Fell through, didnt want to pay full price

This is typical in freelancing/consulting. I’ve lost count how many times this happened to me in my career. A lot of front end meetings and time spent on proposals only to have nothing come of it when real money has to be paid out.

They all want the designs to be super innovative but don’t want to pay a reasonable fee and want it due in a near impossible deadline. A plumber gets more respect yet isn’t in a position to invent something that’ll make millions for the client. Funny huh?

I now screen potential clients carefully beforehand and don’t go through the trouble of even writing up a proposal until I feel pretty confident they are legit and have the money. If I think they are clowns I even ask for some money to meet me for the initial meeting. Otherwise you can easily waste a week on emails, phone calls, meetings, and a proposal and then get zero out of all the back and forth. It’s a huge amount of time wasted.

I recently told a client I’m going hourly rate instead of fixed fee because he’s still vague about the brief and specs. That’s when the communications suddenly stopped. This guy has been contacting me on and off for over a year talking about a project. Now that I ask for a deposit to start work and mention an hourly rate, he totally disappears. So am I to think he expected this for free. He kept saying “this is what you guys love to do.” Well Michael Jordan loved playing basketball but it doesn’t mean you don’t pay him when he’s going to pull in millions for your franchise.

Funny how people disappear when money is mentioned…the thing is they want to make zillions off your work yet don’t want to pay you anything to get there. I say go make a better mousetrap for a competitor who will pay or for yourself because they don’t deserve to reap the fruits of your talent.

You see they weren’t even honorable people and once they figured out they can’t totally use and abuse you they didn’t even bother wasting another second to tell you they no longer want to do the project. Scum.

Another ploy I see is the false friend ploy when they try to act like or use the word “friend” when discussing a project. OR when they say :trust me". These kinds of words used in business discussions with people you hardly know is code for “do it for free” to help them out. Saying we have “a lot of other projects in the pipeline” is another one I hear all the time to make you think you are getting a ton of work if you do this first one cheap. It’s dangling a carrot in front of you when chances are they’ll drop you like a rock after they get what they need. It’s a cut throat world, just keep your eyes wide open and protect yourself from wild goose chases!

money talks, bullsh!t walks. Talk is cheap. Its hard not to get excited anytime there is the possibilty of a new project, but alot of people just like to talk big. It happens to everyone.

Yeah, don’t get too discouraged. It happens all the time. I felt like I was looking into a mirror reading mpdesigner’s last post…
He’s right though, the more you do this type of work the better you are at spotting the flops. It’s all about experience and picking out cues for concern. I’m most certainly still learning. This is one thing they absolutely don’t teach you in school and was tough for me to understand at first. When I first started to freelance I would take anything I could find, now I’m more selective and it helps everyone involved.

Sorry to hear you had a poor experience. Chalk it up as a learning trial.

-J

I know we are all passionate about design but we need to be non-passionate in business. I don’t mean to not be congenial when talking to clients. I mean we have to look at business in a relative cold manner, like our clients. Don’t do any work to show your commitment. Wait for the contract to be signed. A plumber doesn’t start fixing your pipes before you have agreed to the price. A lawyer doesn’t work on your case before you have signed a contract/proposal. Why should we be any different. Our over exuberance is our biggest asset during a project but our biggest liability in business. I know we don’t think of our work as “just a job” but in the business negotiation we need to treat it as “just a job”.

As a person in charge of business development for a design consulting firm:

  1. Nothing starts until the contract is signed.
  2. I don’t reduce rates, I reduce project scope.
  3. I don’t count on getting every job and I don’t plan on our company getting every job.

Please help make this a real profession and treat it like business.

+1 tim.
+1 mpdesigner re upfront fees

I think upfront fees are a great screen. It is perfectly reasonable to offer a free initial consultation for the purpose of assessing the client (getting a feel for their credibility) and to get a general feel for project scope. From there, though, I think it’s fair to say “while we assess the project scope, milestones, and development process, we charge a fee of $X/hr.” I think if you are doing a decent job consulting, you’ll spend 5-10% of the project budget up front, asking questions, framing the project, etc. This results in a document that is transferable (design brief or project roadmap) and creates value for the client by making sure stakeholder expectations are fully aligned, their internal evalution processes are understood and anticipated, and what is in scope is not ambiguous.

That said, when you encounter a new client, do the legwork. Use linkedin, yahoo finance, the company’s annual report, industry publications, etc, to prepare yourself and make sure you are having the right conversation with them (and to make sure you understand their financial picture). And if their email address ends in @hotmail/aol/gmail/etc.com, take a pass.

Great advice so far (not that I am in a position to use it currently, but who knows about the future), but I want to clarify what you said, bcpid. You say “I think it’s fair,” but has this worked out for you? Can we interpret that as “I think it’s fair and my clients have agreed?” I think you’re right about doing a really thorough project scoping adding value, but when a potential client is soliciting multiple bids for a project, how do you make that work? How do you convince the client, especially a corporation where getting permission for a second PO can be a pain, to spend money on you essentially before they’ve selected you? I do think deposits, on the other hand, seem like a great and feasible practice.

Just happened to me, so I feel for you. I was really ‘strung along’ this time. I did a small range and they paid my rate, but when it came down to it they didn’t want to pay my rate to develop a large range. They wanted like 50% of my rate for something that was gonna mean me working weekends for a month to meet the deadline.

I do have quite a good radar for this kind of thing but it didn’t work this time.

If I’ve learned anything in 9 years of freelance it’s that people can still come along and behave in a way that they catch you out.

Yes it’s frustrating. But one thing I’ve learnt is to never ever count your chickens before they are hatched. Until you’ve got that signed contract and deposit paid then it 'aint happening!

Great advice so far (not that I am in a position to use it currently, but who knows about the future), but I want to clarify what you said, bcpid. You say “I think it’s fair,” but has this worked out for you? Can we interpret that as “I think it’s fair and my clients have agreed?” I think you’re right about doing a really thorough project scoping adding value, but when a potential client is soliciting multiple bids for a project, how do you make that work? How do you convince the client, especially a corporation where getting permission for a second PO can be a pain, to spend money on you essentially before they’ve selected you? I do think deposits, on the other hand, seem like a great and feasible practice.

It’s client by client - some go for it and some don’t but the way they don’t provides a lot of insight into just how painful the client relationship will be. It sounds obvious, but the people that object to entering a business relationship from the start are people you should not work for as they subscribe to the starving bohemian model of design services and they are generally morons. Also, the bigger the project, the better your odds and the more it makes sense. Don’t try it on a $10,000 job. Probably not worth the effort.

RFQ’s are trickier - in a lot of those situations the client is looking more for a vendor than a consultant, or at least that is what I have experienced. Since the vendors are relatively interchangeable, it makes sense to solicit a number of them. The more consultanty the relationship is the better your odds.

To sell it, you need to think of it in terms of a deliverable and how that deliverable benefits the client - or different kinds of clients. As a consultant, the best thing you can do is ask a lot of questions - be thorough and don’t make assumptions. This is essentially what you will be doing, to the following ends: 1) establishing stakeholder consensus - many organizations are fraught with internal political battles. Engineering versus marketing, project leader versus technician, sales versus the corporate mission, team member versus team member. By talking to all these people, you will get a truer picture of what needs to happen not just for yourself, but for the client - true for any size organization. 2) Creating a much stronger project brief. Often, the project leader will create a brief that is not necessarily reflective of true project milestones and evaluations, and full of blind spots - especially true with inventors and startups. 3) Creating a project plan that any group can work to.

Oh yeah, up front fees are a must. Especially with company’s asking for NET 60 to NET 120 these days.

Good call. Short term credit is a major issue - net 30 is almost gone.