RECAP | B-Side: Taking Care of Business

Karl Sakas led AIGA Raleigh’s fourth B-Side course, Taking Care of Business: Procedures, Paperwork & Project Management, on Wednesday June 15. His presentation provided a thorough overview of procedures and tips for managing paperwork, clients and contracts. He started and ended the session with his number one piece of advice: Be Intentional, Not Reactive. 

If you missed Karl’s session, read our recap below!

---

Begin with the ending in mind

“Ask yourself: What type of business do you want?”

First, determine how you want your business to grow. This goal will determine your business model.

• High growth: You are interesting in growing your business as fast as possible
  • Sell business in 3-10 years
  • Growth is more important than work-life balance
  • Grow 30-100% a year
  • Hire a team
  • Full-time job
• Lifestyle: You want to be part-time or full-time freelancer. Interesting in quality of life.
  • Quality of life comes before growth
  • Not planning to sell
  • Priority is to reduce stress
  • Part-time or full-time

---

Pricing

“Because clients can’t always see what you’re doing, clients have the tendency to undervalue design.”

Three pricing models: Most designers start with an hourly rate and move towards value-based pricing as they become more experienced.

• Hourly: aka Time and Materials
  • Easy to estimate
  • Penalizes efficiency and expertise

• Milestone: aka Fixed Bid
  • Rewards efficiency
  • Harder to price and enforce

• Value-Based: aka Performance
  • Rewards results
  • Can be hard to sell and measure

Creating estimates

• Start by value anchoring: Ask client about the potential business impact of your design.
  • Ask about competitors and business goals to help with pricing
• Sum the line items: Add 20-35% for project management and client communication.
  • Time/cost for each task
  • Don’t forget to count emails, meetings etc.
  • Include revisions
• Give clients 2-3 options
  • Multiple options show client your pricing is fair
  • Provides a cost-benefit analysis for client
  • Present basic, advanced, deluxe versions
• Cut scope, not rate

Contracts

• Hire a lawyer for template feedback: helpful when issues arise or if you’re sued

• Important parts of a contract to note: Venue, IP transfer, “Work for Hire”
  • Venue: noted in contract where law applies. Important for remote work. 
  • Intellectual Property transfer: client does not own what you made until they paid in full
  • Work for hire clause: relinquishing any claim of copyright to your work.
    • Need to get paid A LOT for it to be worth it
• It’s important to write a contract for every project, especially for friends and family.
• Contracts are about the process and the result. They are always worth writing. 

 

---

Terms and Conditions

Terms and conditions are items to include in your contract with the client. They provide solutions for coming issues surrounding design work and client relationships.

• Require payment on your delivery of work, not happiness of client.
  • Your money is due when you send the deliverable, not when they are happy with it.
  • You can control meeting deadlines, but not their emotions or opinions.
  • Add incorporating feedback into next step and payment cycle.
• Try Net 15, not “due on receipt”
  • Add “Payment due in 15 days” to invoices.
  • Karl recommends taking credit cards for security of getting paid immediately.
• Include a clause in your contract that states all work is paused until past due payments are made. 
• Not sure what else to add? Think: What tends to go wrong?
  • To help guide additional T&Cs
  • Ex. Long delays on feedback. Require a time limit to provide feedback on designs.

 

---

Put it in writing

• Karl stressed the power of email recaps when working with clients.
  • Use email to recap meetings and phone calls
  • These emails act as mini-contracts and help create a paper trail for agreements
• Change orders: updates to the scope of projects
  • Email confirmations work for these agreements
• Create a statement of work for each client
  • Outlines scope, deliverables and timeline for project
• Include a list of sales exclusions in your statement of work.
  • Things you previously discussed with the client that didn’t make it into final scope
  • This will eliminate any confusion about deliverables later on.

---

Client Onboarding

“We train our clients to be our clients.”

• Client experience
  • Warmth and competence
    • Finding a balance
    • Minimize client surprises
  • Deliverables and emotions
    • Finding a balance
  • Help clients “manage up”

• Boundaries
  • Using policies
  • Setting and enforcing boundaries
    • Ex. Work hours. Don’t accept calls or emails after hours
  • Scope management. Avoid scope creep. 

• Logistics
  • Provide checklists
  • Schedule kickoffs
  • Maintain communications with client
  • Set up expectations for billing

The iron triangle of project management: Budget, timeline, scope. Changing one variable impacts the others. 

---

 

Client Questionnaires

“The questions you are before a project starts demonstrates to your clients that you know what you’re doing.” 

Pre-Kickoff Survey Sample Questions

• How do you define success at launch? After?
  • Make sure there are not competing definitions of sucess
• How many hours/week can you dedicate?
• Prior experience with designers?
• Do you have an existing approval workflow?
• Do you prefer phone, email, or in-person?

---

 

Creative Brief

It’s a good idea to include a creative brief to outline the goals and expectations for every project. Here are some items to include in the brief:

• Background
• Objective
• Target Audience
• Key point to convey
• Deliverables?
• Why audience should act
• Schedule and other constraints

---

 

Change Orders

Change orders are necessary when the client decides they want something that’s not in scope. Karl share his 7 magic words to kill scope creep: “Would you like an estimate for that?”

• Strategically free is ok: “This isn’t included but since you’re long-time client…”
• Secretly free is not good.

---

 

Additional resources from Karl:

About the Author: Chelsea Brown is a UX/UI Designer on the marketing team at Republic Wireless with a focus in editorial content. She looks at each project as an opportunity to tell a story and enhance the reader’s experience through design. On her days off, she enjoys running, Jane Austen novels and day trips to the beach.

Twitter  |  Instagram  |  Linked In  |  Website  |  Dribbble  |  Medium