You Can’t Actually Get a Client to Approve EVERYTHING on One Call, Can You?
Finish a client project in 2 days?? Are you kidding??
Nope.
Way back when I was a struggling agency owner - charging way too little for way too much - I figured there just HAD to be another way to make more money, and actually enjoy my work again.
My partner Steve and I figured that doing what every other agency does is a great way to stay stuck.
You’re probably right there yourself.
Your projects go on for a VERY long time. And then you have multiple client meetings where you go out of scope, or there’s another revision, or there’s more ‘feedback’.
Or my favorite - ‘Hey, could you just do this one thing, ‘cos you’re so great…’
At that point, a few things start to happen.
You get ‘fatigue’ - the more time you spend working on something, the less and less excited about it you get.
Your clients feel the same. Other things take priority - they don’t meet their deadlines to you when they’ve got fires to put out or end up working on other stuff.
This whole time you’re trying to figure out what they mean, and then they start tweaking things that don’t matter, and they insist on this thing and that thing…
In the end, you’re like ‘Whatever, let me just finish this, I don’t care anymore.’
And that sucks. When you’re a creative, you really don’t want to put out some hodge-podge thing that you don’t even want to put your name to.
What’s worse? You’re counting on that money coming in from this timesuck client, but you’re only getting paid after a certain ‘phase’ and the client is dragging that out. You get resentful, you have to chase them…
Sound familiar?
One day, Steve said to me ‘I wish we could just sell people brands - almost like a store. I love making really cool brands, but it’s the clients that get in the way!’
So I said ‘Let’s figure it out' - and we started doing Intensives.
You know, I think all us creatives want that. We just want to create something amazing, that we’re proud of, and your client loves.
Intensives solve a number of problems. But you need to know what it’s not.
It’s not just paying for a day of your time. That’s a VIP Day.
And it’s not doing it faster. That’s a rush job.
It’s also not about giving people less or doing something that’s cookie-cutter or less impressive.
Instead, you take a project that stretches out for months and shrink it down.
You cut out 80% of the stuff that doesn’t move the project forward.
You keep that initial enthusiasm high, so your clients are just as excited about launching their project, as they are when it starts.
If you’re thinking ‘I can’t do that, I need that back and forth - in my experience, clients don’t actually want all that.
The best clients are hiring you as an expert, and want you to tell them what the best thing is.
Here’s how it works:
You do a lot of due diligence with the Lead Product - you’ve figured out the deliverables, and fleshed out what the client REALLY needs. If you’re getting scope creep, it’s because you haven’t done this properly.
Since you’ve now got that blueprint, you can go do the creative work in peace!
Then, it’s just a case of taking the client through the completed project over just 1-2 days. This is where we get revisions and feedback, but they’re so minor, that we can make those updates in real-time.
It all comes down to how you position yourself. You’re not coming from a ‘you tell me what you want and we’ll figure it out’ - it’s more ‘you tell us your goal, and we tell you what it should look like’. And because you get so clear on that, you can easily map out why this work is going to get them there.
It’s way more valuable for clients. If you’re launching a website for more sales, do you want to wait 3 months, whilst you go back and forth with your designer?
No! You want it launched in a couple of days, so you can make 3 months more money!
It’s a no-brainer.
The clients launch their projects quicker and get them out there, hitting their goals.
You give them your best work, not a watered-down version that’s been through 10 rounds of revisions.
And it’s way more profitable for you because it's not nearly as time intensive.