opinios

Playing Hardball

The honeymoon has ended and someone ended up offering me full-time employment, starting in a couple of weeks, so the days of playing house husband are now short-lived.

Not that I have been sitting on my hands all this time while my wife brings home the bacon.

In between doing the laundry and the dishes I have taken on a bit of freelance web design work. Despite promising myself that I wasn't going to do it (largely due to some excellent articles I had read about someone in a similar situation), I did in fact undercharge my first client massively in order to win the contract. The client was a friend of a friend and I made him an offer that he couldn't refuse, promising the world. And then I went to work.

Unfortunately it ended up being a can of worms. There was a whole stack of business functionality that he just assumed would be taken into account, and that I assumed I wouldn't need to include because he hadn't mentioned it.

Never assume anything.

Part way into the contract it came out that there was a large amount of extra work that would be required. If it had been a minimal amount I would have been happy to wear it. I was happy to prostitute myself for a couple of weeks because I could foresee how it would be a good portfolio-builder, and this project has already led to me winning a couple of other sites through word of mouth without it even being finished yet.

But when it became obvious that a large portion of extra customisation requiring an additional three weeks of full-time effort was necessary, I submitted an addendum to the contract for my client to peruse.

And it shocked them a bit.

Thus we reached the awkward impasse where I felt like I had already compromised from the outset and wasn't prepared to continue at sub-McDonalds rates for another month, and he felt like he was being taken advantage of and was on the verge of becoming resentful. Not an ideal situation when the relationship is that of not-quite-but-kind-of mates via a mutual friend.

Anyway, we negotiated for an hour or so over the table in a coffee shop, talked about where the gap in understanding lay, and how we might be able to get over it. I had to concede some functionality that I normally would have charged for, and they agreed to a discounted version of the addendum.

A reasonable outcome I think. And probably inevitable due to the fact that it is my first client. But not much fun.

I guess the question is: at what point do you say, "Hang on, I can't give you that for free as well". It's all relative because if you start out cheap then your client won't want to climb much higher. But if you give a more reasonable estimate up front it is likely to scare them off if you don't have a reputation behind you to justify it.

I don't think I would have gone about this job any differently apart from being more demanding up front about the requirements. The initial criteria was to mimic the functionality of the existing site, not add additional stuff to it, and if the existing site had actually worked rather than been a half-arsed attempt at being an eCommerce site that was really just an unfinished page which couldn't actually handle any transactions at all, let alone the complex shipping or tax rules involved in selling to the international community, then there wouldn't have been any ambiguity.

But you can't turn around to your client and say "You're wrong, look read the contract that you signed" or they'll tell you to pack up and leave. You have to diplomatically break it down into understandable chunks, highlight them and gently refer them back to the original contract where they weren't listed. Without getting them upset.

The other interesting thing which is probably more a result of me using an open source package is that while I am purely charging based on the perceived time it will take for me to implement something, customers don't want to pay according to the same scale. The fact that initally this client got a whole heap of functionality included in the initial quote (that came as part of the package) mean that they were therefore confused about why a customised add-on should cost about the same amount again. They already got so much for so little, and expect everything else to come a price relative to that perceived value.

I guess this is a danger when installing open source technology, you can take advantage of the fact that you are standing on the shoulders of the people who developed the original system, but you need to be able to factor in the price of customisation when giving your quote.

Anyway it's all a learning experience and I think I handled myself reasonably well after this morning's meeting. I got the all important signature for the next phase and the first portion of the payment, even if I did have to play hardball a little bit.

Now I have to go make it work.