Managing client relationships as a freelancer and agency

This transcript has not been edited — please listen to the podcast to confirm any statements made by speakers. 

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Brian Shields, CEO & Co-Founder of Sprinter: 

Hey everybody, welcome to the future at work Podcast. I'm Brian shields. I'm here with my partner Alex Ford. Carter. Hey, Alex, we're gonna talk Hey,

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Alex Ford-Carther, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder of Sprinter:

what's up, Brian? Welcome everybody to the show today in today's episode, we're going to be jumping into managing client relationships, both as a freelancer and as an agency owner. All right. So yeah, you know, we've had our agencies since what 2015? So I think this is a good topic that we can really dive into just kind of generally speaking, like, what are some some of your ideas on client? Management?

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Shields:

Yeah, well, I think right off the bat, you know, as soon as you kind of figure out, you know, what the client needs are, before you're even getting to the point of a contract, you need to kind of like, take that consultative sales approach, and really kind of like, suss out what the problems are that they're looking to solve, whether it's building a new product, or kind of like optimizing a existing procedure. And then what it comes down to is really kind of like drilling into, like, what's the actual scope of work. So I think that everyone knows, especially the Freelancers out there like that scope, creep can like really come and bite back at you. So you want to make sure that you're communicating the boundaries of the engagement, whether you're doing like a time and materials billing, or if you're just doing like a deliverable based contract, you need to make sure that you're communicating how long things are going to take, you need to make sure that you're not, you know, over promising and under delivering as the as a service provider, we also need to make sure that you don't allow, you know, the maybe the client's enthusiasm for the project, to kind of like allow them to kind of like, run away with a scope.

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Ford-Carther:

Ya know, from this aspect, like, setting, setting the project up early for success is definitely key. You can even go as far as setting it in your contracts and making sure that, you know, the client understands, you know, scope and statement of work and deliverables and making sure that that's properly set up with within your engagements. You know, so, you know, what are some ways that we've done in the past? Like, what are some of the things that we've done? for setting up specific engagements?

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Shields:

Yeah, I mean, like, we've, you know, over the years, we've kind of worked with every engagement model you can imagine. So I think that like, what we've done most successfully is having a few clear set deliverables, and then having some of the longer term engagements beside it kind of like a time materials basis, where they can determine what the resources are for their team, and figure out how long they're going to need to engage that team then figure out what they can accomplish in terms of like the overall like roadmap for their product and for their company. And I do think that one of the biggest things is making sure that you know how to handle like a change request, right? Because I think every every product roadmap will eventually have something come up that will change something in the roadmap. And that's like, why agile wins over waterfall, right? So it's about how do you make sure that when something comes up, or when something changes, or a pivot needs to happen, that you're able to roll with it and not have the entire roadmap collapse? Right? So it's, you know, how can you handle a change request to a fixed scope and make sure that you're able to do that in a way that's clearly defined in terms of time and budget for both the client sake and for the service provider.

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Ford-Carther:    

One thing that I think is hugely important is being able to properly estimate the time that it takes to complete specific work, whether it's, you know, doing a website, you know, breaking it down task, by task, on an hour by hour basis, will really help, you know, understand the full scope of things. And as clients say, Oh, well, I want to change this image. And, you know, I really liked this design when they come back and give you a change request, being able to make sure you can articulate, well, that's going to take four hours. And what we had scoped originally is going to take two hours. So do you want to swap that? And if so, then that's going to change your budget and potentially change the delivery date and the timeline of the specific project. So making sure that you can accurately estimate the time it takes to complete specific tasks within within a project is really going to help you align more closely with the client as change requests happen.

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Shields:  

And then maybe we could talk a little bit about, you know, when you're working, you know, maybe as a freelancer, maybe you're starting out kind of earlier in your career, like you're launching your agency and you're working with your legal counsel to kind of draft your documents like how do you make sure when you get to the scope of work, when you've got like your actual agreement with the contract with a client you're putting, putting putting the specifics for their project in? How do you kind of work with the client to make sure that you can clearly define kind of like the features, requirements and tasks of kind of what they're asking for?

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Ford-Carther:    

I mean, typically, we go through like a full discovery session. Every agency will do that a little bit differently. But we've We've tried a few, you know, ways to do it. But ultimately, we kind of will just do discovery first and usually build that as its own little separate standalone budget item. And then as you go through discovery, you know, typically clients will come with their wish list and you go kind of one by one and go through, you know, the specific requirements and build that out into more detailed documents. So the client could say, oh, I want a website with a slider on it. And then through discovery, you go step by step, okay, well, does this slider have images? Or is it sliding text, and then if it's sliding text, you know, or how many carousel items you want to in that particular slider, and does that slider then link out to anything like so then you really get into the nitty gritty details. And, you know, a client saying, oh, I want a slider on my website that, based on his very specifics, that slider could be a two hour window that it takes to build or, you know, 10 hour, because you might have videos, and you got to create the videos and optimize the videos, and you have images and optimize images. So there's a lot that goes into just having a slider on your website. And that's just one example. But as you can imagine, diving a lot deeper. Like, if you're talking about software development, or just, you know, really heavy duty, web development or engineering, like you can really get into some great variables between what the client expectation might be, and specifically, like, how long it might take for that particular project to be executed.

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Shields:  

Yeah, I think one of the things that we've learned over the years working with, you know, businesses from you know, like, you know, mom and pops and startups to, you know, like, fortune 500 companies, that is the idea of, not necessarily, but like, I guess the client bit, depending on their sophistication, terms of building software products, like they don't necessarily know what like a proper scope looks like, right. So if some people are coming in with a cocktail napkin, some people are coming in with like, you know, 25 Page bullet pointed, you know, like, you know, triple underlined, you know, you know, full scope that they've already worked through what, you know, maybe with a third party consultant or something like that, I think that one of the more difficult things for people to figure out how to do specifically is how to value the creative, specifically, you know, when you're working with design, and when you're working with video, specifically, I think it's difficult for people to figure out how to build for that, and like what that looks like. And so in terms of kind of, you know, taking the idea from like, concepts to like, you know, fully through, you know, a storyboarding and an animation or, you know, process or something like that, making sure that the clients can understand, like, how much time goes into that, and how many different people might be touching that project, is something that a lot of times people may be having these needs as a business owner, but they haven't actually had to, you know, end up producing video content before, you know, or something like that, or, you know, working with designers on, you know, creative campaigns, as opposed to, you know, just product design.

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Ford-Carther:   

Yeah, that's a good point, I think. Yeah, if you could, you know, if you're an agency, or if you're like a freelancer, being able to have some sort of documentation about your process, and like, you know, if you're a web designer, you go through wireframes. And then, you know, start with mood boarding, and then wireframes, and then low fidelity, imagery, and then high fidelity. And then like, you know, how many rounds of revision Are you going through, so like, articulating your process, and everyone's process typically is fairly standard, depending on you know, what type of creative you're creating. But going through that process, being able to quickly, easily articulate that to the client early on, I think is definitely, you know, part of, you know, putting in that work early to set, set that foundation, and then making sure that as the client relationship grows, like you can continue to continue to articulate that process. And make sure that there's still alignment within, within the client and your relationship. Because, you know, ultimately, they got to win, they may have one idea of how many hours something takes, but like, like you said, they've probably never done done it. And that's why they're hiring you. And so you've got to be able to, you know, not only for their sake, but for your sake, and not feel like you're getting cheated on the amount of hours that it's taking you to actually do the work. And, you know, as you grow in your career, as you build your agency, some of those processes will, you know, the timelines will get more refined, you'll get better at it. Something that might take you, you know, six hours early on in your career, like maybe now it takes you four or maybe you've created libraries of tools that allow you to expedite that. That process more quickly, but all Ultimately, they're still paying for your knowledge and understanding of what goes into that. So make sure that you can articulate that and how long it's going to take set those boundaries, set that timeframe. And then, you know, if it changes, that's okay. But you know, just being able to communicate that to the client as things go on.

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Shields:  

Yeah. And you also want to make sure you know that you're engaging with all the correct stakeholders at the client level. And you want to make sure that as their business grows, and you know, their business needs change, you're able to adapt with them. So you might have a, you know, a quarterly contract, you might have a six month or an annual agreement, but you want to make sure that as that business evolves, if it's like an early business, and it's growing, or if it's just a more established business that needs to change direction, you need to be able to kind of, you know, work directly with multiple stakeholders at the client level. And so I think one of the key things has always been transparency, and making sure that all of the different stakeholders are kind of on the same page with everything. So maybe we can talk a little bit about how the, you know, what we've done with sprinter has been able to kind of, you know, bring some transparency to the, to the process in terms of how like, the dashboards are integrated and everything like that.

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Ford-Carther:

Yeah. 100%. Before I jump into that, like, I'll give you a perfect example. Last week, I was on a call project we've been working on for quite some time. But just internally, they're shifting from like a b2c model more to like b2b. And so, you know, that shifts, the scope of the app that ships the scope changes the scope of their pitch, it changes the scope of their website looks like there's a lot of ripple effects that kind of go down as they evolve their business. And, you know, it's obviously for the better, I think, allow them to, to grow and scale their business, but then requirements changes, you're talking b2b, like, what kind of admin stuff are you going to need for potential business owners, as opposed to just, you know, one off customer, so like, as, as you evolve up in the agency, with the client, like, make sure you kind of reset and kind of go back to, you know, the structure and the process? And kind of keep going back to that and make sure that that that's still alive? To answer your question about sprinter? Yeah, no, we, we've thought about all this. And obviously, you can kind of tell like, we've made sure that our process is tight. And so taking what we've learned over the past, what, 5678 years, and even before that at our previous careers, and kind of dumping that into a software solution, and how we architected the system, you know, dashboards, timelines, you know, quick information about who's working on what allowing the stakeholders easy access into that, so they can then send that up to their, their direct reports, I think, you know, the transparency that you establish with a client initially, is going to kind of set that tone. And so with sprinter, like, we are really trying to help the agencies establish that transparency, and kind of build on the importance of that communication. So we've got, you know, direct chat built right into the platform, you can pull reports from a sprint by sprint basis, you can pull project reports. So everything we kind of built in there was really based on kind of the conversation that we're having today about, you know, client expectations, managing that scope, managing that process, and being able to provide both agency and client the information that they need to properly make scope changes, and do so in a seamless way. So if the client does decide, hey, I don't want this particular button or this particular feature, but I want this instead, you know, within our system, when you add new requirements, like you're alerted, of, okay, this is gonna put your budget out of whack. So maybe you should take this feature out, or you have to accept the new budget and accept that, hey, my initial budget was 100,000. And now it's gonna be 120. Like, I'm okay with that, because this is an important feature that as we continue to get market research that like this has to this has to be in the, in our product for us to be successful. Right?

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Shields:  

Well, and one of the things you were just talking about with, with one of the clients that we're working with, and how like their business model kind of changed to go, which is b2b, b2b, or b2c to b2b. And now they need to have more like admin level privileges. They need to have more stakeholder access, there's like an entire new user experience, like a new user interface to kind of architect we kind of dealt with that ourselves when we were building out the spectra platform. And we'd kind of initially built it for like the product managers and the consultants that are running, you know, teams that are providing, you know, small level solutions. Sure, small scale solutions. To, you know, their independent client base, and then we wanted to build it out for the people that are actually running larger agencies. And so like that we wanted that individual to be able to scale up to be able to have other people managing projects for them, and engagements for them with their clients, as they scaled their, you know, from an independent, you know, kind of individual, you know, you know, process to be able to scale that to an agency level.

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Ford-Carther:

Yeah, I mean, we really thought about, well, initially, like, we built sprinter for ourselves, right, like,

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Shields:   

a lot of our own problems away. Yeah. And then,

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Ford-Carther:  

you know, we, as we grew, we realized that, you know, a lot of as we kind of started talking to other other groups, like a lot of people had the same issues that we had. And so we don't have all the answers, but we feel like we built a solution for some of our problems. And if we could then let other people use that and in a way that they can eliminate some of their problems. And, and, you know, how, how we could scale and grow our business. And, you know, it was kind of a natural evolution, because we started working with a lot of agency partners. And can we talked about last episode, like going from in house teams to partners, and then, like, partner agencies, and then network model, like, as we kind of transitioned our model, like, once we started engaging other agencies and found new problems, like it was just a natural fit to kind of re architect some of the platform in a way that we knew we could kind of roll it out for other agencies and other other creatives to use the product in a way that, you know, we thought eliminated a lot of a lot of the friction. And I know, like, early on in my career when I was, you know, just building websites for one off folks. And, you know, I'm not the most communicative person, and I just want to build stuff, right, I just, like, Get out of my way, like, tell me what you want, I'll just build it for you. That's not really how everybody works. So like, if I had a tool like sprint early on, like, some of the admin stuff that actually has to happen in building and establishing good client relationships, it kind of automates that for me. So like the reporting, and like the feedback loops, and everything that kind of was, you know, not in my wheelhouse early on, and some of the mistakes that I made just as like a freelance, you know, web brand guy, right, like, we've kind of used that experience and built into the platform so that someone like myself, who, you know, are early on is just kind of getting started has a process in place, right out the gate, so they can not, so they can avoid some of that those misgivings if they're just kind of starting off in their own careers.

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Shields:

Yeah, well, like you said, I mean, like, at the beginning, it was like, Okay, we want to solve our own problems, right. And it was a lot about, like, automating back office agency operations, you know, so it was everything from chasing invoices to managing payroll, and managing your client contracts, and, and, and your buildings and everything like that. And so being able to architect all that into the platform, alongside all the file sharing, and chats, and you know, product management tools that you've already talked about, I think, like, it was really the idea of kind of, you know, like I said, automating the agency operations, so that, you know, the people who are in our position that we're running, these firms are able to kind of grow and scale their business with less friction and lower operating costs.

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Ford-Carther:

Yeah, so setting the foundation is important. That initial kind of engagement with a client, you know, obviously, sprinter, we've tried to make it really easy for folks. But the other tip that we have, that we want to kind of discuss today is like, what do you do when the client kind of goes off the rails to sort of say, or kind of gets out of scope? Like, talk tall? We got, we got plenty, plenty of stories. Yeah,

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Shields:

don't get in any specific details. But I do think that, you know, a lot of times, you know, people may have an appetite that's bigger than their stomach or a wishlist that's bigger than their wallet. You know, we've seen clients that have gotten in front of their skis gotten ahead of their skis a little bit in terms of their own operating budget. And that's typically the sign of a younger company, or a less experienced entrepreneur. You know, I think that a lot of times you get larger businesses that have, you know, kind of, like, use it or lose it corporate budgets that, you know, they may, you know, be spending a little bit more lavishly on things that are kind of like bells and whistles, and it's like distractions, and you're kind of like, this isn't actually something you need, it doesn't drive your business forward, but they don't care. It's something that they want. And you want to kind of keep them focused on like, what's going to help them build the product that's going to help them make money, right. And so I do think that it goes a little bit both ways, right? Sometimes it's, you know, they're wanting more than they can afford, or they're wanting things that aren't necessarily what the product architects would necessarily think are actually like the focus of the product itself. And so it's a lot about working with the client to figure out what's the business model, what's the product, right. It's like you always say it's like you can build The best piece of software in the world but it's like your those are those are your Nike shoes and they're in the box and they're on the shelf and now you got to still like run the business and sell the product and move the boxes of shoes. Right. And so I think it's a lot about making sure that you keep them on on target, and you don't let them get a little bit out of their own.

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