Growing Little Customers Into Big Customers
When it comes to keeping the bills paid, it can be very useful to have a few cash cow customers. These guys and gals always seem to have more work to send your way. In the best possible scenario, they’re even willing to delay projects a month or two if you don’t have the available time right now because they want you and only you to handle all of their web design needs.
If you’re in the very early stages of your career, this may sound like a pleasant but very distant fiction. I want to tell you it isn’t as far away as you think.
You may be wondering, then, where you find these utopian clients. You grow them. Let me paint you a picture.
Stuff and Such, Inc. is started by a couple who does yard sale consulting. They decide they need a web site and find a local designer. The site is clean and functional, helping the business rapidly grow. Stuff and Such expands their business to garage sales and estate auctions. Since the web site played an important role in their expansion, the business wants to invest more money there. The local designer is asked to add an online auction interface for buyers and sellers. New features and subsections of the site are regularly added, giving the designer a lot of ongoing work.
In this very simple (and realistic) scenario, you are the local designer. By the time Stuff and Such has grown enough to generate a lot of billable work, they’ve already found their designer. If that’s not you, then you’re out of luck. That’s why you want to build a relationship with customers before they start experiencing exponential growth.
What I left out of the simplified scenario above is that there was probably more than one designer involved. The first draft of the web site was done by the owners themselves or one of their relatives. A few months later, they realized it needed to be more professional, so they hired the first designer they found after 5 minutes of Googling. That relationship soured when they discovered that designer didn’t know how to design for multiple browsers. After a lot of trial and error they finally found their web guru, who knows all the answers (or at least knows how to find all the answers).
So how do you make sure that you are the web guru? The first key is to avoid making them feel like the work they are asking you to do today is insignificant. So what if it is only 15 minutes of work? I have yet to encounter someone who needed 15 minutes of work one day that didn’t later need another 15 minutes or an hour or a whole project. Think of that tiny sliver of billable work as a first date. The goal is to put your best foot forward and find out if the two of you are interested in working together more in the future. If you want to get married, you’ve got to go on a first date.
A highly practical piece of advice here is to respond promptly to phone calls and emails. I can’t think of many things that make a client feel disregarded more quickly than giving them the silent treatment. (A quick message saying that you’re researching the answer to their question with a rough idea of when you’ll get back to them is always better than avoiding contact until you can answer in full.)
Often the exact work that you need to do won’t be immediately clear. Hearing “something is broken on the home page,” from your customer is not uncommon, particularly if you’re cleaning up someone else’s work. Like a doctor, you may have to spend some time diagnosing the problem before you know what needs to be fixed. Maybe it’s 30 minutes, or maybe it’s a full day. Regardless, you should check with the client once you’ve identified the problem. Make sure they feel it is worth $200 (or whatever the exact price is) to have this problem fixed.
If it looks like the diagnosis is going to take a while, make it clear that you’ll charge your hourly rate for the time spent looking for the problem. If there is a limit on how much the customer is willing to spend, find out up front. If it looks like you’re going to hit that limit without finding the problem, let them know. Even if they don’t realize it, customers probably have an expectation in their mind of what they’re going to end up spending. If you tell them a number up front that is higher then they expected, it isn’t the end of the world. They’ll either adjust expectations and move forward, or you can shake hands and walk away with no hard feelings. The worst thing you can do is give them an invoice after the fact for more than they expected to spend. You will not receive any future business or positive word of mouth from them.
Since you’re trying to build a relationship, you may be tempted to give away a small trivial fix for free. Don’t. An important part of this business relationship is the understanding that your time has value. Treat everything about the transaction the same way you would for a large project. A few months down the road when more work comes your way, you’ve trained your customer on how to interact with you and what to expect. That familiarity is the whole benefit of working with a customer when they are small. Don’t muddy it by using a different process depending on the size of the project.
