Number eleven: No Cafés
Good day, I'm Troy Dean from Video User Manuals and Agency Mavericks, and this is the 101 Ways to Elevate Yourself and Demand Higher Fees, a practical guide for WordPress consultants to start attracting better quality clients, work on better, more interesting projects, and get paid better fees. Now, let's go elevate.
Number 11, no cafés. Do not meet your potential new client in a café. Why? Because if you meet your potential new client in a café, you send a message that you are a chilled-out, laid-back, easygoing, casual web designer who likes to meet up and have a coffee. That sets two dangerous precedents. First of all, their expectation of your fee structure has then, got to be one that matches their image of you as a laid-back, casual, easygoing web designer, which means your rates and your fees also have to be laid back, casual and easygoing.
And if you're having coffee with them in a café, it instantly sends a message that you're matey with them and that you're going to give them a mate's rate. It also sets a dangerous precedent that they can call you up in the future and say, “Hey, do you want to meet at that café and have a coffee? I've just got a couple of ideas I want to run past you.” I can't tell you the hours of my life that I've lost sitting at a café having coffee with someone who's got an idea and I do that in good faith, on spec, thinking that, “Yeah, well, I'm going to get some work out of this,” The idea never gets off the ground because they haven't done their groundwork and I've just wasted hours of my life giving them all this great information and great knowledge that they're not going to do anything with.
So, meet your potential new client in their office or in your office or, if you don't have an office and they don't have an office, then find a co- working space or a creative hub in your town. They usually have access to shared boardrooms that you can use. If not, then find a boardroom somewhere and pay the 50 bucks an hour and hire the boardroom and make it professional. You are a business consultant, you are helping them build a website, which is going to have an impact on their business, so keep it professional.
Don't meet in cafés. The other thing is, cafés are full of distractions and you want their undivided attention. In the next episode, I'm also going to talk to you about who needs to be at that first client meeting. Until then, go elevate.
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