Everyone of my clients is "rich" 2

[SteelPE]

In the past week I have been asked to look at some projects from some of my clients. Some of the projects just don't make any sense and when I point this out to my client, they come to me with some form or another on how rich the end client is. It's either take a look at his mansion here..... or the guy owns 400 rental properties bla bla bla. Then I get the "this project is going to go forward and we need to begin doing this leg work". Then when I balk a bit they say "What, you don't want to do the work?".

Why is everyone so fascinated with this aspect?

Oh, and at least one of the projects has already been cancelled because it just didn't make any sense.

 

[SteelPE]

Gross, I would not want that in my home.

On the part about doing work for repeat good clients. In a round about way I have had my clients take my information and then award the engineering to another company before.
This was a client who I have worked with for 10+ years. So I try to avoid this where ever possible.

 

[btrueblood]

Why does that cow have two front ends?

 

[MacGyverS2000]

Eats more to get fat more quickly... and none of the nasty pies to worry about.

Dan - Owner

http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

 

[beej67]

Three competing forces at play here:

(1) the closer you get to the money, the more money you make,
(2) free work is marketing, and marketing only returns on the investment when you land the work you're fishing for,
(3) Opportunity cost.

If you're setting aside paying work to do non-paying work on the hope that the non-paying work pans out, you're doing it wrong. If you don't have paying work to do, then you should be marketing, and spending your time on whatever activity that's most likely to land you more paying work. If that marketing activity turns out to be pro bono work to land a future paying job, so be it. But don't complain about it. Just admit to yourself that it's marketing, and be glad you're not filling the same time doing cold calls or passing out business cards to strangers, because those activities are infinitely less pleasurable than actually doing work. At least for me, anyway.




Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[glass99]

beej: you are basically correct in your assessment of free concept design as marketing. The hazard of course is that they take your free work and run away with it. At what point do you cut clients off? How do you convert your free work into a job? Its easy to get taken advantage of by under resourced or unethical clients in situations like this.

In such situations I limit myself to a couple of meetings/long phone calls and provide only nicely drawn but not detailed sketches. I think its key in such situations to hold back critical information about how to make the job work, and make it clear that they will need to hire you to have you spill the beans. I think after a certain amount of this kind of work you should simply ask to send them a proposal.

 

[IRstuff]

For a single person firm, a serial work/marketing cycle might be OK, but only if the market is hot. IF the market is cold, that sort of cycle would tend to lead to large gaps in the workflow, since it might take a while to line up a new job. Steady workflow typically requires some overlap of work and marketing.

TTFN
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