Speaker 1: If you've ever had questions about what you need to put in your contract, this is a video for you. Hey, you. My name is Brandi Morgan. Welcome to my channel or welcome back to my channel. A little bit of change of scenery. Josh is working upstairs in the office, so I am down here in our living room filming today. I'm going to be doing a side by side, going over a contract that I use all the time with my clients and also with future clients as a freelancer slash agency owner. Please, if you like this video, give it a thumbs up. And don't forget to subscribe to my channel below. I would be greatly appreciative. And let's jump into this video. This video has been highly requested for a while. And this is all about freelance contracts. If you are a freelancer, I highly recommend checking out chapters for this particular video. If there's something that you have a question on, it's really specific. I tried to break it out the way the contract looks. So I have a contract pulled up right here that I use for my business. And with all my clients, I am going to do a side by side on the computer, whatever you're watching this on. So you can take a look at what I'm actually talking about going over. Disclaimer, I am not a lawyer. I do not have any sort of legal background. So if you are a business owner, freelancer, entrepreneur, it is always important to make sure that you have your contracts looked at by some legal representation. There are many resources online that do this. And you can actually get contracts through legal third parties that sell them on the Internet. But this is a contract that I use. And I'm going to be going over key things that you want to make sure that you have on your contract. Number one, at the very top, you are going to see where it says contractor and company. You are the contractor. So you would put your name or your company's name. If you have an agency like I do, that's what I do business under. That is what you would put right there. The second part where it says company, this would be the company name that you are going into business and that will be signing that contract. The very first sentence, you are going to put the date on when this goes into effect. Whatever you have agreed on with said company, that is the date that you would put there. Usually the date that you are sending this over to them or the date that you are starting the work. The next thing, once again, company name is their name and the contractor is your name or your business. And that is going to be how it is referred to in the whole contract. The first part that is outlined in this particular contract is services. Now, services are going to be what services are you providing for said company? Now, this part can be as vague or as detailed as you want it. For myself, depending on what type of contract it is, I like to be specific on the services that I am providing for my clients. The reason why is because if there's any question on what I should or should not be doing, I have a legal copy or a written copy of what that is and I can refer back to. In my case, I say be specific and I will give you guys examples. If you are providing social media work and you would just put social media, that is extremely vague, right? So you would want to put copywriting, photo editing, graphic design, engagement, responding to direct messages, the different platforms you're going to be managing. I like to keep it specific like that. So there really isn't any question of what work you're doing and work that they're expecting you to do. The next part is change orders. If you are in the software development, web development space or design space, this should be very familiar with you. Change orders are changes that the client is requesting for you to do. So if you have outlined the scope of work to build a website for them, oftentimes you're going to design it, show them the design and most likely nine times out of ten, comment below if you're a web developer, you have gone through this. Change orders with a client are a real thing. But this actually sort of kind of saves your booty because you can outline how many change orders they get. This is extremely important because if there's going to continue back and forth and the change orders keep mounting and mounting and mounting, it's going to add to the time and the scope of work that you are doing. And if that's not outlined in the contract, you can lose money on it. So make sure you have that outline and it's actually talked with and talked through with that client and that company so they know expectations going in. But a change order could be if they don't like the graphics, the animation, the copy, whatever it is on the website or the software product or even the branding that you're doing for a company. So make sure you have the number of change orders outlined in your contract and make sure you actually go over that specifically with them so they're aware of the expectations that they have for you and that you have for what you're doing for them. All right. The third part, compensation. How much money are you making as you're doing this project? It is important to break it down hourly, but also if you are doing a monthly retainer, it's good to have a tied number of hours to that sum of money. Does that make sense? Let me know if it doesn't in the comments, but I'll try to clear it up right now. So if you're doing work for somebody and you charge $50 an hour, but you decide when you're working with them that it is going to be on a retainer basis, you would then have that lump sum, but you would still want to tie whether that's 10 to 20 hours a week or a month associated with whatever that retainer value is. The reason why is so they have a reasonable expectations. The second part of compensation is payment. When are you expecting payment and when should they expect to pay you? For myself and my contracts, I like to put 10 business days. Once they get my invoice, they then have 10 business days, which is roughly two weeks to pay me. And the reason why I have it up as 10 business days is I have people that work for me that I am in charge of paying. And in the contracts and people work for me, I do 30 days, but I usually pay them ahead of time. But that gives me buffer then to pay my employees and my contractors, as well as getting my payments on time from my clients and the companies that I work with. So you want to make sure that you have that outlined in here and that they see that and they agree upon it. I think 10 business days is super reasonable because a lot of times if you're on 30, 60 days, because I've had contracts like that, it is extremely hard to plan your future of your freelance or maybe your agency business. Like I'm in the process of growing an agency, which means I need to know when I'm getting paid so I can pay all the other people. So 30 to 60 day invoices are really, really hard and it's hard to manage those. So in the contract yourself, make sure you agree upon a payment timeline that works for you. A great tool to use for yourself and for the companies is bill.com. It's free to use, but they can actually just set up payments directly through there when you send your invoices through there. The next part that you'll see in the compensation is taxes. This is something that falls on you as a contractor. When you are hired as a contractor for a company, you are required for your own taxes. This means you should have a separate savings account. Or this is how I do it. I have my business savings account where I put money away from every check that I get so I know how much I have to pay in taxes, whether that's quarterly or yearly. So this is something that I would recommend doing. But you as a business owner, freelancer, contractor, taxes are going to fall on you. The next part that you are looking at is expenses. If you are a videographer, designer, you're going to be using all sorts of tools. Or if you're in the web development space or software space, there's probably a lot of things that you're going to be using that the client may need to know about ahead of time, whether that's hosting or maybe it's a GitHub account. So you can store all the code because it belongs to them, whatever it is. Or if you're using a tool that maybe they're going to need access to, whether it's agreed upon or not, it needs to be discussed with them. And if it's an expense that they need to pay, that's something that you need to talk with them about and have it outlined in your contract. No matter what type of work it is that you do, this type of stuff needs to be approved ahead of time and it needs to be thought out ahead of time. So if you are setting up like servers or hosting, that needs to be outlined in the proposal and it needs to be agreed upon in the scope of work that you're providing. And those expenses need to be researched, planned and approved ahead of time. And you need to outline them here in the contract that those expenses fall on the client. Something else to keep in mind when you're doing this is when you are creating accounts for other people, whether that's on, you know, servers, hosting, you need to be able to do it in an email that they provide so it's fully theirs and they have access to it. Side note. The rest of the contract, read on through, breeze through it. But the next thing that I want to bring to your attention is term, which is number eight. This means how long is this contract valid? This is also something that needs to be agreed upon with this company. Are you doing a three month project to a six month project? Or is this an ongoing retainer that there is no end date? It's just an ongoing thing that needs to be outlined in the term spot. But that date needs to be here in the contract. And if they need you to extend it, this thing would then need to be modified and amended on that agreed upon date. The next part that you want to look at is termination. This is really, really, really important. And this can really save you a lot of heartache. You need to have it outlined when you can terminate the project or they can terminate the project. I outline they have 30 days. I think this is extremely reasonable to give somebody 30 day notice, whether you're not happy with the work that you're doing or maybe you and the company and client don't see eye to eye or it's not working. You have a 30 day out. Or if the company is not happy with the work that you are doing and providing, they also need to give you a 30 day notice so that you can get things wrapped up and pass back to them so they can kind of deal with what they want to do with that project. But a 30 day termination notice is enough time for both parties to wrap up the project and get it in to the most capable hands to pass it off to. And lastly, the very bottom thing is the signatures. Make sure you sign it, make sure you date it, make sure they sign it and they date it. What I like to do is once I have my contract written, I send it to them to have them sign first. This way they have a chance to go over it if they have any questions or changes that they want made to it. You can go ahead and do that. Send them the changes. They'll sign and date it and then you go ahead and sign and date it. Then make sure you guys both have a copy that there's both signatures and dates on it. And what I do is I actually have a contract folder on my computer where I house all my contracts and they're organized by the year. This is extremely important to do and to have and to make sure you're updating these because I've had contracts with customers that are ongoing years and years because they're still my client. So you want to make sure that you're updating them at all times to make sure that you have your basis covered. All right, I hope that explained everything that kind of goes into a contract. Once again, I'm not a lawyer. I do not have a legal background. I do recommend talking to a lawyer, especially if you are an agency or you're trying to build an agency. You want to make sure you have your butt covered when it comes to any type of legalese stuff going on with your business. I hope you like this video. Please give it a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe to my channel and be sure to stay tuned for more videos coming on all things freelance and creating the life that you want. Thank you.