Make Money Online

This podcast is due soon. When? We have to finish it. When?

I think it’s the 22nd. I think it’s the day my new book comes out for pre-order. Where can people find that book? ValueBasedDesign. org. Excellent. Yeah. I’m recording. Are you recording? I’m always recording. Okay, great. No, I’m literally recording. Like, this is This is going into the episode. No, I did. Yes. Okay, great. God, we’re horrible with time management. We’re about to talk about project scheduling. I guess there’s like with big one-off design projects, I do this all the time where I just kind of like create a timeline and then I adhere to the timeline. and then everything ships on time. And I think there’s got to be a little bit of cat herding that happens with it. Like a lot of it is on the client to make sure that they show up to meetings and like meet deadlines and that you let them know with a lot of like drudge alarm dot gif things that they’re going over time or that they’re exceeding a boundary in some way. Like project scheduling, like the It’s nice to have a schedule, but like it only matters as much as you actually follow it. And if your client torches the schedule or you torch the schedule, God help you. Then there’s a problem. The goal is to make sure everybody is following the schedule. And I think that’s where the more crispy bits of this are, right? How do you set the expectations around it? It’s a lot of boundary setting, shocking no one who listens to this podcast. How do you Maintain and enforce those boundaries. How do you make sure that How do you recover?

Yeah, yeah. How do you, how do you, if everything truly goes to shit, like renegotiate a contract? Because for me, I can’t speak to what you do. But I have dates encoded in the statement of work, which means they’re contractually enforceable. It’s not just two weeks later this happens. I am very, very hard-assed about it. For two reasons. Number one, I’m busy and important, and you shouldn’t be wasting my time because I have another client coming after you. I always, the goal is to have another client coming after you. The other thing is more of a philosophical thing. And I think part of this is the fact that I’m in the line of work that I’m in. And it helps me actually get paid because designers have a problem with getting paid. And so I, in order to like book time on my calendar, I’m very high-end tattoo artist about you booking time on my calendar, which means you need to fucking pay me. Money needs to be in my bank account in order to guarantee a specific block of time. That is the prerequisite. It’s not the contract gets signed. It’s not the invoice goes out. If you net 30 my invoice, which you can’t because you agreed to a contract that says you can’t, but if you decide to do that, Then we have to completely renegotiate the contract. And the con what ends up happening in that situation usually, it’s very common. For people to sign an MSA and statement of work. The MSA govers all of my projects for five years, and the statement of work governs that particular project. What happens is they sign these two things. And then I send them an invoice because that’s the order it goes. And then they choose not to pay the invoice on time. It is always a choice. You can cut a check and overnight it if you have to. You can ACH pay like because it’s 2018 and overnight it. Or you can wire something to me because it’s 2018. If you choose not to pay me, what happens is if you are one day late with payment, the statement of work becomes invalid, which means I wait for your payment, then you pay me for a non-existent project because the statement of work became invalid. And now that I have your money, we renegotiate a statement of work. What does the statement of work contain, Kai?

The project fees. Mm-hmm. Will those project fees go up because you completely fucked yourself over on this? That is how I schedule projects because we’re professionals and you have the ability to wire me. Right.

And honestly, it’s a little bit of a brown MM, right? Like if you don’t have your company together enough such that you can actually move quickly I had a situation recently with um somebody who didn’t become a client who decided decided to send all of my contracts off to legal after giving me a verbal that they would sign them an hour and a half before draft closed for the holidays. And they were like, we’re going to have our lawyer work overnight to turn this around to you on Christmas Eve. And I’m like, this. For one, what on earth is happening? Oh my god, this is my actual hell. Number two, no. You don’t have to make your lawyer do that. Be nice to the lawyer. Just this. I appreciate your alacrity, but no. And for three. Most importantly, how does this reflect on you as a company that you have chosen to do this? Like, I look at that and I’m about to get in bed with you for a month, and I actually Go out that night. My partner took me out to Cocktails for our Christmas present. She’s wonderful. We’re having this conversation. He’s like. You must be so sad that you just lost that gigantic five-figure contract. I’m like, actually, no, I feel relieved that I didn’t get in bed with a client that would do that and think it’s okay. Like, I don’t feel sadness or anger or frustration or worry or anxiety about it. And And I think that was the moment where I kind of leveled up as a business owner because the lizard brain part of me would have gone into a panic mode thinking, again, this was a big project. And I was not counting on it, but excited, you know, like. And a little bummed, you know, that I was losing it. But the fact that I didn’t go into panic mode about it, I think, is fairly telling of where my mindset is at right now and how much it’s developed. In terms of business maturity, not like actual like social graces maturity, because I’m still six years old, but business maturity. I think that’s really where it’s at.

Yes. And, you know. I told them in the email that like we’ll pick this back up and this goes back to the project scheduling moment. I gave them a specific date that we can pick it back up, and that date is after I get back from Japan. Because I’m back in the office this week, but like this week I should be doubling down and putting all of my effort into making sure that my paying clients are okay post vacation and pre-next vacation. Because I’m insane and booked something for work days after. I come back from Christmas. So I need to make sure that everybody feels okay about this, right? And if I’m not doing that, then I’m not serving my clients who already paid me and didn’t send it off to legal on Christmas Eve Eve. Right? Like they’re, they’re the thing that you’re here for. They’re what my job is right now. You know, like, and you need to make sure that you’re planning for that and accounting for that. So that’s one long anecdote of taking that to some actionable advice for you, which is Establish clear boundaries and have good justifications for them. The justification for after I come back from Japan is: I don’t want to be negotiating with your legal department while I’m summoning Fushimi and Ahi in Kyoto. I don’t want to be doing that. And also, I’m 14 time zones away from you. And also, what are you thinking?

Establishing clear dates in the contract is so that you can’t just be like, well, we’ll push it out four weeks. Because if that happens and it’s just T plus one, then that gives them license to not pay you, license to fudge with the schedule, and you get this weird. what ends up happening is you don’t have a clear work schedule, right? You have this weird wave-based work schedule where all of the money comes in at once and all of a sudden you run haggard, and then you have nothing for six months and you’re watching cat videos on YouTube. And what you need is something approaching an actual job where you come in and do the practice every day. Because you’re good at estimating time. I don’t have to, I don’t. Actually, don’t think I have to tell you, listen to yourself about how long it takes you to do the design work. Because you know. I think you actually know if you’ve nailed down the scope of it and you have a sense of that. If you don’t have a sense of the scope of it, then you haven’t done enough discovery before the proposal. If you’re a developer and think about scope creep, then you need to build that into your contracts. And you know all of the but actually is in here. So you need to make them explicit in the contract with actual dates and times. I tell people the time that the contract is no longer valid because I don’t want to be negotiating your shit at 9 p. m. on a Friday night. I want to be out celebrating the fact that we just closed a deal. I care very deeply about getting new client work. And the goal is for everybody to seem like an adult. And if you come in As a consultant, acting like an adult and comporting yourself like an adult, other people will straighten up in the room and do the same. You have to demand that respect because nobody else is going to give it to you.