 They came to Jesse girth Thank you I always like to include pictures of my team and my family and my slides because this is the reason that I'm doing this This is the reason that I travel. This is the reason that I talk. I'm super passionate about growing businesses I'm super passionate about helping other people grow businesses and Allowing yourself to free up some time in your life So this is my team. We I run a website development agency out of Minneapolis, Minnesota We have nine people website developers project manager on staff a full-time support agent and a content writer in-house and my my kids Cedar is my six-year-old and River is my four-year-old They are very typical six and four-year-old boys and they keep me on my feet. I enjoy traveling with them Cedar will be at a word camp in just a few years. I'm pretty sure he's he's interested in following in The WordPress footsteps that I've been working on so my talk project management for developers The reason that I put this together is because I started my business back in 2005 as just me solopreneur I was the website designer. I was the website developer and I was also the person answering all of the phone calls and As my business grew the first people that I started to hire were in production so I started hiring more web designers and we ended up in a unique situation and I don't know this this may sound familiar to some of you possibly but I Would have my web developers or myself get on the phone and talk directly to the customer about what they were looking for And the customer would say hey, I need a seven-page website and The web designer would say oh, that's great. Okay, pretty simple seven pages So, you know, we get them a quote for their seven-page website some on the dotted line and as soon as the project starts Customer gets back on phone with the designer and says hey, I actually forgot. I've got three more services I think we should highlight those all out. Is that gonna be a problem? So as a web designer, it's not too hard Especially if you're using WordPress to just add three more pages slap some content up there great good to go All right customer your seven-page website has now turned into a ten-page website But it wasn't a lot of extra time. We'll let it slide how does it look and Inevitably the customer says oh That's right. I've got four employees Wouldn't it be cool if they all had their bios on our website? Maybe we could have a fancy Team page where the photos flipped when you scrolled over them and by this point, you know You just want your customer to be super happy and again, you know, it's just a simple team Plug-in and you take up a couple of bios you put their pictures up on the website and The next thing you know, you're just about to launch the site when your customer says Hey, you know that contact form wouldn't it be really sweet if people filling out that form could determine or could tell me if They're a customer or if they have a new sales inquiry And wouldn't it be cool if they were already a customer the fields changed so they could fill out their name and Their website that they already have with me and other information But if they were maybe an inquiry and wanted to buy from me, they could change They could fill out Different fields based on the products and services that what they were interested in and so all right We're already using gravity forms pretty easy to set up conditional logic. Not a problem Let's just go ahead and build that into your contact page and now we're pretty much done with your site, but wait The day before launch your customer Signs up for a live chat service because they saw it on another website And wouldn't it be nifty if everyone visiting their website could contact them through a little chat box? And so this is super easy you guys have all done this before right? You just get the JavaScript code from your customer put it in the header and it works right away, right? Super symbol no no, but but again, you know the designer wants to make the customer happy at any expense And so they're gonna they're gonna go ahead and they're gonna fight with this JavaScript they're gonna put it in the wrong place in the header They're gonna find out it needs to be in the footer then they're gonna find out it has to go back in the header and they're gonna have to make custom buttons and custom graphics and And then the website's ready to go live. Oh, but wait What if we just put a contact form in the footer just? Three fields simple simple easy. No, we're done. I promise. I promise, right? So what's happened here? What's happened here is that you've sold your customer a seven page website And what they got was a whole lot of stuff. They didn't pay you to do Anybody familiar with this has this happened to anybody? Couple people in the room. All right, so I'd like to get a feel For who I'm I'm I'm kind of delivering the talk to and hopefully you know some Q&A time We can have a little bit of back-and-forth talk about your specific struggles How many of you are working as website designers? How many of you are freelancing? How many of you work for an agency? How many people are the sole contact for most of the customers that come into your business? All right, so that's a pretty good pretty good spread here. So as web designers We like to focus on what we're building and not so much on Managing what we're building. We really like to get the work done. We like to make our customers happy But we need to be sure that along the way we are keeping things in bounds so that the project isn't spiraling out of control As in the example that I showed So I'm gonna give you just a very very basic overview of what project management is To start and then we'll get a little bit deeper into scope creep and controlling How your projects move forward and keeping things in line? So the first thing to understand about a project is a project is a temporary endeavor It has a very set and defined beginning point and it has a very set defined end point So a project isn't a website that goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and continually gets added to The project is the initial scope of work. There's a starting point and there's a clearly defined end point when the project is complete and So projects have three things that kind of make up the quality of How the project ends and that is the the cost how much you're going to charge for your project The time how long it's going to take you to complete the project and the scope Which is the full list of all of the features all of the things that you're going to do During this project and all three of those things dictate the quality This project management triangle will talk about a little bit further down the road and so a manager Project management a manager is the person who has the responsibility to make decisions about a project The manager of a project is the person who is solely responsible for the success or for the failure of a project So as the project manager You are working with your customers one-on-one To control the cost of the project to control the scope of the project to control the time of the project So that you can end up with a successful project Now a successful project might not just be a really great-looking website a successful project might be The relationship that you end your website filled with your client on So if you build a terrific website for your customer, but you're fighting so much during the process That's the at the end of the project. Do you guys have a sour relationship? That may very well be a failed project and so what I'm going to help you do today is Learn how to keep your projects on track and work towards quality and success So back to the project management triangle this This is kind of out of the project management Institute sort of a very great way to look at how to keep The quality of your project under control So again, the quality is in the inside of the triangle and the quality of the project is going to be dictated by the time it takes you to complete the cost and the scope and So the key is to keep the triangle equilateral anytime one thing gives the other things have to give along with The thing that you change so that the triangle doesn't Get out of proportion so here you see if we increase the scope of A project without increasing the cost or the time it takes to complete the quality is going to suffer So if you add to a project You need to make sure that you are adding on the Appropriate amount of time and the appropriate cost So for freelancers kind of a very practical approach to project management Your job as a project manager is to make sure that your projects are completed on time Your job is to make sure that they am meet the agreed project scope that you talked about with your customer And you need to make sure that your projects cost what you agree to at the beginning of the project And so you need to take a step out So instead of going back to the example that I gave earlier with the web designer Continually thinking oh that form is so easy to build or oh, let's just add one more page because it's simple for me to do When you're acting as a project manager, you need to take a step out of your web design shoes and Stop thinking about how easy it is to add certain things to a website But think about the time and the cost Implications that those will have on the overall product So your job as a project manager is to stop thinking like a web designer you need to change your mind's shift As a project manager, you are the person who is going to keep your project leading You're the one who is going to communicate with all of the members that are involved in the project You're going to balance competing objectives. Has anyone ever been in a room with? Board of directors who is working together on a project and You have five different people on the board and they all have different ideas So your job for the project manager is to determine. What is the goal? What is the initial outcome? How do we balance all of the different ideas that everybody's bringing to the table and agree on? One decision to help move forward Determine who the decision maker is in your board of directors if you're working with four different people And you come together in a group meeting and they have a bunch of ideas This is a great time to interject and say hey, okay. I hear all of you. Let's summarize all of your ideas Why don't the four of you meet as a team and decide which one of you is going to be the decision maker on the project? So when you first start your projects, especially if you're working with multiple people Make sure that you determine one person on the client end who is going to be delivering final decisions to you And who's going to be in charge of making The calls of what happens in the project It's okay if they need to go back and consult with their board But you don't need to be part of that process and you need to make sure that you are clear on who is allowed to give you changes So that you don't end up in a situation where four different people are requesting four different things And you're just bending and doing all of them or You could be adding on cost and cost and cost to compete With every single person's different ideas and at the end of the project you come back and nobody's clear Who had the authority to continually increase the budget of this project? So make sure that when you're working with customers There's one clear decision maker the other part of your job is communication actually the biggest part of a project manager's job is going to be communication making sure that Everyone is crystal clear about how the project is flowing how things are on track and also make sure that You keep all of the different members who are working on the board of directors or on the team You're building a website for focused on the central goal. What was the initial intent of the project? So some great skills to have problem-solving is essential communication like I said Motivation as a project manager, you need to be motivated to keep the project moving Oftentimes you may need to be a cheerleader for your customers You may need to help them keep the project moving forward and let them know what the next steps are Leadership skills absolutely important, especially if you're working with a team inside of your organization But leadership skills with your work when you're working with your customer are also going to come in so you can't help guide your customer You can show them what they need to provide to you You can demonstrate how to keep the project moving forward smoothly Negotiation skills you may have to get into a tough situation or a tough conversation with a customer where they want Ten team members add it to their website, but you can't do that for free So you might need to negotiate a cost and that's gonna obviously Increase the time it takes you to complete the project as well So you're gonna need to renegotiate the time frame that you talked about at the beginning of the project In customer service number one This is the the biggest thing that we focus on in in our company is making sure that every step of the way No matter how firm you're being with customers and how much you're you have to say no Or you have to increase the price do it with a smile make sure that you are Answering your phone make sure that you're providing fast responsive customer service that is going to speak Speak dollar signs to your customer They're going to be more willing to work with you on terms if you have great communication skills and great customer service to back it up You may also play some other roles you may be involved in accounting If your customers call up and they want to know where we're sitting with billing you may have to look up Their account you may have to tell them you know how much money they owe you might have to send out some invoices That's the project manager You very well could be acting as a sales agent In the example where someone wants to add a team section on you might have to upsell your customer And that's a great thing. Don't be afraid to upsell as part of your project management That's only more money for your business and for you and you might be a hiring manager If you are working with an internal team, maybe you need to bring on contractors Maybe you need to bring on graphic designers. Maybe you need to bring on Content writers or perhaps to get your job done easier. You need to purchase a specific plug-in So part of your job as a project manager could be making executive decisions on what software gets purchased and what people You hand jobs over to to efficiently complete the job You might Yeah, the purchasing manager you may need to buy software as well All right So this brings us to kind of the the hearts of the conversation The talk in the other room at 9 o'clock was a little bit of I mentioned a little bit about scope creep Is everybody here familiar with the term scope creep? One and one person you want to explain what scope creep is So scope creep is when my vice president comes up to me five times a day and asks for The extra features after we decided on that seven page website you described Exactly. Yes. So scope creep is when a project starts to creep up Beyond what you originally agreed to do and you know that scope creep has already happened When it's starting to cost your business more time or more money Then you originally budgeted So the goal as the project manager the primary overarching goal as a project manager is to mitigate scope creep so we're going to talk about some ways to do this and First and foremost scope creep prevention starts with the sale So another hypothetical situation Let's say we've got a sales guy and we've got a customer and they have a really friendly meeting and they're talking about everything that the customer needs on her website and so The sales agent leaves the conversation thinking. Oh, you know what? She just needs a super simple brochure marketing site a couple of little design features Maybe some contact forms But the customer leaves that meeting thinking ooh, I'm gonna get an e-commerce site. I'm gonna get conditional logic forms I'm gonna get team bios. I'm gonna get all of these fancy features because he told me That their team was so good at making websites. And so I'm just gonna I'm just gonna end up with an amazing product So sales agent goes back to the developer and says hey developer. Here's a project for you. This is a super simple website project And the developer starts working gets the website built connects with the customer and finds out that now What the developer delivered was not exactly what the customer was expecting because The customer was pretty sure the sales agent was clear about her shopping cart and about her team members and about the conditional logic forms And now we have an issue Where there's a complete disconnect a complete misunderstanding and this is where the quality suffers in the relationship This is a great example of when that triangle becomes equilateral because the customer's expectations on scope We're not to the same as your expectations And so we may have a really awesome looking website But we now have a serious situation with our customer and that I would I would call a project fail So Project management and scope creep prevention starts with the sale When you are selling a project if you have a team that does sales make sure you're delivering a super crystal clear proposal Make sure you're line iteming line iteming everything in your proposal How many website pages are you gonna build out? Define what a website pages for you. So in our company we say we're gonna build out 15 website pages. Oh Yeah, we define a page as 750 words and two or three simply formatted photos My favorite one of my favorite graphics. Yeah You can have it good or fast But I'm not gonna be cheap you have it good and cheap, but it's not gonna be fast Define if you're if you're building out contact forms Do they include conditional lodge logic be super specific in your proposals Contact forms if you just say we're gonna put a generic contact form on your page And you think that that's a six field form and your customer thinks it's an 80-page form That's a that's a big difference So define what does contact form mean? Are you gonna give them six to twelve input fields? Are you gonna give them three conditional logic sections to each of those conditional logic sections have four input fields that change? Is it gonna be one page contact form or is it gonna be a multi-page contact form? Are you building out products? Is it an e-commerce website in my experience the larger the website the more potential there is for scope creep and the more Potential there is to lose money and this is simply because as the project gets bigger and bigger especially with e-commerce It's it's it's not fun And it's not as easy to define the specific features that go into it So if you're building e-commerce and part of your contract is that you're gonna build out products for your customers Define exactly how many products is included at your price point to find what a product looks like how many pictures are gonna go on a product How many variables are gonna go do you sell t-shirts? How do we want to do different colors of t-shirts do we want to do different sizes of t-shirts does a large green cost? The same amount as a small red These are things that you need to spell out and then it's really great if you can in your proposal Include a price per additional so that your customer knows and is and is not surprised when you come to them and say hey Said 50 products, but we're at 75. That's that's 25 more than that was included And so you're looking at X for your additional spend on this is that okay? Now I'm not saying you have to be a hundred percent super rigid It's always good to give a little bit just make sure that you're not giving so much That your customer they have to go back and backpedal and fix the situation So you know 50 products and they give you 51 There's the yeah, there's there's reason to argue though that that's okay And that's going to lend back to your customer service experience as a project manager just using a little bit of common sense Explain your process what we do in our business is we hold a project kickoff meeting as soon as the project closes Where our project manager the sales guy and the decision maker very important to have the decision maker On the customer end all get together they they talk about the whole project They review the proposal and they talk about how they like to communicate some people like phone calls Some people like emails some people like text messages Make sure when you have your project kickoff meeting that you're all on the same page about scope of work About communications and set expectations if your customer owes you 10 page of content before you get started Put a deadline on that tell them when you need it by explain to them that you cannot Continue with your process until you have deliverables from them Likewise set expectations for yourself Let them know how frequently you're going to be delivering let them know How they should expect to hear from you let them know when you're gonna get updates and let them know what your billing schedule looks like So that everybody's crystal clear from the beginning how your process works and how the project will move forward Identify milestones So when we start a new project typically what we give our customers is a timeline Which is an overarching sheet of what their entire project looks like and it starts with a project kickoff meeting We have the date on there, and then we have a place for them to initial off at the end of the meeting Following that we need content so that's one of the milestones and we will put a date that it's due by the the timeline can be Can change as it goes you can you know set the date for the next deliverable And then put expectations for how long it'll take you to turn around after you receive from your customer What order do things need to be completed in if you need content before you can build out a website design Make sure that your customer sees that have it in print have it on a PDF have it on a website somewhere So they can visually see the order that their project is going to be completed in This will help them stay on track And this will also help you stay on track and organize your projects so that you can see as you go down The timeline where you're falling at also stick to your timeline Once the customer signs off on something on their timeline They don't get to go back and make changes if they go back and make changes. That's a change of scope That's a change of your project that should fall under billable time Back to communication your most important job as a project manager Make sure you're keeping those lines of communication open Find out I said this earlier who the primary contact is find out who the decision-maker is and Most importantly make sure you're keeping a record of all communications you have It's very easy to get on the phone with a customer or meet with someone face-to-face and have a long conversation about What they're expecting and what you're going to do and Then go back and do it only to find out That information was taken a different way from the customer. So after an in-person meeting after a phone call always send a follow-up email Outlining what you talked about Outlining the scope of work outlining the price the time it's going to take this way You're all on the same page before you start and if anything changes moving forward or expectations change You have written documentation to refer to Also make sure that different team members are not promising different things to the same customer We have run into this situation before where a sales guy gets on the phone with a customer and says oh, yeah, we'll go ahead and do that for you and then the project manager is on the phone and says Oh, yeah, we're going to do it this way and then they get the developer on the phone and the developer says Oh, actually, we're going to do it this way and now we've got a customer who has been told three different things by three different people Now that's cool If you want to have your developers talk directly with your customers that can that can be super Advantages sometimes it's really hard to get across an idea or to explain a concept as a project manager Maybe you just need your tech officer to do it if that happens again Make sure that written communication is followed up Make sure that you are sending an email or that your developer is sending an email and copy the project manager Copy the customer on that email. Hey great phone call. This is what was said. This is how we move forward This is how it's gonna affect your project and Address red flags super quickly if your if your project starts To get into scope creep if you if your customer starts expecting more Make sure that you nip it in the bud as soon as you possibly can this will set expectations moving forward If you make it clear to your customer right away when something goes out of scope They'll be less likely to continually pile on things that are out of scope as the project moves forward And they'll know how you react to it. They'll be able to kind of gauge moving forward How the project is going to change with their expectations? Revisit the original goal So many times we've been halfway through a project when the customer says, oh, we should start selling Well, what was the original goal of your project? You wanted to get more phone calls? Yeah, but maybe we should just sell our products online Let's take a step back here. How do you sell? What's your best sales method? You you told us at the beginning of the project that phone calls was the original goal So always go back to that if you're having an issue with scope creep always pull out the original goal of the project Why were we doing this in the first place? Is what you're going to do is what you're wanting to add on going to accomplish your goal? Is it going to make things muddy? Can we add it later? If we add on e-commerce to your website, how's that going to affect your deadline? You have a really big trade show coming up in two months You wanted to get your new website up before your trade show if we add on e-commerce Are we going to meet that deadline and keep track of scope changes? We have a change order form that's on our website that people fill out Depending on the change order request There may be a cost associated with it which we make them pay at the time that they fill out the form So if your customer does want to add their team bios onto the website, that's great Don't be afraid to upsell but make sure you're recording it and make sure that they're signing off on it And if it is going to incur additional costs make sure that either they put a deposit toward that or Somewhere signed to agree that they will meet the additional cost if it's going to delay the launch of the project Make sure that they're clear that you're clear about that and that they understand and that they accept those terms So maybe adding on three more pages isn't going to change the cost But maybe it's going to push launch day back a week is that okay does your customer agree to those terms and Finally when a project is complete follow up ask questions get genuine feedback It is so much easier to get feedback from your customers and get reviews as soon as a project is done Then it is to come back and to two or three months later Ask how you did how did this project flow for you? What could I have done better? What expectations did you have that weren't met? Did I go above and beyond anywhere? Getting feedback from your customers will help you move forward will help you better your process will help you change How you handle your project management? All right, so any questions so far so I'm going to talk a little bit about tools. Oh, yeah, yeah Phone time do we build for phone time? So typically we so the question was do we build for phone time? No unless it falls into consulting time about something that wasn't originally included So when we put together proposals if it's an active client that we're working with we typically include project management time in The cost so we average you know the average project that takes us a month to complete is going to take 20 hours of project management time for example project management time is going to include those phone calls Project management time is going to include organizing collecting information emailing back and forth If you set your proposal structure up correctly Often times when we're doing custom builds We will include a one-hour consultation with a designer or we will include a 45 minute review with the project manager on the phone And so for the larger projects we oftentimes will dictate how much time is included and then Above that if it if it really gets out of control then yeah, we'll let them know You know what we've gone an hour past the time that was allotted at this point We're falling into consulting time if it's on new Add-ons you can handle that either by saying you know what this is this may fall into a phase two This may be something that we consult about later Or you may send them back to sales and then however you handle your sales process And billing for that set into your question. Okay. Yes Yeah, so the question is how do you bill by project or hourly so we typically have will we put out a proposal? with a minimum scope of work and The cost on that is a is a per project invoice for for a new project for example for a full new development project and That price will spell out things like how much project management time and one-on-one communication time they get it'll spell out You know how many design revisions they get it will spell out development features And then anything above and beyond that either falls into hourly if it's minor updates or changes or It will be rolled over into another project And so the way that we typically gauge it is if it's going to take us less than three or four hours to complete We will just invoice hourly for making additional changes and going above and beyond will have them fill out a change order form For additional hourly work and then they'll agree to the hourly cost and oftentimes that change our order will say not to exceed Four hours of additional work But if it's going to take more time and it's going to severely impact the timeline of the project will oftentimes fill it out As a new add-on proposal and at that point then yes, it's project-based So I guess the answer is it really depends on What what exactly the add-on is? Initially yes, we don't invoice hourly because it's very very hard to Calculate Everything that goes into a project on an hourly basis Because we're also accounting for overhead. I mean we have an office. We have computers. We have an electric bill We have the sales time that went into selling. It's you know So did it take a month to close a sale? Did it take two months to close the sale? So we look at all of those factors while we're determining a project price often times The project price can be defended can be reflected by a skill level, you know So a very simple five-page marketing website even if it takes our developers less time to complete a Five-page membership website the skill level there is quite a bit Higher and so you need to kind of consider in a lot of different factors when you're when you're pricing on projects hourly, you know You can sit down and straight calculate out how many hours it's going to take and I would recommend that you do that because it will give you a good idea of how Long it's taking you to complete projects and how much you're actually making per hour But you also need to calculate how much you actually need to make per hour to keep the business running So there's a lot that goes into it Yeah Yes, yes So revisit the original goal ask why why did we decide to do this? Back to numbers five and six and then step six was six was scope changes So for this we have a change order form Yeah Yes, I Do and it'll be at the end. Yes, the link to the slides will be at the end Potentially see me afterwards we might be able to I might be able to show you a few things. Yeah, possibly I do want to talk a little bit about tools But because you all are WordPress users and you might be web designers or web developers I would encourage you to use the tools that you have at hand already Change orders we use gravity forms for change orders. There is a signature Implementation that you can add on to gravity forms you can add payment onto gravity forms And it looks super professional when you send your customers to a page on your website With their change orders spelled out and their price there and they can just sign online It's also going to add value to your business and it's going to validate you as a web designer if you're utilizing the tools that you have at hand For timelines we utilize page builders Great way if you if you use even Gutenberg blocks Maybe you have a timeline block and you duplicate that block over and over and over and you put every milestone along the way So your customers can see a visual we actually have an entire website dedicated to project management and sales where we how Home all of this stuff. So it's not indexed so people can reference it and we deliver our proposals We deliver scopes of work via the web as well Super easy to create a page in WordPress type up your proposal type of your scope of work In better gravity form at the bottom of it have your customers sign off on the scope of work So one of the advantages that we have as website developers is we have access to these tools And we know how to use these tools So don't be afraid to use the tools that you're using for your customers for your own business To help you with your project management Yeah, so there's a lot of different in terms of managing your financials there are a lot yeah Harvest fresh books. There are a lot of different invoicing software that you can use Whether or not, you know, that's that goes along with project management, I would I Guess I would recommend using a tool that you already have rather than creating it from the ground up, but Yes Yeah, so the comment was that it's a really great if you're charging hourly to be able to track all of your time So yeah, there are a lot of third-party Applications that do time tracking that integrate time tracking with task management. I'm going to talk a little bit I have just a few different tools that I've used in the past specifically for project management So if anyone's heard of Zappi air which allows Different programs to be super integrated with each other So there are a lot of time tracking harvest I think is one time tracking Often that will integrate with slack that will integrate with a sauna or base camps So if you use any tools for project management and you want to bring time tracking into that or you want to bring billing into that You can using API's there's a fear Connect your different tools to work together So we have used all of these in the past a sauna is a great task management Software platform if you like to make lists if you like to check things off your list a sauna is great I have an overview here When we used a sauna in the past we would create a template for the flow of a project and the steps that go along every section of every way through the project and You can just duplicate that template and modify it for every customer you take on For website go live checklist get the DNS information Do a page speed check Change the a record check for broken links all of the things that you do in your go live process That's a great as on as a great tool to use to duplicate that And check off things as you go so you don't miss something Trello is a very similar to a sauna, but it's more board-based where you can have different projects It gives you sort of an at-a-glance view of all of the different projects that you're working on The nice thing with the sauna and Trello is if you want to you can give your customers permission to access their project So they can see where you are in the workflow another Project management tool similar is base camp base camp used to be super popular in the tech industry There are quite a few other alternatives now So depending on you know what what level your company's at a sauna has a free version for up to I think eight users And a certain number of projects Trello and base camp are paid software project management tools Slack is free for up to a certain number of users. We use Slack Every day even though we work together in a co-located office most of our communication is on slack just so that there's written Communication we use slack to post Updates about every project so we have a different channel in slack for every project that we're working on and the full proposal goes up in there Recap of conversations on the phone with a customer goes in there so that the developers are on the same page as the project manager More than anything we use Google Drive and do Google Docs for project management time sheet or timelines change orders proposals those types of things if you decide not to use your website and gravity forms or Page builders to to build out Some of these things you can use Google sheets The nice thing about Google Drive is you can create shared folders for your customers to upload their photos their logos their assets You can put notes in there for your customers as well We will utilize Google Docs very frequently when we're working on website edits and changes so we can have multiple people working through the changes and crossing them out or highlighting the changes in different colors that They're going to work on so that our entire team is kind of on the same page about who's handling what? and Yeah, that's kind of what I have we have about five minutes for questions and My slides as someone asked for is at icebergwebdesign.com slash WCS CV Any further questions? Yes So the question is how worried are you about Some of these tools harvesting the information that you put up I guess my answer is a little bit I would recommend that you never put sensitive data such as passwords into your project management tools However, we're not we're not typically working with super sensitive data in these tools I mean a lot of it is you know content that's going on a marketing page If a customer has an NDA that we need to sign for something we likely wouldn't Publish that in one of these channels depending on you know what what what exactly it is if it's Financial information payments information anything like that you yeah You definitely don't want to be publishing credit card numbers in project management tools You'll you want to use different methods to communicate those lost pass one pass One pass is a great service where you can just share your past share passwords with your customers without actually getting their passwords So it encrypts it You can use virtual private networks if you want to if you're on open Wi-Fi So if you're working in a coffee shop and you're concerned about it There are a number of VPN apps that you can install on your computer or your phone to encrypt data that passes through the Wi-Fi Yes Crotone mail Great comment any other questions yes so I've been So I've been running my own company for some time now For years, but I've been struggling really hard to actually to actually be able to fill At a fixed price is I've already shot myself in the foot every single time And I mean of course like you know that even though the mouth is growing it's growing But I'm still struggling like everything that you mentioned was like I'm doing everything wrong I am in the right place It's so hard it's it's so you know I'm like I started to freelance again and doing you know, I'm doing hourly And I feel so much better like I'm seeing paper what I would I feel I'm worth but yet like I Wanted to get to the point where I can actually like sell Like websites web applications to clients and you know deliver Everything to the point where it's like clients happy. I'm happy. I'm making money. You know everyone's making money, you know, right? It's just a struggle. I'm just like I'm like doing both I'm freelancing and running a company because I just haven't gone You know gone into this point where I can feel good and you know get it get up and running, you know I guess maybe the question is Like like how how can you securely start with say it's small whether it's yourself Maybe it's small team kind of growing from zero to you know to where you are How do we transition from basically like the hourly thinking but also using a certain like certain like methods to actually get out of that like that hourly zone and that Terrible fix rates, right so for the video that the comment was on the struggle going From hourly rates to fixed rates, especially as your team is growing and how to kind of overcome as You're growing your team charging on an hourly basis to charging on a per project base and how to increase that over time So I I have a whole talk that I've delivered before I'm growing from a freelancer into an agency And I'd love to chat with anybody about that, you know outside of outside of this room later at the conference if you're interested in that I mean the short answer is as soon as I started hiring people I doubled prices and then a couple years later You know we did it again What you need to look at when you're setting your project price a little bit of competitive analysis is helpful And obviously location is going to depend greatly on you know what you're going to charge But look at your whole overhead how much money do you want to make how much money? Are you putting into your office? How much money are you putting into your staffing? How much insurance do you have and how many projects do you think you're going to sell this year? And so from a very very broad broad overview if you think you can sell two projects a month and you Need a hundred thousand dollars to live Then that's a hundred thousand divide by twenty four per project, right? As a as kind of a base minimum to gauge Project pricing now obviously you know if you think you're going to sell a bunch of really complex projects and a bunch of smaller Projects that kind of changes up the numbers, but take a step back from the hourly thinking and think of it on a broader sense of How much you need to keep your business running and to keep your life stable? And then as you grow think about what does growth look like? How do you want to change your prices and your price structure so that you can then meet the demands of your growing staff? You're growing operations and hopefully an increased salary for you as well. Yes Yes last question here, I'll answer very quickly the question was do you include include con language in your contract for addressing scope? Changes and scope increases. Yes absolutely in my contract in our contracts It very clearly states that you've agreed to the scope of work that you've signed up to on your proposal So customers signs a proposal scope of work and they sign a contract and then it does outline the change order process We also have a project delay Fee and process that is also outlined in the contract. So yeah, you need to make sure that the parts of your Process that you may get pushed back on from customers are clearly outlined in your contracts And that's a completely different Subject but all right. I think we're out of time. I will be available and around for the rest of the weekend So thank you all very much for attending