Should you take on that project?

00:00 Hello and welcome to Perspective. This is a show by founders of small indie creative agencies giving our perspective and starting running our own companies. The aim is to provide some useful advice and inspiration to others as well as learn from each other and others who get to come talk on the show. This is our 11th episode. My name is John Dark. I'm a director at Every Interaction and today with me again I have Tom Johnson from Lighthouse London. Hello Tom. Hey, hey how's it going? Very well, how are you? I'm all good thank you very much. It's very nice to be back.

00:29 Excellent, it's fantastic to have you back. Cool and today's topic we're thinking about how you go about choosing the right projects to work on. What we want to do is be able to sort of briefly cover a whole load of different things that run through our minds when a brief lands on our laps, however that happened, and the criteria that we internally and I guess externally sort of run through as a business to determine whether we should even take on piece of work or you know take the time to respond to the brief in the first place. This is pretty important to do because you obviously don't want to start taking on or spending a lot of time writing up proposals and projects that just aren't suitable for your business. Definitely, they take ages so we don't want to do that as much as possible. Yeah, massive time sink and for various reasons if it isn't right one way or the other you've got to have a pretty well-defined set of criteria that you as a business agree upon so that you don't end up wasting a lot of your time.

01:28 Yeah, we definitely used to waste loads and loads of time on this stuff so it's quite good to talk about how we don't do that now. Yeah, likewise. I think when you first start out you're super enthusiastic, you know maybe even a bit desperate for work at times and so you'll pretty much take on anything you want and I do recognise that this advice is coming from perhaps a position of slight privilege and that I think we've both moved on quite a bit from those days now. Yeah, luckily.

01:53 Yeah, we've got the ability to be a little bit selective with the types of projects that you take on. Yeah, absolutely not everyone can afford to be in that position especially if you're really new and starting out and just need to have the money coming in in the first place.

02:07 Yeah, I mean we were like that for a long time and many people are but I think a lot of these things we didn't put in place because we were worried that like if we don't go for this thing that's bad, you know, we had to go for everything that came through and we shouldn't even, you know, we should send a proposal for everything but when we started to filter things and look at stuff that is completely wrong it actually didn't affect us too much which I think is common for quite a lot of people I would hope. So there are some things you should definitely step away from and you need to know to do that. But also even if you are smaller and new, yeah, you do need to have some kind of filter because otherwise even though you need the money taking on the project can end up costing you more than you make from it. Oh definitely. It's not right, it's not suited, if it's any number of reasons it can just be very costly to your business. So yeah, we thought we'd cover off what things go through our minds when we go through looking at these briefs and trying to make those decisions and hopefully that will help some of you out and give you some criteria to use to make those decisions yourselves. Sounds good, let's do it. So number one on the list is repeat business. So obviously if you do a job of a certain type and it's a type of job that you want to do more of, logic dictates that if you do a good job of it it'll make a nice case study, you're more likely to win or be invited to pitch for that type of work in the future. Now I've seen a lot of agencies that just do one type of website or product which has always been a little bit strange to me because we don't do that at all, I don't think. The sectors we work in are very very broad. A lot of people make a good living out of doing one type of thing in repeating and I guess they love it. Yeah and there's nothing wrong with that at all. No, no, no, no. Having a specialism and you know you could be doing e-commerce for example and just targeting a lot of e-commerce clients. Yeah. Even within that you may be targeting certain types of e-commerce clients or specific verticals within e-commerce such as fashion retailers because there could be some specific problems or niches or issues that you would solve on one client that you can apply to another and be more efficient in that process.

04:05 Not every agency takes that approach. We've done some projects that have similarities in the past like we've done one type of project that was logistics based and we did an exercise recently where we looked at all the work we've done over the past couple of years and grouped different clients we've worked on into these different categories to try and see some commonalities in the types of clients that we've worked on. Nice. Yeah it's amazing to see a sort of correlation that you didn't probably see before. Didn't even make the connections but we saw actually there's this sort of cluster of logistics based clients over here and when we think back it's that those clients often got in touch with us because of a case study that they thought was relevant to their business. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. We might have to do that. I don't think we have or if we did it was a long time ago so things probably changed but it's interesting on the other side of this that the people often ask us if we've done the exact same sort of thing for another client.

05:01 So you know how much experience do we have making a school's website or you know something or something even more random. Clients often value that a lot whereas I feel that you know we would be able to do lots of different types of work and the fact that we've done that one specific sector before doesn't necessarily make a big difference but from the other side of the table I think it does.

05:22 Yeah and you know there are obviously business benefits to be able to do that. If you know how to do something well once you can learn from that experience to a better next time there's certain efficiencies that come with that and you know either you can pass those savings onto your client and offer a better deal or increase your profit margin by having increased internal efficiency. Very true. So yeah there's definite benefits to working in something in a similar vein. I definitely wouldn't want to do like a common copy of something. Yeah we sadly have done that before but it's been a while. There we go. So yeah think about the repeat business this might bring you and the possibilities it opens up for similar or like-minded clients in the same vertical or in the same sector and just take that into consideration because good case studies lead to getting more work. So the next thing you should be thinking about is if you have the skills that are needed to do a good job of it. So I definitely recommend to people not to take on jobs that are quite a long way out of your comfort zone unless you make it pretty clear to the client that that is the case and for you it's going to be a bit of a learning experience. Yeah we always try and learn something on a project and that's quite a key thing that we want to make sure that we get something new out of each thing we do. Obviously it doesn't always happen because you know nature of how things go but yeah we've always kind of been very wary of agreeing to do something that we know we just don't have the skills for because I mean we did that years ago back in the days when we were taking everything we could get and some of that ended very badly. So now you know we're maybe over cautious sometimes on taking on things that we feel there might be a tiny bit of what we're able to deliver comfortably. Again you don't want to make it boring so you just take on the same stuff over and over again because it feels safe especially in this industry where goalposts keep shifting on what we're doing and new technologies new advancements new ways of thinking and doing things. It's nice to do new things sometimes but you've got to be comfortable taking that step and it's quite often a good idea to make sure your clients aware that you haven't done that particular thing before and just to say it comes in agreement with them essentially. It could be that you give them a discount to allow you the ROD time on it to get up to speed or it could be you know they're quite happy to pay for you to do that exploratory work because it is such a new thing and they can't find anything else out there who has experience in it. Yeah I think that as our projects get larger we're kind of finding the edges of what we can do or legitimately do with the team that we have. So in many things certainly the much bigger projects are taking on we're finding other people to work with so we know that we're not uh I don't know like marketing experts that we know enough to get people certain places but then we have partners that we we work with and we're just open with clients about that so when we know we've hit the roof of or the ceiling of what we're doing we'll be open about the fact that we'll get in a copywriter to say who's much more experienced and that kind of thing and that's great for us too because then we learn from them so we're kind of like ramping up our skills in that area by working with this um this partner that we use and and we know we can deliver on that and maybe next time around we might be able to use more of that learning we've made from the project to kind of do more of it in-house. Yeah that's a very good point don't turn stuff down just because you don't have the skills in-house don't be afraid to go out and source the skills. Yeah it's probably a good idea like you say to be open about that.

08:49 Oh you should be people don't really care a lot of the time. They really don't so you always think if if people think oh someone else is doing this someone else doing that doesn't matter they're just getting a team of specialists so it's uh yeah not something to worry about a lot in a lot of cases. Yeah we work with a load of independent specialists who have disciplines that we don't require full time and bring them in ad hoc on projects as required and we just package that up into something that we sell onto the clients. Similarly with development if our usual go-to development partners don't have the skills to take on what we're talking about. Then you come to lighthouse. Yeah we know we know a lot of people we know a lot of agencies and each each company's got its own little specialism for doing different things you know it could be that it needs to be done in ruby and needs to be done agile or it could be yeah it could be a mobile app and you need some you know ios or android development skills uh it could be all in web and bhp and yeah you know it really depends on what what's required but don't be afraid to source out partners and either offer to the client that you're going to manage the actuals for them or if it's a substantial amount give them the choice of well you're quite welcome to have this relationship and manage them directly or you know try to push them like we're going to use these external partners this is what they cost we're going to need to manage them and their output and work with them so we're going to have some additional project management time on top of that. Yep. So capacity is a big one. Definitely.

10:15 If you've got a lot of work on right now and your plate's pretty full then put a lot of pressure on yourself just don't accept stuff just because you want to take it on make sure you can actually deliver on it and your existing commitments aren't going to hinder you or make you not able to deliver what clients wanting in the timescales that they're asking for. Yeah that's really tough isn't it because i mean you know it's it's really hard to turn down work that you really want to do but but you have to be ready to do that if you just know you can't deliver it or say to them we really want to do it or you wait a month for something and a lot of the time they'll say no but it's worth asking. Yeah don't be afraid to ask for more time because because you you know you're already busy on stuff i mean we've all done a bit of burning the midnight oil and working late and just having to knuckle down and get stuff done i mean we actively try not to do that these days and of course yeah try and give everyone in our business a bit more quality of life but you know you can't control sometimes these things happen and you just need to knuckle down and get on with it. It happens.

11:17 Try not to put yourself in that situation knowing me too often because it's better to reserve those late nights for emergencies and unknown scenarios rather than making it into your business as something cultural where you're always taking on more work and everybody's always working late.

11:32 That is weird i like i hear agencies where they do that all the time and it just seems really strange like you can't survive like that forever. No it's not healthy. No like your staff will just hate it. I mean who wants to be at work late every night it's crazy. Yeah there's a bit of a culture of it in the design industry in particular i feel you know i think it's just one thing we had a career of doing crazy hours for agencies and people who don't treat you well enough to deserve that kind of loyalty. Yeah yeah. I actively made a point of imposing that on our staff and trying to plan things well enough so that we don't put them in that situation. Yeah definitely fully agree.

12:13 And on the capacity front as well i mean obviously there's a finite amount of people in your business and sometimes opportunities may come along to you that are you know pretty big. I guess just don't take on something that's too large for you to take on. It's sort of to you in terms of how you want to manage risk in your business but we have a rule of thumb that we would never take on something that generates more than 50 percent of our annual revenue for example. Oh yeah yeah. Simply because it's too many eggs in one basket. Definitely. You'll come to rely on that money and if something happens to that relationship you know it's out of your control someone could just pull the plug on the entire project that revenue stream disappears and suddenly that money you've come to rely on is just dried up out of nowhere. If you've built up a business and a number of staff relying on something that's that large of a percentage of your revenue then you know you're gonna have to start firing people or you know maybe even close the business. It's a big gamble to take. That is definitely a quite scary situation to be in. Yeah just this year we came across quite a meaty opportunity that was really exciting it was totally totally in our wheelhouse. A project we really wanted to do would have been a great tentpole client brilliant case study but it was just a bit too big for us.

13:35 It would have been way too much resource for us to pile into one project. There were some additional conditions around it that didn't suit our way of working and our existing client relationships would have suffered. We wouldn't have been able to take on all the other stuff we had in our pipeline at the time and we just had to make the decision to to gracefully turn it away.

13:57 Yeah we've done that plenty of times actually and some you know we don't work with a lot of kind of big name brands but most of the work that we've turned down has been that kind of thing just because it was just too big for what we can legitimately take on and deliver well on.

14:13 And they'll appreciate that as well if you do take something on and you mess it up because you haven't got the the ability to deliver on it or I suppose so they mess up and your business goes under then you know it's not good for anybody. When we've done it clients have been very understanding and appreciative that we haven't put them in that risk. Yeah definitely definitely because it's a risk to them taking on you. Oh totally. Yeah that's that's putting a lot of pressure on the person who's making that decision in their business as well and their neck may be on the line so you can think about everyone else in the situation. Yeah completely.

14:50 Other reasons we turned stuff down in the past things like conflict of interest with existing clients. So you could still be working with a client who they may see this new business as a potential competitor and obviously you probably shouldn't work with them both. In these scenarios whenever you're concerned but that might be the case I would say just talk to your existing client and walk them through what this other business does assuming you have permission from your business to do so and just see if they have any concerns about it. On a few occasions we've spoken to some existing clients and said look we've got this new client from this customer having him we think it's sort of in your ballpark do you mind us talking to them and asking more about their project and quite often they've said yeah we don't mind at all and we didn't see them as a competitor. Yeah have people said no before then and they not been happy with that? No I don't think they have actually. Yeah I think if you're honest people are doing okay. I think we've luckily never had to turn anyone for that reason but it's come close I think add to new things at the same time which are in very similar sectors but yeah we've never had to turn one down but yeah I reckon most people wouldn't really mind that much value if you're honest with them. Yeah I mean we have turned them down for this reason but it's cool that we've made it that easy to be a client because it was so obvious. Yeah. Also this is a handy one to keep in your back pocket for people you want to turn down gracefully. Yeah that's good. You really don't want to do it for some reason you can just say oh sorry we're currently working with someone who does something dangerously close to what you're doing and it's just a polite way of saying no thank you. I'm gonna remember that one definitely. Another interesting one is moral conflicts so this is a little bit difficult to give some advice on really because obviously it's a very personal thing and there are things that some people feel fine doing and others that people would feel weird doing so I mean we've tried to move away or you know tried to never actually do anything in the gambling sphere although we've been asked a few times we've worked on a few things that sort of came close especially in the early days sort of lottery style products. Yeah. But that sort of on the fence really that's really gambling or not. Yeah that's that's a tough one isn't it yeah.

17:14 But things that are clearly designed to milk poor people of money. Yeah I would not do that at all. I don't know if there's anything we would turn down like a I suppose gambling but yeah anyone that and someone's going to be ripped off by I wouldn't want to do. We have been offered porn before. Okay. Yeah. Which is as payment. Wow I would have taken that. But yeah that was weird I think I feel like it was a while back but Dan was a little bit at work and seemed like it might be.

17:50 I think it came from someone that he kind of respected quite a lot and they turned around and said yeah it's porn so we we decided not to not to go for that one. Yeah right now someone's got to do it right. Yeah exactly I wonder who does and probably make a lot of money out of it if they are.

18:04 Yeah I wouldn't be surprised. But yeah there's been a couple of things that we haven't done in the past but it's quite rare that we get that sort of situation and come up luckily which is good or maybe we've just got very low morals I don't know. I've definitely worked not as every interaction but in my agency days on one of the agio alcohol brands. Okay. That sort of spirits and whiskies and things. Yeah we've done drink stuff recently or fairly recently so I don't mind that so much. No that feels acceptable. Well we also got three booze so it was um. Oh yes. How are you going to turn that down? I have turned down a long time ago now someone approached us about something cigarette based in states. Yeah. And yeah definitely wasn't up for that. Yeah I think I turned that down as well. But vaping though I do a vaping site. Oh do you? Okay. So that's okay no one gets killed by that so if all the vaping clients want to come on. So we know so far. Yeah yeah oh yes true. Time will tell. Yeah that's a whole other topic. Next week. No no.

19:18 Yeah uh you draw your own line there you know I know people who would only work with charities. Wow. You draw your line where you want to but it's important to have one. It's important to have a line and some rules and you shouldn't compromise on those. Yeah definitely. A bit of a personal one but when the client gets in touch you obviously get to know them as a person a little bit and if the person who you're engaging with as part of that new business coming in is the person who's going to be on point of contact or a large part of the project you've got to make sure that you're going to get on with them. Completely. I think this is one of the biggest ones for me. You spend ages working with these people and it gets quite intense at times so you have it has to be someone that you have that rapport with or that you know that you get on with. Yeah I agree yeah. One thing we've started doing is that we will never take on any work without meeting people these days.

20:14 We wouldn't ever take on a job just by emailing or even just talking on the phone. We would always have to have a place to place workshop or a meeting of some kind. You know worst case even if you do that on Skype. Yeah. You need to meet the people you need to have a really good conversation with them. You need to understand them and get a gut feel from the communications that you have for that person the type of person that they are. I guess it comes with experience but you'll quickly learn the type of people who you know are and know what they're talking about. You know this isn't their first radio. They clearly got experience. You know that you know they're going to be joy to work with or even just not a nightmare basically. Yeah completely. I totally agree about the meeting thing. I mean you know meeting people face to face is a big part of our sales process anyway because we find that it works really well for us. So we'll always want to meet these people if possible and it's rare that we can't do that. You know Skype's not great. You know it's still kind of a face to face thing but it's nowhere near as good as actually being in the same room as someone and seeing that kind of body language and working all that stuff out. So it's really really key for us. Yeah that is important but it's not always possible. So you know do what you can and then just maximize the amount of communication with the people before you make a decision. Yeah and kind of related to that is them buying into the way that we work which is I don't think it's like completely groundbreaking and lots of agencies and studios work in the way that we do but you want them to see the value in how the way that we work might be slightly different to other people. So certainly when it comes to building products for people and making them you know our startup clients that's a big part of working out if this person's right. If they really see why our approach being slightly different is much better for them in the long run. Yeah they've got to completely bind to you and what you're about because if they disagree with your philosophy or your way of working or your processes then you know clearly it's not going to go well. And sometimes people kind of nod and smile and go oh that sounds amazing but you just know they haven't actually decided they're going to do it. Like you say with experience you're going to work that stuff out because there's been nothing worse than signing contracts and doing all this stuff and then kicking off and realizing that they actually just want to do the same thing they came to you with within the first place. Yeah. So yeah tricky. I think my ideal clients my little checklist is that they are they're knowledgeable and passionate about their industry they're organized people and they make themselves available. They understand the creative process and you know they're receptive to new ideas being introduced established conventions being challenged you know they're not completely shielded off and defensive every time you try and suggest something. And also people that have confidence in their own decision making to me that's the sort of person who's going to be an excellent client really receptive to the whole design process and they're generally going to probably do a lot of the project management of the business from their end which is going to save you a hell of a lot of hassle. Yeah I've just written those four points down so I'm going to be is in the future. And if you're really not sure I've never done this but this occurred to me the other day that the way that a client would ask you for a reference when thinking about hiring you this is this is a two-way street here this is a two-way relationship this is much your decision to work with them as it is theirs to work with you so don't be afraid to ask your client for a reference. Hmm okay. Surely they've worked with an agency before it may be that they are a startup and everyone in it has never worked with an agency before that's fine I'm sure they've worked with someone or had a job you could speak to their previous boss or a colleague don't be afraid to ask clients for a reference. I've never yeah I've never thought of doing that but that's quite interesting. I've never done it before but I thought of it recently and I think I might try it.

24:26 Yeah you should do see what kind of reaction you get. Yeah if someone else tries is it for us please why don't they do it first and they can tell us. There we go yeah I'll get you on the show to come talk about it. The big ones when thinking about whether you're going to take on a project or not are obviously budget and time. Thinking more about budget first I would say obviously you want to find out what the budget is ideally before you agree to do something or at least arrange before investing a lot of time in putting together a response. Specifically you just want to make sure that the budget that they have isn't too low to achieve what you feel is going to be a decent job.

25:06 Yeah I mean that's it's always a tricky one isn't it really and people show well when talking about budget and I'm sure I think people talked about that on the show before but you've got to know that really because you just have to know from the start whether it even sits within the range of of what you're able to do and whether it's the right fit for you. Yeah it's a difficult thing to get out of people and in my experience it's just easier to flat out ask people don't feel about ashamed about it. I mean this is a business arrangement money's changing hands you need to know if they've got enough money to afford you. Yeah definitely sometimes it's good to you know if they really aren't going to give you any idea just say is it this kind of amount something a bit bigger or something much bigger you know which one of those three is it because then they'll be able to tell you something there rather than naming a figure that that kind of thing might work but yeah it's always difficult to do that. Or even just indicate people are very broad range. We often do that actually. Based on what we know so far that you know the sort of ballpark could be anything between 20 and 50 grand. Some of us are a lot more vague than that. Exactly yeah they can they can be crazy vague. Well I mean a lot of the time they just want to know what ballpark you're in and but don't want to give the game away so it's just this silly little game that happens. You just want to make sure people don't want the world from the grand and yeah completely you know there's just absolutely no chance in hell that they can afford you and don't be rude about it if they reveal that just go oh unfortunately it doesn't sound like you you can afford us. Yeah well we cost a little bit more than that and we feel like to deliver the type of work we need to do we need to charge these rates because talented people cost a lot of money. Office is not going to cost a lot of money. Yeah there's a whole process we need to follow as part of doing good design. Yeah it does take time and talent and that's what you're paying for. So yeah no we often say that you know these these things take us ages and involve a lot of work so we have to put the the hours in and and and they cost that much money when the budgets are a bit too low for them. Yeah so try and get that out of the team as soon as possible. Obviously if it's a large company and it's quite obvious that you know they've got the cash then it isn't always something you need to necessarily ask but you'll quite often find that those types of clients are most open to revealing their budgets. Yeah those guys usually just tell you straight away which is good to know. But you know sometimes we've talked with clients who seem like really good jobs that had told us the budget and it was too low and we just straight up went back to them and said this sounds great we're a bit more expensive can you do anything about it and sometimes they just say no that's the limit but other times people come back and be like well we found you know 30 percent more and that made it well far for us so that conversation is always helpful in many different ways. Yeah budgets aren't always completely chiseled in stone, they can be flexible so don't be afraid to ask. Another option might be if you really want to do the project to just agree a more limited scope. Yeah. Cut a few things out of their shopping list in order to be able to hit their budget. Yeah. Quite closely connected to the budgets is timelines that's important to make sure you have enough time to do a good job of it but also sometimes people have deadlines that are put in place for one reason or another there could be some other activities which this thing has to be ready for. If you think those timelines are unrealistic and they seem unwilling to compromise on them then I would recommend that you let them know that and if they refuse to budge then compromise because you're just going to end up putting yourself in a situation where you're going to struggle to deliver something of a good standard that you're happy to put your name to in the time that's available. Yeah definitely I think this one's actually the most common one for us. We often find that budget wise we're okay on a lot of projects that come our way but so many come our way with absolutely ridiculous timelines and that's either from people who don't understand how long it takes to do this stuff which is a kind of sort of warning sign in itself or you know there is some event coming up and they've left it too late to even think about this project and they're now they're in trouble essentially. So yeah this is really common from us and we often have to say to people this is just not not doable and walk away which is a real shame sometimes because some of them seem like great great work but we just know through many years of experience of like really trying to meet deadlines that aren't possible that that's just one of the worst things you can be doing. Yeah just don't put yourself in that position I mean we've done in the past as well and we definitely need to do it again. Not to say it doesn't happen every now and then still but you know you try and step away from that stuff. Yeah design is a process you can't put a well-informed solution out of our hat. Oh yeah definitely. If you don't feel you can stick to the process that you think you need to do to deliver a good job in the timelines that they stated then just let them know that sometimes clients are willing to to shift timelines and quite often we've found that people are putting timelines into briefs and deadlines that aren't actually connected to any justifiable business reason. Now that's common yeah we often ask people what why is this deadline in place and they're kind of like well no reason. Yeah always ask why absolutely. Yeah I think that makes us laugh quite a lot is that the time that it takes people to make a decision to hire us. I think we had a job recently where they took two months to go through the process of getting proposals and making decisions and then wanted it done in four weeks and it's kind of like well you know you took that long to do that so how are we going to turn around building you this thing in half the time they'll stick to these deadlines. We took three times as long to decide hi can we still meet the same deadlines it's like well no because that's going to damage the project so that that happens quite a lot for us obviously getting sign off and building jobs does take time and it goes on. On projects where there is a deadline and it does seem viable when they mention a deadline in any proposals that we do we'll do a time plan to make sure that we come in on that deadline to make sure it's possible and there will be dates in that time plan where we need to make sure we are kicking things off and there's always a contingency in that timeline as well to allow for overspill and decision making signing stuff off you can't cut these things close and if you put in a proposal and you say right this is going to start on 1st of July and this is where it finishes in the end of September in order to hit that end of September deadline we have to start on the 1st of July and that's in the proposal and if they don't make the decisions or delay starting the projects until after that point then the entire project plan has to shift. And I think it's also making them aware of what they've got to do in the projects as well from from their side so what you know are they going to take ages to sign something off and that's something that should be a be in your mind as well when you're deciding we can take this thing on. You'll often find that the biggest source of delay is probably the client themselves especially if there are parts of the project that are out of your control it could be that the content is being provided by the client that's always a red flag to us because that's never ever going to be delivered on time. The content is always the one that slows down every project we've ever worked on. If you want control of it you can guarantee it's delivery if it's somebody else's responsibility you've got to make sure you're not in a position of being held accountable for other people's schedules.

32:28 Yeah totally. Another possibility is that you simply don't agree with the brief. Some briefs come along and they could be quite prescriptive around how the client wants to do things they could have already have made quite a lot of decisions about the project direction and the things they want done and it's quite possible that you know you would you would look at that brief and look at the problem they're trying to solve and think that what they're suggesting isn't the right solution and this has happened to us a few times. It's usually in the case where a client already has a product and they're doing a revolution on it or they'll need to make some changes or bring in some new functionality and they've already done a reasonable amount of background work to decide what it is that they actually want to do. If you don't agree with what they're asking you to do you should definitely raise that and speak up and tell them your opinion and say that well I think there's probably a better way of doing this. You probably wouldn't take on the work if they weren't receptive to those new ideas. Yeah no that situation is terrible. We often get people coming to us with a predefined product that they want to build and they've got a technical layout and all this kind of stuff and they've got database designs and yeah it's actually really really common giving us a tech spec on something that they've only really just got an idea in their head for a lot more of the kind of startup product stuff obviously but that's really really common and it kind of goes back to what we're saying about the ideal person to work with. It's someone that gets the fact that we're going to ripple this up and you know validate all their assumptions is really important. They're just like no this is what I want, this is what I want you to build we'd walk walk away always. Absolutely. But certainly something from a boardroom or committee is also equally scary because I've been in that situation many a time and you know that's just terrible. Yeah if you just don't agree with what they're asking for just don't take it on.

34:25 I guess connecting to that is too much red tape around the brief. Yeah and we've sort of just touched on both those really. Having a big committee, if people signing off stuff is always a huge stage inside for us. People just feel like they're going to be a complete nightmare to work with. I mean there are loads of different ways that can happen but when you just kind of get that vibe that it's going to take a long time for anything to get done and that relationship is just going to probably turn sour because of it. It's maybe best to cut your losses and not dive in.

34:55 Yeah to me this is something that just naturally comes with scale as you start working with larger and larger clients. Absolutely. The larger the organization the more levels of hierarchy that tend to be inside. I mean we do work with large companies and they have quite a progressive way of doing things. Those companies have usually given somebody quite a lot of autonomy in their own business to run their own team and projects independently and give them quite a lot of freedom to do what they want. Sometimes yeah you do meet people who have a lot of red tape and you've got to make a decision as to whether that's worth being with or not. It obviously is at a certain scale.

35:33 It could be worth it. It's up to you to decide. It's hard sometimes. We do a fair bit of work with academic institutions and they're quite known for that kind of thing so lots of this committee is going to meet this week to discuss that and then we're going to take it to the other one to discuss that and that soon eats into your time and then they talk about stuff about you there and come back and give you a load of nonsense to go through. So it's well worth working and how that's going to go because that can cause huge problems. Yeah yeah in terms of stakeholders one thing that we always do if we ever think this is a concern is to just ask when you're having early conversations with a client who is a decision maker here. Oh yeah we always ask that yeah. Who is the person who's going to be signing things off and ideally want that to be one person. If they start reeling off a big list of names you just need to be upfront with them so that this isn't going to work.

36:24 You don't get to good design by agreement by committee that that's how bad design happens. Yeah of course. You need to trust in the expertise of the people you hire them to do a good job and you need one very confident well-organized and knowledgeable person. This goes back to this little ideal client checklist around who they are what they do but you know that that ideal client that's a single point of contact that you are aiming for needs to be the person making the decisions ideally. Yeah totally. And yeah finally chance of winning the project. You know you get stuff come along sometimes especially in a in a proposal scenario where there could be quite a few agencies going for the work. Always ask how many other people are pitching for this. Yeah definitely people often I think worry about asking that kind of thing but it's really important to know because if you're just one of 10 agencies pitching for something that's that's not really good odds.

37:18 Unless you've got some kind of special relationship there or you know there's there's some way that you know you stand a better chance but you know when we get kind of like RFPs through and you know you're one of like 15 people going through it there's just so much effort for that kind of work.

37:34 15? Yeah well yeah who knows. You know experience is usually three or four probably. Well we've had one so there are loads but yeah. Wow okay. Yeah not always you know but even that many is quite a lot to be up against in a in a thing that's going to take a lot of your effort to put together. So a lot of the time their jobs that we would quite like to do because again often big name clients which would look nice as case study and all that kind of thing but just the chance of essentially getting it is is so low knowing who we're kind of up against and the fact that they're maybe a bit more suited to that kind of pitch process or the the way that these guys are going to choose who they're who they're going to work with. And if it is a pitch scenario just say do you mind me asking who the other people pitching are because you know idea of you know the scale of the players if they start reeling off a load of really heavy hitting agencies that seem way over your league and can either go whole hog and just try and win it and try and blow them away or you can just think oh man there's absolutely no chance of us getting this that's not a waste of time and spend days and days on a proposal but we've got no chance of winning. Yeah we we would rarely do that because uh just you know being a being a smaller team it's just making those proposals and and writing that pitch and preparing for it is just such a such an effort for time that we need to be doing work really.

38:52 Yeah I think for us and if there's any more than three other people or three people total in the in pitch then it has to be a really good opportunity for us to consider putting ourselves forward.

39:03 Yeah definitely. Or you know we've got to be pretty confident we're going to get it. We probably wouldn't bother if there was more than five the odds are just not in your favour. I would say that if the client hasn't seen anybody yet and they're thinking about it and you're the first person they've spoken to this happens quite often where people will go to one agency first get a price and then I'm gonna know about it and then go oh I wonder if we can get this cheaper. It's because the people don't have any experience in what they're asking for it's like when you go and do some decoration work on your house or something some renovation work and got no idea how much stuff costs so you're going to speak to one guy they do a lot of teeth sucking and think oh that's a bit expensive and you often go and get a couple of quotes so you can compare it make a decision. What often happens is you'll go for the middle one right? Oh of course every time. Exactly people always go for the middle so what you should do to try and avoid this if you're the first people they're speaking to don't give them one price give them three. Yeah give them a choice give them a scale and then they won't go looking elsewhere for that perspective scale.

40:06 They'll see a perspective in front of them and with any luck they'll just pick the middle one so make the middle one what you want them to buy. Nice. Make the lower one what they've asked for make the middle one what you want them to buy and then go crazy with an upper limit and go well this is the bonkers one if they go for this we'll be laughing. That is incredibly manipulative of you.

40:26 Just give it a bit of a psychology of buying. Definitely. But you can avoid them having to go elsewhere and looking for other opinions by giving them some perspective. No I think one thing tied into this is their experience of buying your type of service before as well.

40:50 So it's quite often in these situations that people make decisions you can tell they're not making decisions for the right reasons and that's the time when you kind of or at least know whether you're going to go forward this this pitch or not because you just know that someone's going to come along and maybe wow them with the amazing PowerPoint presentation that the kind of salesperson will step in and do that whereas we'd go along and our kind of sales pitch process is slightly different and isn't based around that kind of thing so that's sometimes when we choose to not go for something when we know the whole way of selling will kind of fall on deaf ears with with this kind of client.

41:26 On that point I would say that it's important to not feel like you are constrained in the way you want to present your solution. True. I would say that don't be afraid to challenge the brief don't be afraid to present yourself in a way that they're not expecting and don't be afraid to propose something completely different to what they're asking if you think it's the right decision.

41:50 Yeah, no completely agree with that and often we get those kind of things through and think oh you know it seems like a terrible process to go through but then call them up and say is this really what you're thinking and turns out they they weren't and they're open to new ideas so always good even if you think it looks awful to have a phone call or try and get on the phone and talk about it in detail and see what they're really thinking because you might be surprised. Yeah, yeah I mean I did it just last week put in a proposal they send you it's not really a brief they send you a shopping list there's absolutely no way you can spec out all the things on that list you know there's a massive discovery process needs to happen yeah in order for you to even understand what they're asking for and the scope that lies there in so there's no anyone who puts a price on those types of things are really just ripping you off because they're going to be massively overcharging you for all the unknowns that are in that brief. Oh completely. So it would be quite a front view when to tell them that this is our proposal instead you're not giving them what they asked for but you're giving them an alternative that you might be able to upsell and it might seem like a better alternative.

42:38 Seem is a better alternative. Yeah. No I mean that that's very much how we're working these days as well so because so many people come to us with really complex things they want to build we just can't even tell them how much it's going to be or and so we adopt that exact same way of doing a longer process with iteration towards something great and some people buy it some people don't. Sounds like a topic for another time. It does indeed. Cool well just to wrap up I think I'd say you know enjoy it I mean think about think about your team and the types of things you're actually going to enjoy working on if it feels like it's going to be a real all-ate to work on this thing and no one's going to enjoy it or the subject matters really dry you know and do it just take on things that you think you're going to enjoy. Yeah completely you know you've got to come to work and look forward to it so that's a very important point. And you know everything we talked about today is just you know our perspective on this list of criteria that we go through making these decisions it is a judgment call this isn't a hard and fast set of rules to run your business by you know you need to make these decisions yourself where you draw the line on each one of these things don't over complicate it don't over stretch yourself don't take on too much risk and just make sure you do a good job and if you do all those things then you're going to be successful you're going to have a nice agency you're going to get a good reputation people are going to be falling over themselves to work with you so definitely keep it simple stupid absolutely. Cool I think we'll wrap it up there for today if you've got any questions comments or feedback you can go to our website at perspective.fm all the show notes will be there we'll do a little write up with this episode and these points that we've covered if you've got anything you'd like to contribute to this then please send us a message there should be some contact links on our sites find us on twitter at underscore perspective FM we'll get the links on our websites thanks to everybody who has been rating us on iTunes that's been really useful it helps people find us so anyone who listens out there who haven't done that yet please go to iTunes give us a rating hello how much you love the show again you'll find links to do that on the websites I've been John Dark from every interaction at Dark John on twitter everyinteraction.com at every interact on twitter and where can people find you Tom? You can find stuff about lighthouse at we are lighthouse.com on twitter we are at will our lighthouse if you really wanted to follow me on twitter I'm at mr. haste fantastic thanks for coming on again cool man thanks for having me I'm gonna see you all next time. See you later.