photo credit: urban_data

I haven’t written anything in a while. The time constraints of being a new dad and starting on a new business venture are insane, so I think I’ve avoided starting because I don’t have time to do the long posts that I’ve historically done on this blog. Here I’m taking a stab at a quick tip. Maybe this is the future of this blog.

I have a project that is taking a lot of mental energy right now. I can see the finish line, but everytime I’m distracted by something it takes me 20 minutes to mentally get back to where I was. So yesteday I moved every email that didn’t have to do with this project into a separate folder. Now my inbox only has the 10 or so emails related to this project.

Any new email that comes in automatically gets shoved into a separate folder. I’ll deal with all those when I get through with this project, but I MUST be able to focus on it without distractions for the time being.

photo credit: Extra Ketchup

Until just recently, I had gotten into the bad habit of using my inbox as the storage location for customer change requests. Until I completed all the items mentioned in an email from a client, I just left it in my inbox. (It’s especially tempting when the email has an attachment that’s relevant to the change.)

Every time management guru I’ve ever heard of agrees this is bad. I ended up spending a ton of time rereading all of those emails throughout the day, even when I’m not ready to sit down and work on them.

A far better approach is to use a change request log. It makes it very easy to keep a lot of information organized. I also love being able to look at a complete list in one place of all the things that need to be done to get a site finished.

Tracking Client Change Requests

photo credit: fill3r

With most of my clients, I develop their site on my web server. We’ll go back and forth through all the iterations of changes there. When it’s complete, then I move it over to their production server. 95% of the time, this works fine. I recently came across a situation, though, where a client had their website hosted with a company that did not support MySQL (my database of choice). Since I had built a CMS for them, this was a problem.

Everything was eventually worked out, but it did require some emails and phone calls back and forth to get to a resolution. The process of moving the finished site from the development server to the production server normally takes just a few hours, but in this case it took more than a week.

In hindsight, I could have easily gotten the ball rolling on verifying that MySQL would be available at the beginning of the development process. Then these issues could have been taken care of at the same time the programming and design was happening. It just didn’t occur to me because how often do you run into a situation where a web host doesn’t have MySQL already implemented? For two years it had never been an issue, but in the past few weeks it has come up three times. Most large hosting companies provide packages with MySQL, but some of the local hosting providers here in Indianapolis don’t.

The solution to avoid this in the future is to make sure that I include in my original quote that the site will need to run on a server that has PHP and MySQL. I did this when I first started my business, but kind of got out of the habit because it just didn’t seem to be necessary. If I start applying that practice again consistently with every customer, that will get the conversation about hosting requirements started. My customers (and I) won’t have any unpleasant surprises when it comes time to go live with the site.

At the beginning of this year, I invested a lot of time in creating a web application that allowed people to keep track of the activity they were doing to build relationships with their network of business contacts. By giving numeric values to the various activities, the scorecard turns the process of tracking your activities into a kind of game. More importantly, it gives you a metric that makes it easier to set goals and evaluate your performance over time. Although I still think the scorecard is a truly valuable online tool, it really hasn’t taken off the way I had originally hoped. Here are some thoughts I have on the experience.

Not Filling a Perceived Need

Many people who engage in referral networking really need something like this. (Just ask the Referral Institute.) Unfortunately, they don’t necessarily want it. Using the scorecard requires ongoing data entry that some people are just going to find monotonous.

The Paper Version

Starting out I assumed the online version of the scorecard would be an upgrade over the paper version and the Excel spreadsheet version provided by the Referral Institute. Why? Because when you’re holding a hammer every problem looks like a nail. I’m a web developer, so naturally I assumed everyone would prefer a web tool.

Showpiece

My motivation for building the scorecard should have been to create a tool that solved a problem. My actual motivation was to create a tool that demonstrated what an awesome programmer I am.

Credibility of Free

A few of the people I asked to test early versions of the scorecard thought I should be charging something to use it. The scorecard right now is completely free to use. It’s possible that part of the reason I have struggled to establish a strong user base is that people assume the tool must not be valuable since it is free.

Conclusion

The scorecard is still up and running. There are a few people who use it right now… barely. There’s no reason right now to take it down. It uses almost no bandwidth and lives on a subdomain of this site. It can always serve as a reminder to me of these lessons. Besides, maybe in a year or two I’ll dust it off and take another stab at getting the message out there to the masses.

Should you be more like Dr. House? Yes, if you possibly can. Now I’m not trying to say that you should be spiteful, difficult, or adopt any of the other character flaws of this character. But if you did, would people still work with you? Are you so talented and capable of producing at such a high quality that people will work with you despite any reason they may have not to? Because there’s always some reason not to work with you.

Hopefully the reason isn’t that you’re a big jerk. But maybe you have a different set of technical skills then what they envisioned for the project. Maybe you won’t be available for three more weeks. Maybe you are perfectly capable but don’t have any experience with the type of work that client needs. Maybe you’re a part-time freelancer with a 9 to 5 job that can’t take calls or schedule meetings during regular business hours. Maybe you cost more than all of your competition.

Whatever the “downside” is to working with you, are you so brilliant that customers are willing to work with you anyway?

It seems I hear a lot of stories about workaholic entrepreneurs. They spend 80 hours a week working on their business, and the few hours left over each week goes to their friends and family. I’m the exact opposite. I think.

I spent 10 hours at the office yesterday, and it was a very strange feeling. Usually I spend closer to 6 hours at work, and then I do a few little items from home in the evening. When I found out this weekend how much I owe in taxes, though, I felt a lot of urgency to get into work and make things happen.

The funny thing is I’m not sure that I accomplished significantly more with the extra time. I must have wasted at least an hour over the course of the entire day thinking about how much longer I was spending at work. I wonder if 10-hour days are something that you have to do on a regular basis to get much out of them.

So how do you make sure you’re taking the right actions? The training company provides a scorecard that helps you keep track of your relationship-building actions each week. (The list of possible activities also serves as a reminder of all the things you could be doing.)

The paper version just didn’t do the trick for me, so I created an online version, completely free and open to anyone who wants to use it. People who have taken the training (offered here in Indianapolis by Crystal Synergies) stand to gain the most from this tool, but I believe anyone could benefit.

Savvy observers will also notice that while the system by default is set up to track the “official” activities that appear in the training course, you can add or remove activities as you see fit. That means if you want to use it to track exercise activities or how many hours you watch TV each day, the system will bend to your will.

In fact if you want a simple and easy to use system for tracking the hours you spend on each of your clients in your freelance work, just update the list of activities to the names of your clients.

You’ll bring me great happiness when I check my traffic logs next week if you take a peek at the Online Referral Scorecard sometime today.

Up until a few months ago, I always started from square one when I needed to create a quote for a client. I’d go through the requirements for the project and estimate how long each item would take. I’d estimate how much time I expected to spend communicating with the client based on what I had learned about them up to that point. In short I spent an awful lot of time trying to come up with a 100% accurate quote of what each project was going to cost me to create.

After I had been doing that for a while, it dawned on me that many of my projects were very similar. In fact I realized that a business designing web sites could be run a little like how I imagine a trophy making business is run. Customers select what shape of trophy they want from a menu of possible options. Then the trophy is engraved with custom text. The biggest part of your cost is for the trophy itself, and I’m guessing in most cases you don’t pay by the letter for the engraving. (I could of course be totally wrong about how the price is structured, but for the purposes of this analogy let’s pretend that I’m 100% right. UPDATE: Yes, it does appear that I am wrong, and engraving pricing is based on the number of letters used.)

I can offer customers a menu of general web site configurations. Option A is a vanilla site. Option B includes content management. Option C is a help desk portal for customers to submit support requests. While there is going to be minor variations in the specific requirements for of each individual help desk portal I create, the base amount of work involved is going to be the same.

So what does this mean in practical application? Far and away, the most common project I have is redesigning an existing site and adding a content management system. Since most of these sites take about the same amount of time to create, I can always estimate the same price. Let’s call it $100.

I may come across a client who wants to have an events calendar that isn’t covered by the basic CMS package. Let’s say I know that adding a calendar is worth about $25. I can quickly quote that project at $125. As I develop an idea of what various special features are worth, I build a list of prices.

Now you don’t need to show your customers this list (although that is one approach you could take). The purpose is just to allow you to quickly provide estimates. This saves you time that you could be spending on billable work.

I believe there is another benefit that may not be immediately obvious. Providing timely, consistent estimates projects the image to your potential customers that you have a very good understanding of the value of your work. Most of your clients won’t do a lot of price shopping for web development services, but it is still important that they feel good about the amount of money they are paying you. When it takes you a long time to come up with a price for a project, it can convey that you either a.) don’t really know what the price should be or b.) are trying to figure out how much you can get away with charging.

I often find that customers aren’t exactly sure what they want. If I explain design and layout concepts to them in words, they’ll often just nod and say that sounds fine without really understanding what they’re agreeing to. Now at this point I could go ahead and flesh out the entire site – after all they did agree to my plan. Even if they weren’t happy with the finished product, I could point out that it was exactly what I had described, and they had approved. Technically, I would be right. Of course, being right isn’t always the best business model.

When you are building a site, I hope that you don’t just dive into your IDE of choice and start throwing DIV tags around. That was how I worked when I first started out, but I quickly discovered the value of creating an image of how I wanted the site to look. I use Photoshop, but you can use MS Paint if that’s what works for you. The important element is that you come up with a visual objective for the site before you get bogged down in the code.

Aside: You may be thinking, What if I create a design and discover later that I don’t know enough HTML and CSS to make that design a reality? My first response is the only way your skills will improve is by creating designs that will force you to experiment and learn more about your craft. I realize that may be a little harsh, but you’ve got to hear it from somebody. Every few months I seem to come across a freelancer who is still using table-based layouts and inline styling because they are unwilling to learn about absolute positioning and style sheets. Their work looks 10 years out of date, is expensive to maintain, and will soon find them out of business. Don’t let that happen to you!

Once you’ve created a visual plan for the site, is it really any extra work to save it as a JPEG and let the customer have a look? No, you’re potentially saving yourself a lot of work. When the customer tells you that a few items needs to be moved around, it’s still early enough to make those changes without any major headaches.

Are you worried that the customer is going to want changes that mean a lot more work? Explain that you can definitely do those changes, but it is outside the original scope of work. You are perfectly willing to do that work, but it will cost ‘x’ additional dollars. Pick a value for ‘x’ that’s fair. If the customer really wants the time consuming changes, then you just increased your profitability.

It’s important to note that I am not talking about wireframes. A wire frame applies the same principle to the functionality and navigation of a site. Those have great value, but as a general rule of thumb freelancers are usually dealing with sites that are not so complex as to require very complicated wire frames. (If you are doing a complex site, by all means create a wire frame.) Your clients are more likely, though, to have opinions about the appearance of the site.

Let’s clarify this situation a little more. I’m not talking about brand new features that have never been discussed before. (“I just assumed we would have a password-protected customer portal.”) I’m talking about items that showed up in the original project specification, but both parties didn’t interpret them the same way. (i.e. Your customer thought blog subscriptions would be through e-mail, and you thought they would be through an RSS feed.) No one’s to blame. It was just a miscommunication.

The key to handling these situations gracefully is planning ahead. To start with you can reduce the number of times these situations come up by being as explicit with the project specification as you can. Even if you build the spec with your customer on the phone or in a face-to-face meeting, you should send a comprehensive written outline for them to okay before you start any work.

Even with that step, though, there’s still times when this is going to come up. So how does it get paid for?

Include in Hourly Rate

This is an easily implementable approach if you charge a flat fee for projects. When you determine the billing rate you’ll use to come up with the cost, a certain amount of that is overhead to pay for things like software and your network connection. So also build in a little extra that’s going to cover the costs of these post-project surprises.

Include in Time Estimate

Another approach for flat fee projects is to add a little extra to your time estimate. If all the aspects of the project are going to take 20 hours, make your project price based on 21 hours. Some clients may need less than an hour and some may need more. (If either you or your clients are uncomfortable with the idea that they may be paying for an hour that they don’t need, then you shouldn’t be doing a flat fee.)

Bill Separately

If you are already billing the development phase of the project hourly, you should bill any additional support the same way. The only times this can get tricky is if you did a flat fee for the project, and bill the client hourly for the support. The danger here is that from your client’s perspective you promised to deliver a web site that meets certain requirements for a certain price. It becomes clear down the road that the web site does not meet those requirements (again, from the client’s perspective), and now you are charging more money.