Surviving in a Down Economy, Step Two - Be Flexible
A trait I believe all successful service companies share is knowing which clients to take and which ones to avoid. If you just take everything that comes in the door the 80/20 rule comes into effect and too much time gets wasted. This doesn’t change in a down economy, in fact it becomes more important than ever to make the right decisions.
So far it doesn’t sound like I’m talking much about being flexible, be patient we’re almost there.
In a sellers market you can really scrutinize and be super selective based on who best fits your process, price point and team. In a buyers market the total number of opportunities are reduced so you have to find a way to keep work and cash-flow coming in. So how do you do that without sacrificing who you are? If there’s one thing we’re not going to do at nGen Works, it’s compromise how we build sites. From the way we think through the user experience to the final code, we’re going to build the most usable, standards compliant sites we can with kick ass design. Otherwise our value goes away and we lose.
So how can we be flexible?
First we need to look at what normally stops a customer from coming through the door. For us it is often our price point. A lot of companies who want to work with us can’t afford our full process, so they don’t have a choice but to find another firm. They may be the perfect client that appreciates our skills, loves our work and believes in our process. But they just don’t have the budget, and in a bad economy they probably aren’t going to anytime soon. In this situation we’ve started to offer parts of our process separately. A prospect can now request an expert review of their current site at a fraction of the cost of a full development process. They can also request we take a project through design but not production. In previous years we wouldn’t have made these concessions in how we work because we knew the opportunity to manage the entire process was everywhere. But in order to stay true to who we are, how we build, and how we’re compensated we can make this change and still help good clients.
Another thing that often made clients hesitate was talking about SEO. As a standards shop the sites we build are very SEO friendly, and being in the web space we understand writing for the web. However, when it comes to professional SEO tactics we were very honest in saying we don’t understand professional SEO tactics. In many cases we would just suggest they find a good SEO person and warn them to be careful of the many snake oil salesmen in that space. Now that’s changed. We’ve started interviewing SEO companies and specialists to find a few good go-to specialists we can work with so good clients with a legitimate SEO need can hire us with confidence.
We’re also considering looking for good online marketing companies to manage SEM and traditional online ad campaigns. Another request clients would ask for and we would just say sorry we don’t do that. Once we find the right partners we’ll be able to say we have a dedicated specialist we work with to manage that.
How can you be flexible? Ask yourself why you turn away or lose some projects or clients and think if there are some simple changes in process or philosophy you could make while still being true to yourself. If the answer is yes, 2009 is the year to do it.
Stay tuned for Step Three-Find New Opportunities.
Comments
Good advice here. I think coming to a compromise on scope via a phased approach is a great way to be flexible. We’ve also found that, because we now bill per-project, we can be flexible with fixed bids, meaning if we really want a project and think it’s a great fit we can “discount” it slightly to fit within a client’s budget yet not compromise on quality. All my employees are salary so they get paid no matter what, would rather pay them for working. :)
A quick bit about SEO. I’ve found (and written about and can argue the point well) that most folks don’t need any more SEO expertise that what y’all (or any good design shop) can offer. It’s only if they need that last 20% when it gets dicey and we’ve found very few who can really say they need that. Just a thought.
Anyway, loving the series!
Agreed on the SEO bits, Keith. Basically in the past we’d explain the benefits to our work SEO-wise, but then say “we don’t do that” without going into it any more. I think part of what we’re switching to is more about talking to the existing methods built into our work and selling it more as a service, even though it’s already included.
Part of the kicker for SEO is the refining of content, thinking through it properly to be strategic and hitting keywords. That’s not always on us, depending on the agreement and especially with a CMS and the keys being in their hands after launch. This means more work for the client and is something they will barely ever actually do.
That’s for another blog post we have brewing…