 I'm not trying to be mean, but I'm trying to do my best in my heart. I don't know if everybody can hear that, but she's talking about being nice. So I want to start out by asking how many people here would say that you are nice? Oh, I'm so relieved. I was hoping I have a nice audience. I think I'm nice too, actually. So this is a definition of nice. I'm a mom. These are my kids. They're grown now. But as I've raised them, I've had the mantra, just be nice. You can see, they sort of make fun of me a little bit for it, because that's the last thing I'll say before they go into a newer difficult situation. Whatever you do, just be nice. I really believe that. And this came to the test for me last year. I had my first really difficult client experience. I've been doing this for over eight years, and I'm glad to say I've never had a client not be nice to me, but I did in this case, and I really struggled with it. And so, on how to get out of that situation and be nice about it. So I started writing a blog post on this subject, and I was talking to some friends about it, and I was really surprised when I was asking them about being nice, what that meant. And I was really surprised and sort of disappointed that they had a very negative view of the word nice. They felt that nice was either meaning that you were too focused on pleasing other people, or that you were being nice that it was fake, that you're being nice to get something out of it, as opposed to kind, which is a much more genuine, compassionate word behavior. So I researched this, I read a lot of blog posts about it, and that seems to be a very common perception between the word nice and the word kind. But as I really thought about it and thought about what it meant for my business, I really believe that nice is still a good thing, that it's not bad to be nice. It's a polite way to interact with people. It's a social construct. It's something that maybe we've lost some sense of value for in social media today. So I would rather take the high road and be the nice person, even when things maybe aren't going well. And I also don't think that being nice and having a reason, an ulterior motive for being nice is a bad thing. We are business people. We know that we need to be nice to do business with. If we are not nice to do business with, it's going to be very hard to grow our business. You can do a great job, but that's obviously important to have a successful business, is to do a good job. But if you're not nice about it, then it's very likely the word will get around and you won't grow your business. I was thinking about this, and I don't know if anyone is familiar with a restaurant called Dick's Last Resort, it used to be in Chicago, but they base their brand on being really mean to their customers. That's their brand, but that's the only example I can think of where someone is proud of their reputation as being mean. So as we talk about being nice in business, I formed a company a couple of years ago, a strategic partnership, and we named our company Nice Work because we really feel that being nice to work with is important to us as human beings and as business owners. In order to be nice to yourself, to your clients, to your coworkers, there are some steps I'm going to talk about briefly today to avoid situations where it makes it really hard to be nice. I'm going to talk only about clients, but I'll just say up front that a lot of these things apply to getting along with your colleagues. It's all about communication and expectations, which Pat Ramsey talked about this morning. So thinking through beforehand, having policies and procedures set up up front with your coworkers, with your clients, is going to help avoid not nice situations. And being nice to yourself, respecting yourself, is also going to help you have a nice relationship with your client and feel good about that relationship. You have many opportunities to communicate with your client and set expectations. Starting with an inquiry. When someone asks you if you can help them with their project, how do you respond to them? I would recommend that you have a well thought out preset template that you can customize if you need to, but that has the important information that you don't forget to communicate each time, which includes your personality. It's very easy when you're replying to an email really quickly to forget what your personality is, to put some nice language into your message, as well as your pricing structure, your procedures that you follow, what you do, and your timing and time frame so that they know what those expectations are, and they don't move forward with you if it's not a good fit. When you've moved beyond the inquiry and you're working on a proposal on a contract, here's where being nice to yourself really comes into play, as well as communicating nicely. I was speaking to someone earlier about the negative voice in your head, and if anyone knows what that is, then you know that it's hard sometimes to value yourself. How many people here have priced a job, taken a job, and you realize when you're in it that you have not put a high-enough dollar sign on that? Okay, we have all done that, right? And how does that make you feel? Not very good. It makes me feel resentful, right? I get into the project with my client. I'm working along. I realize, oh, my gosh, I'm not getting paid enough for this, and I get mad, and I get mad at the client. It's not the client's fault. The client does not decide our value. The client does not decide your value. They don't put the price tag on your project. They shouldn't. You decide your value. And how do you do that? Do you throw a dart at a dartboard and just say, this is what I think those projects should cost? Maybe in the beginning, I certainly did that in the beginning, and you may have also. But once you've got some experience and you look around at what the market bears, but also think about what your value is on an hourly basis and how long a project is going to take you to complete. Chris Nama has a great three-point estimate YouTube video that I recommend that you look up, and it helps you come up with sort of an average price so that you can have a general sense of what you're worth, what your project is worth, multiply that times your hourly rate. That way, when you've moved into your project, it's the first time you've done a project of that type. You may be taking your risk. You may build a little bit extra in just in case, but you know that you have set your value and that you've given it thought and you're not just throwing a dart at a board. I'm not going to talk about contracts too much because we have an attorney in the room, but of course you know that you need to have a thorough contract. And I know when I started, I had a very slim one, and as time has gone on, I've added more to it because I realized that I need to be very, very precise and include as much information as I can in terms of what happens if something changes, what happens if they delay, how many people have clients who don't get your content in time, right? That costs you time and it costs you money. These things are hard to enforce, but if you put them in your contract in a nice way, if you end up with a client who's not being nice to you, you have some foundation for moving forward in a nice way with them by pointing out that this has been communicated. And then you're onboarding and the process that you're going through, I would recommend that you take every opportunity to repeat to your clients almost every time that you communicate with them how you work, what the next step is, and also to explain to them that you're excited to be working with them. If you do this upfront, if you have these procedures in place and you have templates, then you don't forget to do that in the middle of crazy time. It's easy to just shoot off an email and not have some kind of nice, friendly communication included with the message that you're trying to convey. When you're sending a prototype to your client and it's time for them to approve the design, that's the time for me anyway where I say to the client very clearly, this is the really exciting time that we have your design. I know you're going to love it. Once you've approved it, any changes that you make include a change order and that's going to cost something. So be sure that you look at the colors and the fonts and all of these things and I'm very clear. And I do it in a nice way, but it's very, very clear and it avoids difficult situations down the road where they haven't understood. When I think about that difficult client that I had, I realize they were not very nice. I will say that. But they also probably didn't have a very clear expectation for me on what was included in the project. So it's really important to be clear in your expectations. How do you do this? Well, I'm a big fan of templates, tools. As was said earlier, I'm a digital efficiency geek. And so I like a lot of tools to help me organize my email box and my calendar. One thing we heard about earlier from Sherry Walling was wanting our clients to love us and we heard this morning. And we heard from Christina about, or Christy about having routines. I'm really big on sending clients information about how to schedule with me so that it's not stressful back and forth. The more stressful, the more communication you have shooting back and forth between your clients in email, the more tense it can become. So try to streamline things. Make it simple for your clients and yourselves. Templates. Templates for proposals. There are services that do this, like Proposify, where you can look at their proposals and see what they include and get some ideas or you can sign up for their service. Sort of a boilerplate makes it easy to make sure that everything's included. Project management. Depending on the kind of client that you have, there are all different kinds of project management systems that you can use. Some may be more complicated than what you need, but they allow you to set up tasks and templates so that you're communicating again. I know I'm a broken record here. I thought through a template, a communication style that you have with your client up front and reuse that. Save yourself time. You can use automation for this as well. Jennifer Bourne has something called the profitable project plan. If you have heard of that or haven't, it's a great system that she has some time-tested, user-tested communication templates that you can use to keep in touch with your clients throughout a process. She uses some automated systems. I use something in Gmail. It's free. It's called canned responses. If you use Gmail, it's an extension. It allows you to set up tons of different templates, and you just go and click on it to save so much time, but it also reinforces this idea that I have front-loaded my communication with my personality and my intention to be nice. And then I'll talk about treats for a minute. How many of you have ever sent a handwritten note to your clients? All right. Great. And how many of your clients have commented on how much that meant to them? Anybody? Yeah. It's not something that many people do. It can set you apart. That's an ulterior motive, nice thing, but there's nothing wrong with it. Putting a smile on your face is a treat for you and for your client. When you smile, do you know that it makes you feel better? It makes you feel nicer. It makes people around you respond better. So think about... I'm not talking about sending treats and clients to your clients, but I'm talking about doing an extra little nice thing for them, a phone call, including in your communication how much they mean to you that you're so grateful that they're chosen you to work with. Okay. Does anybody have any questions? Nice ones, hopefully. The question is, what do you do when you do end up in a difficult situation with your client, where you have done all of these things and somehow they're still upset and they're being difficult to work with, how do you enforce or do you enforce these things? And I would say that's on a case-by-case basis. So I always like to exit on a nice note. Whether or not there's money on the table and how much it is, sometimes it might not be worth fighting for. Right? So the difficult client that I talked about, we ended our relationship and I left a very small amount of money on the table and that's something else is being careful that the way that you're getting paid is so that you're going to not be in a situation where you're going to leave a lot on the table. So you get paid in phases during the project so that you're getting compensated and then at the end, if something goes bad you haven't really lost out on that much. Yeah. Anybody else have a question? Yeah. Oh, the three-point estimate by Chris Lemma. I think it's on YouTube and on his website, I think. Yes. Yeah. You're trading a new contract with the bad client. You mean continuing to work with them? In this particular case, no. I mean, none of this is to say that there aren't bad clients and there aren't mean people out there. Right? If you've done some of these things you also need to pay attention up front to red flags. And this particular client, there were some I didn't pay attention to. So when you're in that inquiry process, if they start pushing you, they're asking you, you know, do you have $2,000 but would you do mine for $2,000? You know that depending on your situation that you're in or how much you want to work with them, maybe you would do that under certain circumstances but you really have to be strategic about it and think about where that could end up if you do make that compromise. Yeah. She's asking if there's a form where you can create one yourself. You can create one on your website that they can sign up. You can have them sign something just like a contract. You can... If you don't want to meet them face to face you can do it via email and say and I don't know if this is legally binding but by sending your approval by replying to this email with your approval you're indicating that we're ready to move on and any changes from now on will incur a cost. Yeah. Excellent question. He's asking about how you come up with your value because prices vary across the country, across the world, across experience levels. That's where having that voice in your head comes into play in combination with what you know about your skill and experience and what the market will bear and what you need to live on. So all of those things come into play in terms of what your value is. If you're doing this on the side and you're just starting and learning less than what you're going to charge five years later after you've built 45 or 100 websites. Right? So I can't tell you a dollar value but you can look around at what the market will bear and what your colleagues are charging and based on your experience and skill level. I hope that answers your question a little bit. It's a hard one to answer, I think. You have to look at what your co-workers, colleagues are charging and be competitive. Thank you so much. If you want to contact me, you can reach me up here or I'll stay outside for a little bit too. Thank you very much for listening today. Be nice, be nice. Thank you so much, Tara.