Speaker 1: Welcome. I'm so glad that you're here. I'm Jennifer Bourne and today I want to talk about managing revisions. Or more specifically, how to manage scope and keep design revisions in check. Have you ever thought, my client keeps asking for revisions, what do I do? If you've ever had that thought, you know that client services, while rewarding, can also be extremely frustrating and exhausting. If you bend over backwards to accommodate your client too much, you risk losing control of the project scope, setting a dangerous precedent with your client, and eroding your profit margins. If, on the other hand, you refuse even the slightest extra requests, and you stick to your contract with little or no flexibility, you risk damaging the client relationship and potentially losing the client. At Bourne Creative, my design agency, we follow a firm, fair, friendly approach to effectively manage projects and delicately manage clients, so all stakeholders are happy. We are firm in our scope of work, deliverables, boundaries, and terms. This is a professional relationship, there are specific outcomes that must be met, and we take what we do very seriously. We are fair in our pricing process and structure. We want our client relationships to be mutually beneficial and provide value for everyone involved. Our goal is to deliver a quality product and an extraordinary experience for a fair fee. We are friendly in our approach. We use simple, clear, easy-to-understand language, align our actions with a desire to provide care, education, and support, and we plan ahead to accommodate minor client requests so we can give a little extra. The goal of every service provider should be building strong, healthy, positive client relationships, and while most start out that way with both parties really excited to get started, some client relationships quickly devolve during design revisions, leaving the client frustrated and the designer resentful. All problems that arise from design revisions can be attributed to a failure to properly set expectations, to poor communications, or even mismanagement of the client project. Revisions are a normal part of every design process, especially when designing for others, and while you may not be able to eliminate design revisions, you can proactively manage the revision process to reduce the number of requests and to protect your profit margin. Now, there are nine ways that you can better manage design clients and reduce revision requests. Number one, you have to understand that design is subjective. While there's research, planning, and strategy guiding the design of the project, design itself is still subjective. No matter how hard you work on a concept, the client will have opinions. They may not agree with your decision or like your work, or they may question your choices, and there you're paying clients, so they have that right. You can take client feedback personally. Client input on design has nothing to do with you and everything to do with their own history, experiences, and preferences. Your job is to be the champion of the design, to keep the conversation focused on the goals of the project and remind the client that it shouldn't be about what they like personally, it should be about what will resonate best with their audience. Number two, set expectations and boundaries for revisions. One of the primary things I cover in my course, Profitable Project Plan, is that you must set expectations and boundaries early, right? As early as possible in the client relationship. Beginning with your contract, outline exactly how many rounds of revisions are included with the project and what happens if the client needs additional revisions. Outline what change orders are and how they are managed. Then, throughout the design process, continue to communicate with your client where they're at and how many revisions they have left. When you provide the initial design concepts, remind the client that they have three rounds of revisions available to reach the final design. When you provide the second drafts, remind the client that they have two more rounds of revisions left to reach the final design. When you send over the next draft, let the client know that under your current agreement, this is the last round of revisions that they have to make to reach the final design. Explain to your clients, well the third thing you have to do, is explain to your clients what a round of revisions actually is. Your client isn't a designer. They didn't go to design school and get a degree in graphic design and they haven't been working as a designer for years. You need to assume that your client has no idea what the phrase round of revisions actually means. Be sure to take the time to explain that the revision process is meant to move the design closer and closer to the final design and let them know what a round of revisions actually is. That the designer submits design drafts for review. The client reviews the drafts and gathers feedback. The client provides the designer all of the feedback at one time. The designer asks any questions needed and makes revisions. Then the designer sends new proofs to review. You also need to educate your client on the differences between a major and a minor revision. The difference between relaying out an entire page or just changing a sentence or a photo. This way your client knows that not all design revisions are created equal. Now here's a quick tip. When a client provides feedback or revisions, don't make them immediately. First, review their feedback and see if it warrants a conversation or it needs to have a little bit more discussion. Confirm that this is all the changes they have at this time. And when you do this, you'll often find that the client just shot you over some things that they thought but they haven't even talked to the rest of their team yet or they haven't gotten feedback from other stakeholders. Holding off on making the revisions and making sure that this is all the revisions for this round will help reduce the total number of revisions, keep your project scope under control and help avoid having to go back to the client with a change order for extra revisions. Now the fourth thing is present the design concepts. When I first began freelancing, I would mock up the initial design concepts, send them off to the client and wait for feedback. This approach put my clients in a really awkward position of providing feedback on the design with absolutely no context. And it created extra work for me to manage all sorts of crazy revisions requests because most of them made no sense. The clients who send you back ridiculous revisions requests aren't usually wrong. They're just operating with no context or little context and they're doing their best to guess at what might work. When you take the time to actually present your design concepts, either in person or through video chat or even over the phone or the web, you have the opportunity to explain the design strategy. The thinking behind the design. You have the opportunity to share your thought process behind why you chose to do specific things. Why certain elements were designed a certain way. Why you chose a specific color. And you can tie those design decisions to immediate project goals and the client's long-term business goals. When you can tie your design decisions into helping your clients achieve their goals, they're going to make fewer revision requests because they want to achieve those goals. When your client has context for the design and they understand why those design decisions were made from a business perspective, they're a lot less likely to second-guess you as well. Number five, you need to plan ahead to accommodate extra requests. It's inevitable your client is going to ask for something that's outside of scope. Don't make their life difficult immediately by demanding a change order and additional fees. If the request is minor and they've been a great client, take care of it as a gesture of goodwill. One of the things that I like to do is plan for generosity in advance. I include a few hours of bonus time in client projects so I have the ability to accommodate extra requests or extra revisions happily saying yes because I know it's not going to affect my profit margin. The key here is managing the accommodation so it doesn't lead to expectations of more free work. I say something like, sure, I'm more than happy to take care of that for you, no problem. Now, this request is out of scope, so please understand that future requests are going to require a change order. So I let them know I'm happy to do this at no charge, but anything in the future we'll need to address with a change order. Number six, use your contracts as a positive tool, not just as an enforcer for your terms and conditions. Too many agencies create a contract, send it to the client, and never talk about it again until there's a problem. This approach turns any reference of your contract into a negative experience and it starts to associate the contract with problems. Instead, use your contract as a positive client management tool. Reference your contract, the terms, the scope of work throughout your project when things are going well. That way, if you do encounter a little bit of a client challenge, you can leverage the contract and reference it without angering your client or immediately creating negative feelings. Number seven, challenge your client. It is easy to just make whatever changes the client wants because it makes the client happy. This is common, right? You want to make your client happy, so you say, well, I'll make any change that you want. It can feel like the right way to manage your client because you're putting the client in control of their website and the client loves you because you gave them exactly what they wanted and did everything they asked. Unfortunately, this also often results in poor performing final products and then the client is upset because their website isn't producing the results that they want and they're wondering what went wrong. When they come back and ask you and you answer, I did everything you asked, you've actually failed to be a design leader. Your client doesn't know what they don't know and what your client wants may not align with what they need for the project to be successful. You can't be afraid to challenge your clients. It's the designer's job to lead the client through the design process and that means stepping up and challenging the client when necessary and facilitating critical conversations about the project to protect the integrity of the design strategy. Just remember to approach the client in a fair, firm, and friendly way. Be positive and helpful. Don't come at it from a place of anger or resentment or frustration. And finally, number eight, own your mistakes. If a misunderstanding of your client or the scope of work, the goals, or anything else results in the initial design drafts completely missing the mark, don't get defensive. Take a moment to settle yourself and then work to discover where the communication breakdown happened and what needs to be fixed. Own your mistake and do the redesign without using up one of your client's rounds of revisions. Now, number nine, halt the project if needed. You can't be afraid to put on the brakes. While you can strive to make every client experience an extraordinary one, there are going to be clients that are simply impossible to satisfy. If your client is out of control and they're not responding well to your client management and the project and the situation is causing too much resentment, too much frustration, and too much stress, you can't be afraid to halt the project. Step up, put a hard stop on the work, and part ways. You're really doing the best thing for your client and for yourself at this point. You're protecting your sanity and your stress levels, and you're giving the client the opportunity to move on and work with a provider who may be a better fit. Remember, firm, fair, and friendly. While it's common to hear about bad clients, it's important for designers, agencies, and freelancers of all types to understand that most clients aren't bad clients. In fact, most bad client situations, it's not because the client was bad. It's because the client management was bad. Usually, if a client is requesting too many revisions, asking for work out of scope, or making ridiculous requests, they're doing so because you failed to understand the design is subjective, you failed to set clear expectations and boundaries, explain what revisions are, present the design concepts well, you haven't used your contract as a positive tool, challenged the client or stood up to them when needed to be the champion of your design, you haven't owned your mistakes or halted the project if needed. These things cause big problems and often lead to the scope of work and design revisions getting out of control. Remember, you are being hired to serve. That's why it's called client services. To effectively manage the scope of work and keep design revisions in check, you need to be firm, fair, and friendly in your service and client management. And you need to communicate as clearly as possible every step of the way. If you can do that, you can keep your project scope in check, you can keep your design revisions under control, and you can reach final design faster than ever before. Thanks for joining me today. If you liked what you've seen, please subscribe. Until next time, thanks a lot and have a great day.