As someone who has been working in professional services for six years, and most recently running my own agency, I thought I would start to document some things I wish I knew when I got started. Here are a few top ones. I will be writing a new article once a week, so If I missed anything, let me know.
Specialize your offering.
Whether its WordPress, design, application development or others, it’s always better to specialize your offering to a single piece of technology.
The reason this is so important when starting out is that like everything in business, a process needs to be built out. Henry Ford didn’t just throw out a bunch of car types depending on what customers wanted, he focused on one and perfected his process.
Think of how inefficient Ford would have been if he had 20 car types to start out with. Certain parts could only be used for one car type, and some employees would only know how to work on certain cars. That would leave employees and parts unused, and not producing cars…
With professional services in technology, focusing on one offering means you can build a successful process that can be replicated across all your clients. By investing in technology that will be used in all your project, you spreading out the cost. Similarly, if you need any subcontractors to start, they can be used for all your projects, not just a few.
Finding new employees and sub contractors is a time intensive process, so its better to specialize and find employees that can be successful on all your projects.
Plus, with a single offering, you will product better work. Learning from mistakes is critical, so with each project in your core competency, you will be getting better.
Know when to turn down work.
This one really hurts. Turning down money goes against everything you are taught, and takes tremendous discipline. Yet, trust me, it’s often the right move.
I have learned this the hard way. For me, I like to focus on e-commerce stores, usually using woo-commerce, my favorite platform. The platform is highly customizable, yet simple enough to get a store running in only a few minutes.
At one point, I was approached about making complex updates to an e-commerce store using Magento. Now, I knew about Magento but really had no experience with it. Taking it a step further, it wasn’t a new project, meaning I had to update someone else’s potentially horrible code. Yet, I was offered a good amount of money, so who am I to turn it down!
Soon after jumping in, I realized I needed to hire a dedicated Magento developer. I had too many other projects to get to to learn a new technology. On top of that, I had to ask questions with the old developer who clearly had no interest in helping out on the website anymore.
The outcome of this project was that took maybe 5 times longer then my average project. Lot’s of that time was spent learning Magento, and hiring/managing my new Magento developer. This was not efficient at all! I new had gone from 0 to 1 on my Magento process, but I never had another project with this stack.
The key takeaway is that with any new project, you need to have a heart to heart with yourself and ask “With my limited resources, is investing the time to build a process here really worth it?” If It’s a one-off project, my answer is most likely ‘No’.
You can knock out more projects in your core domain anyways…
Be consistent about your price and hours.
This is a problem I initially had. I would give my clients discounts or drop hours because I felt guilty about charging a high amount for my services. Short response to my former self, ‘DON’T DO THIS!’.
You are in the freelance and professional services business to make money, not make friends. You can do pro-bono work, but that’s separate. Value your self, and the work you do.
One reason I think people have this problem, is they fear upsetting the client and having them leave. In my experience, as long as you are consistent with your work, they aren’t going anywhere. As much as you think the client can find a new freelancer/organization, it’s not that easy. They have invested time/money into you, and finding a new freelancer is a time consuming process.
If you start giving the client free hours of work, or drop your hourly rate, your opening yourself up to be taken advantage of. Do not sell yourself short. You know how long something should take, so there is no reason to tell them you’ll do it for fewer.
Some clients aren’t worth the time.
If clients are consistently asking you why something took so long, that is a bad sign. If a client wants to know how you can complete a task for half the hours you proposed, that is a bad sign.
If red flags keep coming up, especially with a client fighting you on dollars, you can walk away. At a certain point the headache and small amount of money is not worth it. If you have a consistent process producing good work, you will start to get projects to where you don’t need to have bad clients.
I have gone as far as returning the clients money and walking away. Hopefully you haven’t invested that much time before having to do this. The best is feeling the client out, and making a decision before you begin the project. The earlier the better.
Charge for consulting.
Quick Story… I had a client on a WordPress site that was ALWAYS asking me questions. ‘How does X work’, ‘what strategy do you recommend’, ‘how can we grow the company’. Emails, Phonecalls, drop-ins, it didn’t stop…
The questions he was asking were more strategy and big picture, and not necessarily anything to do with my WordPress website I was working on. Pre-project, I wanted to get the contract, so I answered the questions. Yet, they did not stop. At a certain point it went away from me giving a bit of advise, to me spending 2+ hours a day on helping out his business.
I had enough, I needed to charge him for consulting. I usually break my projects into milestones, so I used the next milestone to add in a consulting fee. Given that I didn’t have this in my offering initially, I started with only $30 an hour for this. While my client fought with me over it, I simply stated that my time is valuable and I need to be compensated accordingly.
I now include consulting fees in all my contracts, and so should you. Depending on the size of the project, I usually offer 2 or so hours of free consulting, outside of that, clients pay for it.
Be aware of your time, if your giving away part of your day for now monetary return, consider charging a consulting fee. If the client values your opinion, they will surely pay.
As a side note, if the client wants advise on something, you can write a blog post about it and direct them to the article. That way, they get informed, and you get some value for yourself.