Take a minute and answer this question...

“What do you do for your clients?”

You ready? If you answered something like “Build websites” you need to think harder. How you answer this question is your ‘value proposition’ and your value proposition is what differentiates you from your competitors.

The web design industry is still pretty fast and loose although some standards have emerged over the past few years. It’s a lot like woodworking. Any hack can drop a Craftsman tablesaw in their garage and call themselves a custom woodworker. Likewise, any two-bit geek can get a pirated copy of Dreamweaver and start cranking out diabolical code in minutes. So what separates you from this guy?

To compound matters, your customers often won’t know a good value proposition from no value proposition when they shop for a developer. They believe that they just need a website. So, the first guy that comes along claiming to be a web designer often gets the job, no questions asked.

What a value proposition is NOT.

Think of something you know nothing about. For me, that would be several things but I’ll settle on corporate accounting. This stuff makes my nose bleed it’s so dull and confusing. Let’s say I want to incorporate my business and I’m on the hunt for a good accountant. What are my needs and concerns? I want to avoid an IRS audit, I want to know what my cash flow is doing, I want someone who can continue to help me if my business expands and I don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about it. A quick glance through the Yellow Pages finds…

CPA #1: 20 years experience - taxes - bookkeeping - Quickbooks - answers

CPA #2: “Taking your business beyond the numbers.” (Huh?)

CPA #3: Over 30 years experience - tax & accounting services (Well no kidding.)

CPA #4: Small business tax & accounting solutions - over 25 years experience.

Do you see a pattern? What in the world makes me want to call one of these folks over another? I suppose I’ll call ALL of them and pick the one with the cheapest rates.

A quick glance at local web designers reveals a similar trend. Most firms talk about WHAT they do instead of how what they do makes a business successful in the competetive, global online marketplace. Talking about what you do, the mechanics, is easy. “Our firm specializes in dynamic, database driven sites that present a professional image of your company to the world. We employ only the latest web technologies including .NET, Flash, PHP, ASP, MySQL, Oracle, etc. etc. etc…….” Here’s a secret - your customers don’t care.

“OK, Jeff. Do you have a point?” Yes, I do. Please bear with me - it’s complicated.

What a value proposition SHOULD BE?

Imagine Les Schwab billboards showing you the process they use to change tires. Not very compelling is it? Instead, their value proposition is:

1. Location: chances are good there’s a Les Schwab tire center within 5 miles of your house.

2. Selection: they will get you any damn tire you need.

3. Peace of mind: Have a problem? Take your tires back and they’ll replace them for free, no questions asked.

Maybe you’ve had a bad experience with Les Schwab and you think I’m all washed up. Fine. Then think about the last time you had a really positive experience with a company and try to isolate what it is that made you feel so good about doing business with them. Some possibilities are…

1. You got a great product for less than you expected. The company exceeded your expectations.

2. You felt a great deal of trust when doing business with this company. They could relate to you and your needs like no one else.

3. You experienced simplicity at its finest. The company anticipated your needs, guided you toward the correct product and simplified the transaction.

How to create your value proposition.

This is where I begin to loose traction. Everyone’s business is a little different and probably requires a slightly different value proposition. I can say that your value proposition should be easy to remember and condensed to one (at most two) sentences. The latest version for my company is…

Notice that this is not a mission statement. You can have a mission statement if you wish but from what I’ve seen, most mission statements are fluff, hype, unattainable promises and very abstract. A value proposition goes beyond the mission statement in that it should permeate your entire business. Every thing you do – from your design, code, invoices, emails, client meetings, etc. – should in some way track back to your value proposition. In my next blog I’ll show you how I try to live out my value proposition in the day to day events of business.

If you have developed a value proposition for your company, post a comment. I would love to see what others are doing.

Thanks for reading.

Ok, I’m being a little dramatic I know. But I feel pretty strongly about this topic because I wrestled with it myself for years. A few not-so-subtle experiences ultimately formed my opinion on the matter.

I once had to hire an attorney to settle a dispute and I took keen interest in how she billed me (at $250.00 per hour). While in her office, she started a timer the moment I darkened her doorway and stopped it when my foot was past the threshold on the way out. Her invoices weren’t quite as exact - she rounded up to the nearest 1/4 hour and at $4.17 per MINUTE this adds up. No freebies here.

Sitting in my office one day it occurred to me that I was constantly swamped with work but always seemed way short on cash flow. In passing, I relayed this observation to a close friend, emphasizing that my workload was certainly the result of my obvious skill as a designer. “My clients love my work”, so my thinking went. My friend was almost too quick to point out that “Some people will love you just ’cause you’re cheap.” Ouch!

The pain of a heavy workload coupled with an inability to pay your bills is a quick receipe for throwing in the towel and flippin’ burgers for the rest of your life. So, back to our original premise - bill your clients for everything! Let’s explore this with some mind-games I used to play on myself (and my wife) back in the days of famine.

Clients expect to get free quotes.

This may or may not be true but it was a bedrock assumption I held. Shoot, everyone from Les Schwab to Home Depot gives free estimates or quotes. But large companies have two things going for them that most of us don’t: numbers and systematization. They have their estimation process down to a science - it’s fast and sometimes even accurate. And they have the customer base to justify 5 looser estimates for each one that makes some money.

Now, what about us? Well, I was spending approximately 3-4 hours on each free quote. That’s time to drive to the clients’ place of business, interview the client for one hour and then draft the quote. One-half day of no billable hours which is fine if you’re playing golf.

It got to the point where only about 1/3 of my free quotes returned as actual projects. The successful quotes averaged around $1,800.00. At the time I was billing out at $65.00 per hour which means that I was spending $520.00 to acquire an $1,800.00 project. Not a very good prognosis for success.

Lesson Learned: Bill for quotes, estimates and other administrative tasks. Most professionals do not give away their time in any capacity and your clients should know this already. If a potential client balks at paying for an estimate, they do not value your service or time. Direct them to your nearest competitor so they can go out of business instead of you.

If I do this one project cheap, the client promised more work down the road.

If I had a dollar for every time I heard this sad come on line. I’ve been approached with these offers no fewer than 10 times in the past five years. The come on generally goes something like this… “I’ve got this market smashing idea - but I don’t have any funding just yet. Do this job cheap and I PROMISE you’ll get all the work you can handle.” Or, the more seductive…”I’ve seen your work and I LIKE IT! I’ve got (insert some number here) potential clients just waiting for your design expertise. I just need to know you and I will work well together before I commit to paying a lot of money. I’m sure you understand.”

Both of these positions are insulting to any honest person - or they should be. But maybe you’re trying to build your portfolio and you need a new client. Or, you’re trying to push your skill set beyond Front Page. Or, you’re just going through a dry spell and any work is beginning to look enticing. Having, at one time or another, faced all of these scenarios I can still say with vigor, RUN don’t walk to the nearest door, fire escape, window, whatever to get away from a offers like these. Folks who propose these offers are on the prowl for the weak and hungry looking to take your dinner.

“Oh, come on man. You’re being dramatic again!” Sure, there are a very, very few scenarios where you might be advantaged by providing some cheap labor. Close and trusted business associates should be able to count on you to share some perks if they’ve stuck their neck out for you at one time or another. And legitimate “investment opportunities” do arise from time to time – but rarely.

Lesson Learned: simply commit to charging what you’re honestly worth all the time. Again, I go back to the fact that a true professional will not give away their work for free and good clients know this.

Clients don’t like being billed every time they call or email.

This may be true of some folks but certainly there are many people who know the costs involved when dealing with professionals and they expect to spend some money. I always felt like I would somehow impose a burden on my clients if I didn’t allow them to freely call at any time with any question that came to their mind.

Billing for communication with the client does two marvelous things: it increases your billable hours and keeps clients from wandering into your office and wasting an afternoon while they suck every last bit of hard-earned expertise right out of your head. When I knew my attorney would bill me $62.50 for every phone call, you bet I thought long and hard about what I wanted to ask and whether I needed to ask at all. Imagine you have 4 active projects - not unrealistic for a single developer. Each of those 4 clients will likely contact you an average of 6 times per week, more if their project is just starting or ready to launch. That’s an average of 24 emails or phone calls per week. Let’s say a phone call lasts an average of 15 minutes and it takes about 5 minutes to thoughtfully reply to an email. To make this east, let’s assume that your 24 points of contact throughout the week are split 50/50 between emails and phone calls. That’s a total of 4.5 hours per week spent communicating with clients. Throw in a few random emails or calls from previous clients and you can see how this quickly becomes a nighmare if you’re not billing for this service. Put yourself in the shoes of your client. Would you rather pay for a thoughtful, prompt and accurate reply or get a hasty, thoughtless, inaccurate reply for free - or no reply at all.

Lesson Learned: find a way to recoup time spent communicating with clients. You can pad your estimates by some percentage to account for this, submit a monthly, detailed invoice, wait until the project is complete and add this expense to the final payment – anything is better than letting this one go unpaid.

I want my clients to LIKE me - and they won’t like me if I charge too much.

Man, oh man this hurts. Some of us just need to be loved so we accommodate the impossible in order to please. What we inadvertently wind up doing is dropping the ball a lot - or maybe I just speak for myself.

Now, relationships in business are extremely important and I value relationships more than anything else. Really, I do. It’s rewarding to get a fat check, but to me it’s more rewarding to hear someone say, “Good job!”. However, without the fat check we won’t be around to get the pat on the back. So a balance must be found.

Again, I go back to my experiences with other good professionals. What is it that made me like THEM? Without fail I have to say it was their competence and attitude that impressed me. How much they charged is almost a non-issue. Our customers want us to do a job and that job is to design a web presence that will make them money. If we’re nice to them, that’s a big bonus. But if we’re nice and DON’T do the job well, we shouldn’t expect our clients to be nice to us.

Lesson Learned: my client doesn’t want to invite me to their summer BBQ, like their dog or marry their daughter. They want me to work on behalf of their company to increase revenue using the web as a medium – simple as that. They demand competence over nice any day of the week.

This is a brief list that I’ve managed to beat almost to death. Look for more items down the road.

Thanks for reading.

Very good questions, thank you for asking. UpStart Productions is a one-man development shop started by me, Jeff Denton, back in Nov. 2000. At one point or another, I’ve done logo design, graphic design for print and web, Flash animation, static and dynamic websites and web applications. My company is currently in hibernation but I’ll shed more light on that later.

The world is not pounding on my door for me to write a web development blog. There are plenty of great design blogs and other resources available such as Sitepoint, V7N.com and WDVL. You see, what you’re reading is the very first blog post from UpStart Productions and I want to take this in a decidedly different direction from other resource sites. I want to focus on the business of web design, not the academic, technical aspects.

I probably won’t show off any new PHP classes, teach you how to build yet another RSS reader or debate the merits of CSS vs. table based layout (a debate long settled in my opinion). However, I will discuss the ups, downs, successes, failures and pitfalls inherent in being a freelance designer of any species be it web, print, multimedia or application. And I’ll try to form some coherent thoughts about a few issues in our industry that nobody seems to be talking about. We’ll dicuss those down the road a bit.

I’m not the quintessential geek but probably close. I’ve been fiddling with computers since I got a Timex Sinclair 1000 at 13 years of age - I was hooked. The web exploded onto the scene (for me, anyway) around 1994, just when I was being forced to abandon my pursuit of an Electrical Engineering BS at Chico State University. So, I discovered programming again: a little C, C++, and this odd markup language called HTML.

I began my career by building a few simple sites for myself and one paying gig for a friend of mine the saw sharpening business. I remember earning $350.00 for that project. At the time I thought it was virtually immoral, earning so much money for doing work I actually enjoyed. At the time I was living in a small, Northern California town. It seemed that a lot of action around what is now affectionately called “the bubble” was happening in Seattle and, to a lesser extent, Portland. So, at 28 I packed up the wife and kids and moved to the Pacific Northwest where I still live - sans wife, well, THAT wife anyway but that’s a story for another time.

No one would hire me as a designer up here in ‘98. Heck, I had no degree, no formal training in design and I really didn’t know my HTML that well either - I wouldn’t have hired me. I sat through countless interviews in bizarre corporate meeting rooms with large conference tables and speaker phones. I endured the embarasment when an interviewer showed me a page of 200+ lines of HTML code and asked me to find the errors. I knew I needed to fall back and punt.

Two year and a few “out of the blue” opportunities later, UpStart Productions was uncerimoniously born.

I’ll spare you the rest of the details until later. Please stay tuned and I hope you’ll let me know when I’m right on, close, full of crap or drifting into a place no one else really wants to go.

Thanks for reading.