Blue Flavor

Concrete and Shadow by D. Keith Robinson

Working With Blue Flavor, Part One: Engaging The Team

May 14th, 2008 at 1:46 p.m.

Welcome to the first part in what (I think) will be a five part series about how to work with a design agency — and specifically about how to work with Blue Flavor.

We’re often asked about things like process (something I’ve written and spoken quite a bit about), how we deal with problem clients, how we deal with the sales process and RFPs, etc. For some reason it seems like we shouldn’t talk about this stuff openly and to be honest, I’m not sure why that is. So I’m just going to do it.

About This Series.

This series will cover how to engage us to work on your project, how our process functions, what happens when we run into big problems, how to give feedback and enable us to do the best job possible, and how to cooperate with us to ensure a successful outcome.

These will probably be pretty weighty articles. I’m going to try to dump into them as many lessons learned, observations, reservations, truths and revelations as I can. I want to give potential clients (and anyone else who’s interested) an honest and complete look into how we work and how to best work with us.

Ok, enough preamble (for now) — let’s get to it. First up, let’s talk about how we handle sales and how you can engage us to work on your project.

Our Philosophy On Business Development.

Before I get into the details, I’d like to talk a bit about how we handle sales, at least as of the time of this writing. Before Brian and Cyndi left the company, Brian handled most of the business development and he generally enjoyed doing it. He is much more of a salesman than anyone else here at Blue Flavor and in many ways he was a natural.

This is not the case with either Nick or me, the remaining principals. Nick doesn’t mind doing business development, but I generally abhor it. When Brian left we struggled a bit to keep our new business funnel flowing. With Tiffani’s help we were able to get a basic handle on it, but we found out pretty quickly that none of us liked doing traditional “sales” work.

So we don’t do sales, and I think that’s ok — it seems to be working out fine. What we do try to do is gather as much information from a potential client as we can and then do our best to explain how we can help. Assuming we’re all on the same page, we then tie that scope to a cost and timeframe and present it. Simple? Not exactly, but we try to make it as easy as we can.

The main reason for keeping it simple is we like to work, rather than spend our days selling our services. We’re a small company of craftspeople and we’re happiest when helping our clients by doing actual work. None of us will be happy doing sales all the time.

One of the reasons why I’m writing this post is to give potential clients a starting point in what can be a confusing process. My goal is to set the expectation up front that we’re more interested in helping our clients solve design problems than we are going through 40-page RPFs or dealing with legal issues. We’re designers, communicators, problem-solvers, developers, etc. We’re not salespeople.

So, our philosophy?

  • Listen to your problems and needs.
  • Tell you how we can help.
  • Tell you how much it’ll cost and how long it’ll take.
  • Begin building a relationship.
  • No selling.
  • No smoke and mirrors.
  • No empty promises.

Of course real life is more complicated, but this is a good a place to start. Speaking of starting, you might be wondering what we do and how we can help you.

What Does Blue Flavor Do?

Our primary focus is design. Design for web sites, web applications and the mobile web. We do interface design, information architecture, information design, visual design for online media, and things like that. Our secondary focuses are strategy (marketing, social media, content, etc.) and development (xhtml/css, CMS development and deployment, etc.).

At the moment we’re much more focused on design than we are development, although this may change in the future. We’re thinking about fleshing out our development resources to better service our clients, but for now we just don’t have enough people to take on a whole lot of development work.

Our Value Proposition.

We believe firmly that design expertise can make all the difference in the success of a product, brand, web site, etc. Our value lies in bringing great talent, years of experience and lots and lots of elbow grease to bear on our clients’ problems. We’ve seen time and time again, and can prove, that the work we do helps our clients succeed. The vast majority are very happy with the work we’ve done, and can show how we’ve helped them in their own initiatives.

We’re passionate about design and want to work with people who value that passion.

A Typical Project.

We work on a wide variety of projects, but our most common work falls into two basic categories: the end-to-end project and the IA/Design/Templates project. These are typically our most successful projects, and we do an equal measure of each.

An “end-to-end” project involves a redesign or initial design of a web site or application. I’ll go into more detail about this in further installments of this series, but in general the end-to-end project starts with a discovery and information architecture/interaction design phase, and ends with a fully-realized web site or application.

Our other most common project is similar, but has a different end point. We often work with folks who have internal development resources. In these cases we usually hand off web standards-based templates for the client’s internal developers to work with.

Engaging Blue Flavor. How to begin.

Ok, I’ve given you an idea of what we can do and what our typical projects look like. Let’s assume you’re interested. What do you do now?

Well, the best idea would be to fill out our contact form and give us a clear overview of your project. We’re usually looking for something easy to read, but chock-full of good information about you and your project. If we have that up front, it’s easier for us to gauge whether or not your project would be a good fit. That’s important. A good fit can make a world of difference!

Of course, you could just call us. Or send an e-mail. That works too, but in my experience having a great snapshot of the project in a digital format before we talk via phone or in person helps a ton.

We’re working on ways to better extract that initial information and get to know potential clients, and I’ll be the first to admit that this is a difficult process. We’re generally happy to cater to a potential client’s needs, as long as we can clearly see early on that the project is one we’d be successful at.

A good, clear introduction to you, your team, your project, and your company — without lots of fluff or added nonsense — is a great place to start.

Engaging Blue Flavor. How NOT to begin.

Here’s a list of a few things that will probably prevent us from pursuing your project:

  • A hefty or complicated RFP. We generally don’t look at most RFPs unless we either know you already or have some particular interest in your project. The typical RFP process is simply too time and effort-consuming and often not worth the effort. I think you’ll find that many smaller design shops will say the same. (We don’t have anything against the idea of an RFP, but they’re generally not done in such a way as to make them simple to deal with.)
  • Complicated legal. We like to keep our contracts lean and generally devoid of legal wrangling.
  • An unclear scope. While we’re fine helping people discover the true scope of their projects, sometimes we come across people who have very little idea of what they’re looking for. This is usually a red flag.
  • No budget. We feel that if you’re serious about hiring us, you’ll have some idea of what you’d be willing to spend.

We’re willing to take at least some stab at sorting these things out and try to get in touch with everyone who shows interest in us. But the take away point here is that the more prepared a potential client is coming in, the more likely we’ll be able to help him or her out.

The Estimation Process

The next step we take after an initial needs assessment is to let our potential client ask us questions and get to know us better. Then, as soon as they’re comfortable and ready, we send them an estimate.

The initial estimate entails a simple cost/services break down, split into phases. We take the scope as we understand it and tie it to our our services, deliverables, and project phases, which we then price out based on an hourly rate. If the project is straightforward and the potential client has come prepared, our estimates come out pretty accurate.

Most of the time we come in under our estimated cost and/or over-deliver, especially if we’re working on one of our typical projects. But it depends. The scope and estimation process can be tricky, especially when client expectations are thrown into the mix.

We do our very best to explain clearly and in as much detail as possible the scope of what we’ll be doing and delivering. We actually go out of our way to set expectations before we begin work; however, we’ll occasionally have situations where we find out down the road that the expectations we set don’t match up with our client’s. I’ll talk about this in an upcoming installment of this series. For now it’s important to note that potential clients have some responsibility to read and fully grasp the scope we outline in our estimates.

I can’t stress enough that the main issues we have with clients arise when they don’t fully understand the scope we’ve agreed upon. This can, and should, be cleared up before we enter into a formal relationship. We do our best to ensure our clients have taken time to read and understand our estimates, since trying to re-set initial expectations after the project begins can be very tricky.

The bottom line when it comes to our estimates is that we try and gauge the work that needs to be done and the processes, deliverables and timeframes needed to achieve a successful outcome. We multiply this with our hourly rate to generate totals for each phase and and a cost estimate for the entire project.

It’s really as simple as that. We generally don’t negotiate on price (or quality, we try to do our best work all the time), but we can be pretty flexible on scope, depending on the situation.

From Estimate to Project.

So, what’s next? Well, if the potential client is ok with our scope, timelines, and estimate they usually want to check our references and do some due diligence. Once that is done it’s just a matter of working out any legal and/or payment details before pulling the trigger.

As I mentioned, we try to avoid legal wrangling and it’s true that too much can be a deal breaker. We like to work, not deal with our lawyers. Our contracts are set up to be easy to get through and we’re flexible on most things.

Ownership, for example, comes up quite a bit. It’s our belief, in most cases, that a client owns whatever he/she pays for. We don’t have complicated licensing clauses or anything like that. I don’t know why we would. It’s like hiring someone to build a house for you — they might learn a new technique they’ll bring to another project, but you own the house and can do with it what you like once it’s done.

When it comes to legal the only things we consistently have problems with are extreme changes to our payment terms. We can be somewhat flexible there, but we expect to be paid for the work we do. On time. No exceptions.

Occasionally we’ll come across someone who wants to go to great lengths, legally, to protect themselves from us and frankly, we usually pass on the work if the legal is over my head and/or too complicated. The outcome is usually not worth the effort, since those kinds of jobs tend to go sideways anyway.

Once the legal issues are ironed out, we ask for a pre-payment (which varies depending on whether the project is priced out on an hourly or per-project basis) and get our estimate turned into a signed job order. We then dedicate resources and schedule a kick-off meeting.

A Bit About Resourcing.

One of the hardest parts of my job is resourcing. The reason why? It’s impossible to tell how long it’ll take to get from an initial new business inquiry to kick-off. I have to then figure out how to fit new projects into our schedule without screwing up existing projects. This process is often complicated by delays on the client’s side, vacations and other scheduling conflicts.

A few general rules of thumb we stick to:

  • Existing clients are the priority. Always.
  • I never firmly assign resources or schedule a project until I’ve got a pre-payment and signed job order. The sooner I get that, the sooner we’re all good to go.
  • If you tell me you want to start next week and then put the project on hold for a few weeks while you sort out legal or something on your end, I can’t guarantee you’ll start right away. I have this kind of conversation often.
  • We don’t legally agree to deadlines or timeframes of any sort. Ever. In fact, we’re pretty wary about agreeing to anything time-based at all. In my experience we’re not usually the cause of a delay.
  • The more complicated your project is, the longer it’s going to take. This should be obvious, but sometimes it’s not.
  • Development projects are generally hard for us to resource since we’ve got less redundancy there.
  • I do my very best to stick to the original resources I’ve slated for a project, but sometimes I need to move them around. However, I never do this mid-phase.

The Kick-off

We usually like to do a kick-off meeting to get a project going. Most of the time we conduct these virtually, though we prefer face-to-face meetings when possible. In the kick-off meeting we go over the scope in detail, set down the initial schedule, and nail down resources. At this point we consider the project a full-on go!

Next Time: Our Process

Whew, that was a lot to cover! I hope this is helpful to someone out there. People always ask us about this stuff, so I thought it might be good to talk about it for the benefit of our potential (and existing) clients and for anyone else who might be interested.

I think it’s probably clear that much of our process is fluid, and we are able to make many exceptions to what I’ve outlined here. Every client is different and needs a tailored approach (I’ll talk about that quite a bit more next time). There is no “one-size-fits-all” method for turning a lead into a client.

The Bottom Line.

The Bottom Line? The best projects result from a great relationship. If a potential client comes to us prepared and understands the value of what we do, and if our expectations are well matched, the relationship will start off on good footing and will almost always result in a project that everyone involved is happy with.

Keith Robinson

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