We need to talk about how to get better clients
On the site, we like to laugh about these poor interactions:
-- Client: Hello, I asked one of my friends and he said that you built our site using Hotmail. Me: Excuse me! What do you mean? Client: You used Hotmail to build my site. Me: We can't do that, nobody can. Hotmail is owned by Microsoft and they offer free email accounts. It's not a development environment. Client: My friend is a computer expert and he is sure. Me: Is your friend next to you? Client: Yes Me: Can you put him through? Friend: You made my friend's site with Hotmail. Admit it. Me: Sir, we can't do that. What made you think it was created using Hotmail? Friend: All the pages in the site end with .html.
-- The fact is, working with second-rate clients and undercharging go hand in hand. Site contributors like this one are rarely trusted with creativity or rewarded with flexibility. They are treated like a commodity, not a service. Sometimes, they're not even treated like a person. I've asked Brennan Dunn to speak about how he got past this problem.
Brennan Dunn is an expert at dealing with this, and his story likely parallels yours. He was a technical expert, not a businessman. He had a full-time job, but he wanted to work for himself, on his own terms. He researched rates, set himself up at a reasonable-sounding $50 an hour, and, much to his disappointment, he found he had traded one boss for several.
So Brennan did more research, he built his business up, and he even picked up some of his own employees along the way. That $50 an hour was replace by a much more impressive $10,000-20,000 a week. He didn't specialize in a niche (which is what I usually prescribe for a modest rate increase), nor did he get substantially better at his craft. He got to the root of his issue and figured out how to present and position himself to clients, and he did it by figuring out just why people were hiring him in the first place.
There's no magic bullet or get rich quick scheme. There's trial and error, there's research, and most importantly, there's a lot of hard work. But! You don't need to stumble to success - you can benefit from Brennan's experience, learn from his mistakes before you make them yourself, and see what, exactly, lead to his accomplishments.
I've asked Brennan to host a live workshop for Clients From Hell readers so you can benefit from his success and avoid his mistakes. We'll discuss how he approaches clients, what his strategies are, and what techniques he uses to pull in the $100,000 a month necessary to keep his agency afloat.
When and where: The free workshop will go live on June 10th at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 6pm GMT. Can't make the event time? Not a problem - we'll be recording it for you. But you still have to register in order to receive a link to it.
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Keep a civil tongue.