Speaker 1: Hello, Architect Nation. Enoch Sears here, founder and publisher of Business of Architecture. And in today's video, we're going to discuss how to manage client expectations. Now, if you run an architecture firm, managing client expectations can be pretty difficult because clients' expectations are usually pretty high and they don't necessarily have a big understanding of what it takes to deliver a project. And in addition, they don't understand that things are fluid and things are in motion. And sometimes things might get caught up in the planning department or there may be some zoning issue that comes up that is out of your control. So how do you manage these expectations so that if a hiccup does happen, your clients are cool with it, they're okay. Not only that, but you can actually charge them for any changes and extra services that you have to implement. So I recently had an experience. I recently had to rush print my new book that's not actually out yet. I just printed some pre-release copies because the people over at Howes.com, they reached out to me. They said, Enoch, we'd like to give away something from you at our business. And I said, yeah, I'd love to. And they said, yeah, I'd love to. And I said, yeah, I'd love to. And they said, yeah, I'd love to. And I said, yeah, I'd love to. And I said, yeah, booth at the AI 2019 convention. So I racked my brain. I said, well, I have my book social media for architects, but that's not ready for a print edition yet. But I do have another book that I've been working on the architects marketing field guide. Right. And so I went ahead and I got that that book ready to be published. I sent it into this great place called 20, 48 hour books. I found them online because they have a quick turnaround and I could rush ship the books to Las Vegas where the convention is going to be. Now, here's something interesting that happened during this process. And this is a key takeaway that you can use in your work with architecture clients to help manage their expectations. So the first manuscript that I submitted, there happened to be a couple errors in it that they caught and they wrote me back and they said, hey, we noticed that a couple of the subheadings in your chapters are at the very bottom of the page. Right. You know, so there's like a subheading at the very bottom of the page and you have to flip the page and there's the text. Obviously, that doesn't make sense. I don't want to have that, even though it's a pre-release copy and there's still going to be some mistakes in there. I at least want to get something that's like pretty dang good. Ninety, ninety percent of the way there. Right. So I said, OK, cool. Here's the here's the updated file. Can you change that? Can you still meet your deadline? They said, yes, you can. But here's the thing, said modifying the file is going to be an extra fifty dollar charge. And when I heard that, I said, OK, I get it. Look, it was my mistake. I screwed up. And so I understand the extra charge. But here's the thing. She followed up and she said, however, what I will send you is a get out of jail free card. I will send you a get out of jail free card. What this means is if you read our terms again and you just click that, you agree to them. We will waive that fee and we'll proceed with the order. So when I got that, I got an email that had a little get out of jail free card. It was this cool little kind of graphic that looked like a look like a little ticket right from Monopoly or something like that. And below it, there were basically three statements that I had to read and I had to confirm that I agreed to them. And the statements were something like, you know, I understand that I've submitted my manuscript, that it's OK, that when I approve the proof that we're going to print and if there's any changes or if there's any mistakes, that that's on you, it's not on us. Right. And there were a couple of the things that I had to confirm that I had to confirm that I had to confirm that I had to confirm things like that, where they're just basically they're just setting the expectations for what they can deliver. They're delineating and making it very, very clear. So you have you have things in your contract that hopefully you have a very tight list of things that you will do and that you won't during during the process. And I encourage you to be able to break that conversation early. So if a client starts to go off the path, if they start to request something extra, this is a great time for you to say, absolutely, we can do that. It's going to be an extra X number of dollars. Boom. If you're feeling generous. Right. This is the first the first deviation from what we agreed. We'll go ahead and we'll give you a get out of jail free card. But please read over these again, agree to them, confirm, send that back to me and we'll move along with the project. Right. So you accomplish two things. Number one, you set the expectations to let them know what will and what won't be tolerated. Number two, you're actually able to do them a favor and help establish some goodwill there by waiving the fee. All right. So let me let me know what you think about this strategy. I'd love to know if you're using something similar in your firm. You've got to make sure at the very beginning of the project that these expectations are very, very clear. Right. So what I would have you ask, think about and consider today is where in your process of working with your clients, are there gray areas or things that you are not commuting communicating correctly? Where are your projects going out of scope and over budget and you're possibly even losing money on them because you haven't set the expectations clearly? All right. Let me know your thoughts in the comments on this page. And as always, Carpe Diem. This is Enoch over and out.