Business: What to do, and what not to do
What You Shouldn’t Ever Do
Even If You’re Starving
- Write bad checks, even if you can promise that the money will be there.
- Under-value your services. If you are good, they will pay. If they won’t pay, chance are they aren’t worth it.
- Over-promise on what you can deliver. Do what they want, and later on see what you can do to improve their project.
- Under-deliver and let them be disappointed.
- Give unrealistic deadlines. A salesman might say its good for sales, but your development team will hate you, and you will lose them.
- Take flat-rate projects. These are screaming feature creep, and they have probably have no budget for it.
- Allow feature-creep for free. Feature creep is a natural part of a project. Clients don’t know everything that they want, and will refine and expand the project as it goes. This is ok, but not if they don’t pay for it.
- Let the client strangle you. If they can’t be pleased and won’t pay, make sure your company can survive to finish the project. Be willing to drop a client that is strangling your company, its not worth it.
- Let a good idea keep you from getting anything done. Just because something might be better long-term, doesn’t mean now is a good time to do it.
What You Should Do
Especially If You’re Starving
- Keep open conversations with your clients to make sure they’re happy. An unhappy client makes everything harder, try to keep communication open to understand their needs and desires, and to make sure that minor things aren’t becoming major.
Of course, the “Do” list is short because “boss” didn’t make very many good decisions in my opinion.
posted on July 21 2009