Number fifty-eight: Stick to the proposal
Good day, I'm Troy Dane from Video User Manuals and W.P. Elevation 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 58: Stick to the proposal. I know I've kind of touched on this in some other videos, but what we see happening all the time is a proposal gets submitted and it gets approved, and then the project that you end up building is quite different to what it was you were proposing. There are all these added features and there's all this new stuff that you end up building and it's really hard to charge extra for that because the client just expects that that would have been included.
Maybe it wasn't outlined in the proposal. Maybe the proposal was a bit vague. Maybe the work wasn't done right up front to make sure that you and the client were on the same page. It's really important that you stick to the proposal and say, “Here is the project that we agreed on. Here is the budget we agreed on. Here is the time frame that we agreed on. We really need to stick to this proposal. If things have changed, then I need to change this proposal. I need to go back and we need to revisit the proposal and I need to give you a new quote because, you know, it sounds like things have changed.”
So, a couple of ways that I find it easy to stick to the proposal is to, instead of trying to write a proposal that covers off, you know, every single possibility, I like to write a proposal for Y-framing. Or I might write a proposal for building an attractive prototype. Hey look, I'm not really sure what this project is going to cost at this stage. It sounds like it could be quite complex. But what I can do is give you a proposal to build an interactive prototype. It's a much lower cost that building the website. But what it will allow us to do is get on the same page and answer all these questions, rather than try to talk about it or communicate it.
So, I might just submit a proposal to build an attractive prototype. Once we've built an attractive prototype, I'll then submit a proposal to build a website based on that prototype. So your proposals are smaller. They're much more specific rather than trying to write a proposal that covers a massive membership e-commerce site when the client doesn't really know what they want and the goal posts might move.
So, once the proposal has been submitted and approved, make sure you stick to it and it's one way of keeping on track. After all, it is a documentation of what you and the client agreed to. That's what a proposal is. You have a problem, here's how I propose to solve that problem. You've agreed to that proposal so we need to stick to it because we both agreed to it.
In the next video, you're going to learn why champagne and chocolates are important. Until then, go elevate.
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