When Your Worst Client Comes Back for More
Nightmare clients. We’ve all had them. If you were lucky, you turned lemons into lemonade and salvaged the relationship. If you weren’t, those clients now feature heavily in your literal nightmares — possibly accompanied by your terrifying fourth-grade math teacher. Either way, you probably didn’t have to deal with the nightmare clients for too long in the grand scheme of things. Unless, of course, you’re like us and found your nightmare client coming back for more — in our case looking for a complete website redesign.
If you’re starting to think, “Gee, Erika, it sure seems wildly unprofessional to talk about a nightmare client in a public forum”, allow me to reassure you, we are describing ourselves. In the spring of 2016, I sent an email out detailing our work with “The.Worst.Client.Ever”. The email described the difficulty of doing work for your own organization. Well, we continue to be our own worst clients. And despite all the lessons we learned the last time we worked for ourselves, I would be lying if I said we were better clients this time around. Although I’m proud of the final product and am excited to share more about the changes we made and why we made them, let’s focus on how to make doing work for yourself a smooth process.
Focus
I think we can all agree that all projects have a certain ebb and flow to them. Clients will have other, more pressing needs that require their full attention, and your specific project will get shifted on the back burner until they can regroup. It’s a natural part of any long-term partnership, and most clients will refocus their attention as quickly as possible. After all, they want to see the project completed just as much as you do!
But, when you are your own client, focus is a lot harder to come by. You know that there are items on the to-do list and that the project can’t proceed until they’re checked off, but there’s always something else demanding your attention. Sometimes that’s unavoidable, but not always. If you wouldn’t ignore an outside party nudging you for information for weeks (or months) on end, why are you ignoring yourself? Schedule the time to give your project the attention it deserves so you don’t end up in a situation that sees a project dragging on for twice as long as originally estimated. Not that we know anything about that. ahem
Timeliness
Staying on the theme of “treat yourself like an outside client”, be realistic about your timeline from day one. And, if I could make a suggestion, include some buffer time at every stage to allow for the times you need to put your personal project on pause in order to direct your full attention towards your paying clients. Then once you have a timeline, treat it as though it were etched in stone. This means hitting deadlines — large and small — at every stage. Once again, you wouldn’t promise to get an outside consultant resources, feedback, or edits by a certain day, only to ignore them for weeks on end, so stop blowing yourself off.
If you do need to rework your timeline, be purposeful about it. Sit down, identify the milestones you’ve missed, and come up with new target dates that reflect your current reality. Don’t just hit the project “snooze button” ten minutes at a time, until the project is seriously behind schedule.
Decisiveness
Once you’ve established a timeline, and you’re giving your project the focus it deserves, you need to make sure the project doesn’t get completely mired down in endless edits, experiments, or tweaks. I understand that it’s tempting to hold your own project to a higher standard or to use it as a kind of case study to test new ideas as you come across them. But, even the smallest changes add up over time and can result in big delays. And, if you do decide to move forward with bigger edits, make the time to spell out exactly what those edits will do to your timeline.
The bottom line: treat your personal project with the same respect and urgency that you would use for a project spearheaded by a total stranger. I promise it will make the entire process more efficient, less unwieldy, and more pleasant.
Enough about what a dreadful client we are! Let’s talk about the changes we made to the website!
- Homepage Overhaul — The homepage now features one and only one prominent call to action. In addition, we pared down the page to feature only the things that were MOST important, who we are and what we do. No Twitter roll, no useless data, just the facts.
- More Detailed Description of our Services — As Spring Insight has grown, the services we are able to offer has changed. Our website hadn’t kept up! The new site features content detailing all the website creation, ongoing marketing, and site maintenance services we provide.
- New Portfolio Section — I love the work we do. Seriously, each website we launch is my favorite. Yet, the portfolio section on our former website didn’t reflect the quality of the work we were doing. The new portfolio section does this both with more graphical information and bigger images.
- What we didn’t do — We didn’t finish. As the project got closer to the end, I realized that I couldn’t wait any longer to put what we were creating out there. What we were building was so much better than what we had that I wanted to share it, even before it was “done”. So we still have a team page coming and I suspect some changes to the way we describe marketing services. I mention this last part just to put out there that perhaps the hardest thing with working for yourself is knowing when to pause and stop fiddling with something long enough to let it take flight.
What do you think? Once you have had a chance to check out the site, I would love to hear from you with thoughts, suggestions, broken links (still finding those nasty things).
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