Welcome to another episode of Silence is Golden where Troy and Simon give away invaluable tips for your business.
Tired of chasing people for money? Well, look no further than this week's episode where we talk about how to avoid this problem and what tools to use for payments. We also bring you the latest WordPress news as well as some amazing articles around mindset.
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Stuff That Happened
Material Theming Is Google’s Ambitious New Design Tool
Simon is a big fan of material design from Google and now they have just announced a major new initiative called Material Theming. This allows companies to easily apply their own colours, typefaces, shapes, and other branding elements directly to an interface. Find out more here.
How to Create a Custom Settings Panel in WooCommerce
This is a great tutorial from EnvatoTuts about creating a custom panel for product data and adding some custom fields to it. It also shows you how to use those custom fields on the front end and save their values to customer orders. It is easy to follow and a good way to get your head around some PHP functions.
4 Tips for Overcoming Your Greatest Challenge as a Freelancer
How do you sell the thing you do? Sales can be pretty hard and not many people like doing it. This article talks about actively finding new clients and that sales can be a predictable process rather than something to be fearful of.
Don't forget – make sure you are dedicating some of your time to getting new business each week.
Troy isn’t a big fan of selling but he loves marketing. So the better at marketing you are, the less selling you need to do. Marketing is designed to pull people in by putting a message out there and getting the people to come to you. Whereas sales is when you're pitching at someone. In other words- attracting vs pitching.
19 Harsh Truths You Don’t Want To Hear But Must
Simon found this article quite powerful. Some of these truths will really hit home and whip you into shape. It tells us to stop complaining, get on with your dreams and make it happen.
This Pisses Me Off
Both Troy and Simon get pissed off when web developers do small changes for clients for free after finishing the website. If you are doing this you can’t sustain your business or be profitable. You need to be charging for what you do.
Troys asks – do you get in an uber to go to the local shop and say it was only a little trip so you don't have to pay?
Get them on a care plan… stat! If you don’t charge them for the small changes they won't even need to bother with a care plan!
Let’s Get Unstuck
From the Facebook group this week, Michael wrote:
I am having an issue with a client whom I granted to pay the invoice back in (much smaller) instalments. I granted then to hold a pause of 6 months, but no payments followed at all. The application was taken down because I also did the hosting as separate service. Legal assistance might help, we speak about 30.000 Euro that still are due, but the point here seems not to get into this situation or accepting work that is over the economic capacity of clients.
Troy used to charge 50% up front and 50% on delivery. However, he realised that there were clients who would disappear at the end of a project and you end up out of pocket. So now he does 50% up front, 20% on the prototype and 20% on delivery and the final 10% when it goes live.
If the client disappears before that last 10% is paid then that part is just profit so you won’t have lost anything.
What About When a Client Says They Don’t Have the Money?
Warning! Troy gets very passionate here people… He says that the client's economic problems are not yours. “You are not a financial advisor. Just stop caring! We are in business, not community service.”
Well said!
The Golden Nugget
Getting Paid
You are in control of how you can get people to pay you. If someone has an issue with paying you even the 50% up front then it’s a major red flag.
Workflow on Getting Paid
1. Provide proposal / quote / estimate
2. Send invoice
3. Invoice follow-ups
4. Get paid
5. Start work
6. Finish work
7. Get approval
8. Get paid
9. Launch live
We will say it again – don’t start anything until you are paid.
Payment Options
Periodic Payment via Credit Card
Set up a periodic payment by credit. Eg. For a $9,000 website that will be built over 3 months, you would set up a monthly recurring charge of $3,000. It takes all the feelings out of the payment process.
50% Payments
This is good for customisations for existing sites. Get a payment upfront and a payment prior to launching the feature or change.
Estimate range Eg. 5 – 7 hours.
50% upfront
50% prior to launching live
Sprints
Pay for 2 weeks of your team's time. Eg. $10k for a 2-week sprint.
Tools for Getting Paid
- Project briefs: Google Docs
- Estimates: Google Docs / Xero
- Bookkeeping & Invoicing: Xero + Stripe
- Recurring payments: WooCommerce Subscriptions + Stripe
- Time tracking and margins: Harvest
Check out this awesome doc that we prepared earlier on how to get paid.
Tool of the Week
With WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can create and manage products with recurring payments. So you can set up care plan pages pretty easily. They add it to the cart and then you charge them via subscription and payments come out automatically.
Wrap Up
That's it for this week's show. Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click on the “Notifications” bell so you will know when our new tutorials and shows get published. Until next time… (you know the slogan)… Knowledge is Power and Silence is Golden.
