In this episode: Interview – Stroke the poke your clients to keep you sane with Hannah Smith
So, should I stroke the bear or poke the bear? It’s a question that is, no doubt at the very front of your mind on a day to day basis! Well for Hannah Smith it is, although as you will come to see the bear is in fact just her term for your clients.
I met Hannah at WordCamp in Manchester last year and went to her talk about this very subject and found it to be both informative and entertaining.
Hannah is a seasoned WordPress freelancer. She’s a full stack developer, a project / process manager and a supporter of WordCamps and meetups.
So bears are your clients, and on the face of it, this is a really odd way to describe them, but wait… bears have so many personas.
A bear can be the warm and soft toy that you allow your infant child to play with. Something that you snuggle up to. You have a bond with it. Some clients are like that… you like them, they like you. Your relationship just works and you want to work with them and will go the extra mile to ensure that they succeed.
On the other end of the spectrum, a real life bear can be terrifying and angry and can scare the life out of you and if you really annoy it, it might very well eat you all up!
So your clients are bears and the way that you interact with them can have a direct impact upon the type of bear that you’re going to be dealing with, and some of them are harder to placate and work for than others. There is no one size fits all, they are all unique and need to be handled in different ways.
So what’s all this about poking and stroking your clients. It’s all too easy to keep saying ‘yes’ to your clients. If you always say yes to your clients (stroking), two things will happen:
you will have a very happy client
you will have likely over-promised what you can do
Then, two more things happen
you will not be able to deliver what you promised in the time / budget that you agreed
your client will become unhappy
So this is where the stroking and poking comes in. Sometimes it’s okay to stroke the client and agree to the things that they want, but equally, it’s fine to poke the client and say no. No – this is not what we agreed, no – this is not what you need, no – this will be technically unfeasible, no – this will harm the deadlines that we’ve established, no – this is just a bad idea and we know what you need more than you do etc.
Hannah, like many of us, found this out the hard way, having made these mistakes herself over many years. Sadly, there is no widely adopted manual for building up a web design / development business and we all seem to make the same mistakes at one point or another.
We talk about some of the expectations that Hannah sets out to make work with clients go as smoothly as possible. This covers ways to deal with clients, expectations about how available they will be, what the client needs to supply before the work commences, common pitfalls that she often encounters and much more.
It’s a really interesting chat that will no doubt resonate with many of you.
Mentioned in this episode:
Hannah can be found on the operationcanopy.co.uk website.
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