[thelist] Creating Clients

[Paola Kathuria]

Gord Grisenthwaite wrote:
> I offered a few clients a similar deal a few years back. I think it's a
> viable concept, so viable that I am building a new business plan around it.

Hmm, perhaps it works for small sites priced at hundreds or low
thousands of dollars/pounds that take days or weeks but I can't
see the model working for medium or large sites.

My attitude is: never gamble next month's pay cheque(check).  And a
statement given by a marketing professional still echoes: know what
you're worth.  My experience is that if you *start* a project in a
weak position, even if self-inflicted, you undermine your credibility
and make it harder to charge sensibly later on.

The closest I come to this is the work I've done/do for free for
charities and a small site in trade for services.  The benefits
are that I have a degree of control over the general design that
I would never normally get and I can use the materials generated
in the projects to promote my services.

However, they have been amongst the most-hassled projects, mostly
because there seem to be no deadlines or time pressure on sites that
I don't charge for.  The charity site I am involved in now started
June 2000 and we're still only part-way through the graphical design
- it's been 3 months since the last progress on the design.  I think
it's true that people see little value in a product that they aren't
paying for (when their competitors are paying for it).

The sites I work on tend to take at least 3 months.  I have
experiemented with offering two prices - one fixed cost (which
includes a contingency), invoicing at deliverables and the another
pro rata (invoicing fortnightly against timesheets).  The
fixed-price quote includes a percentage contingency (based on how
the people come across in my initial meets but is around 20%).
The point of the choice is that, whichever they choose, I reduce
my risk of losing out financially due to subsequent changes
in the requirements (which are inevitable and a natural part of
development).

In the project I tried this with, they went with the lower pro rata
option - due to changes in the site that they instigated, the final
cost came to the original fixed price quote with contingency...


Paola, who's finally fixed her PC's date/time *blush*