clients you don't want to take. You don't want to keep. It's okay, walk away. The clients who react by saying, okay, you screwed up, how are you going to fix it? And then keep going are the ones that you're going to have an even better relationship with. But if you don't take that responsibility up front and tell them that, you don't have the opportunity to find out how they're going to mess up. Or worse, if you hide it and you actually get through it and you get to the other side when they then have a problem you don't have any bartering, you don't have any negotiation. So always be completely transparent about that stuff. It'll take you much further in your next sales and in your current project. Anybody else? Well, thank you very much. Thank you.