#685 WP-Tonic This Week in WordPress & SaaS With Guest Nathan Ingram of MonsterContracts
Nathan Ingram of MonsterContracts How To Deal With Problem Clients
As the founder of >ADVANCE Coaching, I work with WordPress solopreneurs and agency owners individually and in groups to help them become more successful in their businesses.
I am also the creator of MonsterContracts, a service that provides contracts for WordPress client work that is battle-tested, attorney analyzed, annually audited, and member strengthened.
As the Host at iThemes Training, I teach WordPress technical subjects and freelance business development topics via live webinars.
I have been working with clients to build websites since 1995, and am based in Birmingham, Alabama where I have been an organizer for WordCamp Birmingham (WP Y’all) for several years.
Main Questions For The Interview
#1 – Nathan can you give the audience some info about your background and how you got into the world of WordPress?
#2 – Can you give some insights on what are some of the key factors connected to handling difficult clients in general?
#3 – How important in the client handling process connected to web design or WordPress development projects is the proposal and contract in your option?
#4 – So you started MonsterContracts what lead you to decide that there was a possibility a profitable niche here?
#5 – Have you got 1 or 2 insights connected to launching a new product or service in the WordPress space?
This Week Show’s Sponsors
Castos: Castos
LaunchFlows: LaunchFlows
Focuswp.co Focuswp
Bertha.ai: Bertha
Episode Transcript
(00:00)
Intro: Welcome to the WP-Tonic this week in WordPress and SaaS podcast, where Jonathan Denwood interviews the leading experts in WordPress, e-learning, and online marketing to help WordPress professionals launch their own SaaS.
(00:14)
Jonathan Denwood: Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic show this week in WordPress and SaaS. We have a great guest, he has great knowledge about building a SaaS, about WordPress, and about coaching and business in general; we have Nathan Ingram with us and he’s the person between MasterContracts, I use his product myself, I highly recommend it. I have John Locke, my friend with me; Andrew is in America as we speak, in New York, partying hard, listeners. So, hopefully, he won’t be with us next week, we have Steven returning next week, tribe. I know it’s a confusing, tribe, but you just have to go with it. So, John, can you quickly introduce yourself to the new listeners?
(01:08)
John Locke: Yeah. I’m John Locke from Lockedown SEO and we do SEO for manufacturing and industrial companies.
(01:17)
Jonathan Denwood: And John has a great YouTube channel, go over to it, he has some great tips about SEO. He really knows his stuff, John. So, Nathan, can you quickly give us a quick 10, 15 minutes intro to the tribe, Nathan?
(01:32)
Nathan Ingram: 15 minutes. Absolutely.
(01:33)
Jonathan Denwood: Oh, 15 seconds. 15 seconds. Sorry, brainfart.
(01:37)
Nathan Ingram: Oh, no. Sure. Glad to be here. Thanks for allowing me on, my name is Nathan Ingram, I am the founder of MonsterContracts, which are proven contracts for WordPress client work. That product, which we’ll talk about in a little while, comes out of my long experience working with clients to build websites; I started way back in 1995, and that was the first time we built and sold a site. It was really, really bad, and a lot of water under the bridge since then; I run a small agency here in Birmingham, Alabama, where I am from, called Brilliant Web Works and we serve small businesses, non-profit, and professional firms; I spend about half my time on the agency side.
So, in addition to MonsterContracts and agency work, I also do some coaching with people who do WordPress work with clients, whether you would call yourself a freelancer, a solopreneur, or a small agency, I help folks get their systems and processes in line and become more profitable and successful in their business, whatever that looks like for them. And then the other thing I do, I have several hats, is I’m the host at.
(02:37)
Jonathan Denwood: Oh, we can talk about those during the show, Nathan.
(02:40)
Nathan Ingram: Yeah.
(02:40)
Jonathan Denwood: Just, by the way, Nathan…dealing with difficult clients, is that how you’ve lost all your hair?
(02:47)
Nathan Ingram: What I didn’t lose from genetics, that definitely didn’t help things.
(02:54)
Jonathan Denwood: That’s why I’m losing mine. But it should be a great show, folks. Before we go into the main meat and potatoes, I have an advert for our main major sponsors; I’ll be back in a few moments.
(03:11)
Ad: Hi there, folks, I just wanted to tell you about our major sponsor and that’s Castos. If you’re looking to get into podcasting for yourself, or for clients, you need a top-quality podcasting platform, and that’s what you get with Castos. It has a superb interface, is really easy to use, and you are not penalized for success; they have a flat-rate pricing structure, it doesn’t matter how many podcasts you make, how many downloads you achieve, you’re just priced at one fixed-rate with Castos; plus there is support and just the quality of the people are just amazing.
(04:01)
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(05:47)
Jonathan Denwood: We’re coming back; I’d like to point out that we have some great special offers for Castos and BlogVault plus some of the other sponsors plus some great recommendations for plugins and services. You can get all these goodies by going to wp-tonic/recommendations. And Nathan’s great product is listed on that as well, so you just have to go to wp-tonic/recommendations. So, in the main part of the interview. So, Nathan, you gave us a quick intro, you said you have many hats. How did you originally get into the crazy world of WordPress and web development and design, Nathan?
(06:40)
Nathan Ingram: Yeah. Oh, man. So, it goes all the way back to 1995, as I mentioned a bit earlier, so my start was really in the non-profit world, I played several major leadership roles in different non-profits early on, and part of working in the non-profit world is not a very large paycheck. So, to make ends meet, I had a number of side hustles, back in the early days I was doing IT, some graphic design, when the web happened, that was just a natural move for me, and so we started doing web in 95 and in 2013, for years it was sort of however much time the non-profit required, then I would do some work in my business, just so it all kind of worked out.
And that’s the beauty of having your own business, by the way, that’s a whole other conversation, is being able to structure it however you want to meet your priorities, but since 2013, I’ve been full-time, working in my business. As far as WordPress goes, found WordPress back in 2008 and tinkered for a few years, but by 2010, we were all in, the only projects we’ve built since 2010 have been a hundred percent WordPress.
(07:48)
Jonathan Denwood: Oh, the early days, a bit like me.
(07:50)
Nathan Ingram: Right. Right.
(07:51)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. Well, over to you, John.
(07:55)
John Locke: So, one of your main products is a guide on dealing with client issues or high-maintenance clients, I guess, what are the most common issues that agencies and freelancers run into when dealing with problem clients and how do those problems come about?
(08:20)
Nathan Ingram: Yeah, so there’s, goodness, you get a group of people together who work with clients, and inevitably the conversation is going to come back to somebody’s horror story, that something awful happened with a client, and so it’s a normal thing to deal with problem clients, and those things show up in a lot of different areas. I have a fun talk that I do call Dealing With Problem Clients, Building Fences Around Friendly Monsters, which is where the name MonsterContracts came from.
But we talk about four different kinds of problem clients there, but really the way to approach problem clients is not by trying to pick out all the different kinds of problem clients, of which there are many, it’s really building good systems and processes in your own business. And when somebody starts to push against one of those fences that you’ve built, that’s when you know you have a problem client on your hands.
(09:13)
John Locke: So, what are some of the common things that trouble agency owners and freelancers? What are some of the common things that happen by not having processes in place?
(09:28)
Nathan Ingram: Yeah. So, maybe if we start with the fences and then what happens when those things get or there are problems. So, the four fences that I talk about in the presentation in my book, which is the same name, Dealing with Problem Clients, there’s an Amazon Kindle, it’s out there. So, it’s clarity, commitments, communication, documentation; there may be more fences you want to build in your business and in your system, but you have to have at least those four, and if one of those is weak, that’s where you tend to find the problem clients trying to weasel their way out of your nice system that you’ve built.
And you have to build fences around your business like that, otherwise, your clients and problems; just run all out into the rest of your life and make things really difficult. So, when it comes to clarity, it’s really about, are we speaking the same language? Are we clear? Is the client clear on what I’m going to do? Am I clear about what I’m expecting the client to do? Do we understand each other? And so, that’s where a great contract, a great proposal, all those things come into line, just to make sure everybody is clear on what the expectations are out of the gate; if you have unclear expectations you’re going to have problems, it’s just going to happen.
And that’s really important too, especially when a project is running long, you find that clarity starts to get muddy, so you have to continue to emphasize, now this is the scope of work and this is what we agreed to do, and we might do more, but we have to expand the scope of work and that sort of thing. So, that’s where clarity issues can start to appear as you work with a client. Commitment is the second fence. Commitment is, what it used to be in the early days when I was just so thrilled to be able to do something I enjoyed doing and get paid by a client to do it.
Their commitment to me was just signing the check, and I’m yours, I am whatever you need, and that just doesn’t work long-term, it doesn’t work; so what I suggest people do, and especially in a coaching relationship, we unpack this, is how do I design systems and processes in my business where there’s an opportunity for clients to make commitments at key points. For example, if we’re building a website, there’s a content sign-off, there’s a design sign-off, there’s a development sign-off, there’s a launch sign-off.
And if you go backward throughout that process, then it costs money, we’re signing off at certain points; we want there to be a reciprocal commitment, I’m not going to commit a bunch of work to you until you’ve signed off on the thing before. And we’re not going to start the work until you commit with a deposit and sign our documents and so forth; there’s some other nuance too there that we can get into if you want to.
Communication is super important; that is the major place where projects go off the rails, that’s where problems are created; if you’re not communicating, there are going to be issues, if you want to set yourself apart from other people, building websites and dealing with any sort of project for a client, clear, regular communication, clear, consistent communication is the key.
And then last of all, documentation; we have to keep a record of decisions that were made and things that were done, if you have one of those kinds of clients that forget decisions they made two weeks ago and that they told you to go one direction, now they want you to go another direction, you have emails to refer to, written communication is referenceable. So, those are the high points, and I’m happy to dig into those, however, you’d like.
(12:47)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, I don’t know where to begin with this because there’s so much useful information you’ve just put in front of us. I just want to put this to you as a kind of secondary story taking over from, John. I think most bust-ups with clients are around miscommunication and total mismatching of expectations. But there are two subsets, there’s the utter con artist, who, well, most of what I’ve just said happens to what I call Virgin Clients. Virgin clients that never worked with either a freelancer, or an agency, and a lot of freelancers and agencies, for some reason, expect the client to understand what are the norms of the industry, but they don’t.
(13:48)
Nathan Ingram: Right.
(13:50)
Jonathan Denwood: But then there’s a subset that has utilized agencies, have utilized freelancers and they have a track record of not paying because they find something wrong, they find something wrong because they don’t want to pay you. But they are a very small minority. The others, I have had clients that have been mentally unstable or they’ve been alcoholics or on some other substance, in my opinion, because of their behavior, they tend to want to text you, communicate with you 24/7, 7 days a week about how terrible you are. And then the next time they see you, they’re constantly apologizing for their outburst, am I on the right track here, or am I unlucky, Nathan?
(14:56)
Nathan Ingram: No, I think you’re a hundred percent on the right track. And so, what you said at the very beginning is part of the whole issue of clarity, when we don’t have a meeting of the minds, maybe it could be our fault, we’re using industry jargon, or it could be the client’s fault, they’re not telling us everything or whatever. We have to look at our processes and the way we’re building and doing whatever it is that we do, whether it’s doing SEO, building websites, social media, or whatever it is we’re doing.
Take a hard look with new eyes, and it’s even helpful to have people, your friends who aren’t in the industry, look in from the outside at your process and how you do things and explain things and answer this question, where are the assumptions in my process? What in this process am I assuming the client understands? Where might they be assuming that I’m doing something that I’m really not?
And so, getting some non-industry eyes to look at that is super important, as you reveal those assumptions then you can sharpen your process and your communication better to deal with those things because even, gosh, I’ve been building websites since 1995, I’m still uncovering little pockets of the assumption that I’m dealing with and getting better at, it’s the nature of the game. The other part of this is, what if the client doesn’t tell you everything and sometimes they don’t think they need to tell you, it’s like talking to a medical doctor, you might just not think about sharing something, but a good doctor asks good questions.
And I talked about communicating as a great soft skill that’ll set you apart, asking great questions is part of that. If you can learn to ask great questions in that first conversation with the client where you’re trying to determine; what’s the goal of this project and what’s the scope of work going to be, and that sort of thing. And just asking question after question, not answering in your mind questions for the client and assuming that this is what the client means, but really asking many questions, layered, I have a checklist of questions that I ask in every intake call with a client.
If I didn’t use a checklist, I would inevitably forget one, and that one would be the one most important thing I should have asked to the client; so it’s about systems, that there’s a system of questions we’re going to ask, and we’re going to keep asking until we get to that point of clarity, so it’s super important. You get the clarity; you don’t have as many problems going in, now as far as the kinds of clients that’ll just rip you off. I think everybody starts with a bevy of bad clients, that’s how you earn your stripes in the agency world.
(17:37)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. I just want to make it clear, the ones that are trying to find something wrong because from the beginning, they weren’t going to pay you or they weren’t going to pay, they should pay a deposit depending, we’re going to go into that. But when you dig in, they’ve done it to other people, from day one, what was part of their business rationality was that if they could get out of it, they weren’t going to pay you, but I want to make it clear, they’re a very small minority, but they are there. Would you agree?
(18:18)
Nathan Ingram: They are out there. A hundred percent. So, one of those questions that I always ask is, have you worked with other developers in the past, how’d that go? You can usually reveal those sorts of clients by that question because they’ll start to talk about and complain about previous developers they’ve looked at, and for me, in those conversations, complaints about previous developers are a huge red flag. It’s all stop; we’re going to stop and ask a bunch of questions about this because one of two things may be happening here. Number one, they truly may have worked with a knuckleheaded web developer in the past.
(18:52)
Jonathan Denwood: There are quite a few bad ones, aren’t there?
(18:54)
Nathan Ingram: Oh my gosh. We’ve taken on rescue sites where the developer has just vanished into thin air and you look at these things and I’m like, this person had to try to build something this bad, it’s just bad. So, that’s out there and.
(19:08)
Jonathan Denwood: Have you been looking at my websites, Nathan?
(19:11)
Nathan Ingram: No, I don’t think so. But those people are out there, we had a site one time, it was a WooCommerce site and they had between the theme and some plugins and some code, there were 36 separate image sizes defined in this WordPress site. So, every time an image was uploaded just 8,000 images, yeah, it’s just a bizarre thing.
(19:29)
Jonathan Denwood: You have been looking at my websites.
(19:32)
Nathan Ingram: So, that may be the case, so I understand that, but this could also be a person who, whether they’re really out to get you or out to rip you off or whether they may be the kind of person who can never be pleased by anybody. And so, if I don’t weed this person out, I’m going to cost myself a lot of emotional heartaches and a lot of time.
(19:54)
Jonathan Denwood: Oh, that’s a whole different subgroup.
(19:57)
Nathan Ingram: Oh, it totally is.
(19:57)
Jonathan Denwood: That’s a different subgroup, the one that can never be pleased, I’m talking about the one, they’re quite rational, but they have, I know people outside the web, we had a president I don’t want to be political. Maybe I am, but he had a track record, it’s well known that his track record was not paying subcontractors and that was part of his business model. There are people out there, it’s part of their business model.
(20:30)
Nathan Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. And so, the way you protect yourself from people like that. First of all, a lot of folks at the level of agency that I work in, in mine and with, in coaching, we’re getting most of our business by referrals, which I wholeheartedly endorse. And you tend to not get those kinds of people through referrals, but that’s why you have to have a good contract and you have to have good payment terms, you have to get 50% upfront, and some of the languages in my proposal or in the contract is, once you sign off that deposit is non-refundable for any reason, and having good payment terms is critical.
(21:08)
Jonathan Denwood: Well, just to finish off before I go to our break, what about, a very English word, the bonker client, the bonker client, free mental, they’re odd, have some mental illness or they’re on drugs, I’ve had two, one was a major CEO, who I’ll not name, but I found out half-way through and it was confirmed by other people. They were a hardcore alcoholic. Have you had the pleasure of dealing with one of those?
(21:41)
Nathan Ingram: I have some that I would not be surprised if that was the case. For people who own businesses, I think that the rate of addiction is a lot higher in that group, it is, and addiction’s a real thing, and I have a lot of compassion for that. But I have to protect myself and my family from people who have issues coming in and stepping across the boundaries and ruining my personal world.
(22:06)
Jonathan Denwood: Well, they tend to have no boundaries, do they?
(22:08)
Nathan Ingram: Exactly. So, that’s why you have to build strong fences, that’s why it’s so important to have contracts and proposals that govern your relationship with a client and things in a contract like, this is the way we communicate, you can communicate with me by email and expect the response during normal business hours. We don’t respond by text, we don’t do social media DMs; this is how you communicate with us, and if you communicate differently, we’re not going to respond to it and it goes back to good systems and processes. Virtually all client problems can be solved or significantly reduced by good systems and processes.
(22:41)
Jonathan Denwood: That’s great. We’re going to go for our break. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks.
(22:47)
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(23:38)
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(24:07)
Jonathan Denwood: We’re coming back. Oh, dear, this has been an episode of woe and darkness, very suitable for me, tribe, you know I’m down. Before we go into the second part, it’s been very useful and educational although. Before we go into the second part of this great interview, I just want to say, you need to sign up for the WP-Tonic newsletter; in that newsletter, we have all the latest news in WordPress and some of the leading tech stories, plus a weekly editorial was written by me and you sample me, I call it English humor, you might call it something else. You can get that by going to wp-tonic/newsletter and signing up. Over to you, John.
(24:59)
John Locke: Yes. Nathan, before the break, you were talking about maintaining these fences with clients and you were talking about the importance of proposals and contracts, spelling out the terms of the engagement. Can you elaborate on how proposals and contracts keep the client/agency relationship on track?
(25:24)
Nathan Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. So, for some people that’s the same document, some people present a proposal, scope of work, and a contract, all in one, we do it as two separate documents. But whatever you’re doing, in whatever document or set of documents you have, there should be a very, very clear scope of work as to what we’re doing for you in this project and how much it’s going to cost, period, that’s it.
And then there needs to be a list somewhere of the rules of the road for every project that we do, those don’t change from project to project; the scope of work may change, but the fact that we don’t design for Internet Explorer 6 unless it’s specifically requested by the client and itemized in the scope of work, little things like that. And we don’t.
(26:09)
Jonathan Denwood: You’re making me start to swear by mentioning Explorer 6, Nathan.
(26:13)
Nathan Ingram: Yeah. Well, that happens, how often do you get to the end of a project and the client says, oh, this doesn’t look right in my web browser? And you dig into it, and they’re using a 12-year-old Mac with the original native version of Safari for OS Leopard or whatever, 8,000 years ago. So, we design for the current versions of web browser, those sorts of things that don’t change from project to project need to be specified somewhere, so for us, it’s a two document approach.
There’s a Proposal of Services and a Master Services Agreement that the client signs at the project outset, and what that does is whether they read the full MSA or not, they’ve at least agreed to the rules and that becomes the basis of communication. So, anytime the client has expectations that you might not get to through a good thorough series of questions on the intake, in order to avoid arguments, that’s why it’s so important to have a great contract is, if they have questions and their expectations aren’t met, well, this was covered in the Master Services Agreement.
So, it becomes not a personal issue at all, you can reference back to a document they signed and there are some clients that, oh my gosh, everything they say has an exclamation point at the end, their favorite word is now, it has to be done this way and whatever. And that kind of drama, and that’s the kind of problem client I call the drama queen, although that is definitely not gender-specific, I’ve met plenty of drama Kings too. It’s just always a problem, it’s always drama, and the thing about drama, system trumps drama, you refer back, this is covered in the contract; this is what we agreed to on the outside of this project, and it really tends to disseminate that sort of adversity.
(28:00)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, I have a quick tip; I want to see if you agree with this. If you have a client, first of all, email is very useful, but it’s a very harsh medium. And if a client communicates with you in a very abrupt way, firstly, do not answer straight away.
(28:22)
Nathan Ingram: Yes.
(28:23)
Jonathan Denwood: Leave it for a day, if you can. Secondly, always reply with a question. I’m slightly puzzled by this email; can you give me more information?
(28:37)
Nathan Ingram: Yeah. Help me understand this.
(28:39)
Jonathan Denwood: Let me understand this. Let me be your friend again. Would you agree with those two things? Do not answer emails straight away and Slack is even worse if it’s somebody on Slack. For God’s sake, don’t get Slack-itis, as I call it.
(28:57)
Nathan Ingram: Yeah. I think and this comes after a lot of years of therapy for me, personally, but I’ve learned to pay attention to how I’m feeling, and when an email comes in that raises my eye or I feel the fire right here, I’m getting defensive, I’m ready to fight.
(29:15)
Jonathan Denwood: Boy, you feel it burning in your chest. How dear they talk to me in this way.
(29:20)
Nathan Ingram: Yes. Exactly. And I think anybody that’s worked with clients in any capacity understands that kind of communication; if it’s a voicemail or an email or whatever, good grief. I could respond with the best worded, snide, cutting, win the argument and that’ll be the best email I never should have sent. So, those are the ones that you, even if you want to write it out to make yourself feel better, stick it in drafts overnight and come back and rewrite it tomorrow morning, put the letter in a drawer, and come back to it.
Especially, when you’re dealing with a problem client, you don’t want anything like that, that they can refer back to, you always want your written communication to be very professional, inquisitive, and curious, as you said, asking questions is such a great disarming tool. And I’ve even asked clients, was this what you meant when you said this? And so, asking questions is a great tool, I’m glad you brought that up.
(30:22)
Jonathan Denwood: The other thing is I found, and people have disagreed with me because they say allowing this allows you to increase your charging, I see where they’re coming from, but I’d still totally. Project drift, I think it’s best to advise a client to do a minimum viable project then bidding, even if they agree, and it’s a really juicy proposal because I think the longer a project goes on, the more it can go pear-shaped. That’s my view, I think having a stage one, and I’m getting this from a friend of the show, Veto, having a stage one and getting it out the door and getting paid and then talking to the client about a stage two or a stage three.
Because if a project goes longer than it was estimated, as soon as you make a deposit, soon as you take a check from a client, a client will never take any responsibility, as far as they’re concerned, and if you can’t keep grips with a project and keeping it on time, it’s not their problem. Even though they’re the one that’s not giving the text, they’re the one that’s not providing the logo, they’re the one that disappears and disappears for weeks, months, not replying to email, not replying to calls; if anybody says that that’s never happened to them and they’re a professional web designer or developer, they’re lying, as far as I’m concerned.
(32:27)
Nathan Ingram: Yeah. So, that’s actually one of the four client types I describe in my book, and in my talk, I call them The Invisible Man. The Invisible Man just disappears during the middle of the project. And that’s okay, except when they reappear with unreasonable demands to get the thing done, well, you’ve had this for six months.
(32:43)
Jonathan Denwood: That’s what they will say because they’re the ones that do say that.
(32:47)
Nathan Ingram: Yes. So, a couple of things on this, you need a great process for dealing with disappearing clients, and so part of the MonsterContract and part of my contract that I use in my agency, which is what became MonsterContracts is, what happens on suspended and delayed projects, and there are very clear things that happen. Now, not only that, but you have to have a great communication strategy to reinforce this, so there’s a point, they’re like, there’s a kill switch finally at the end of this, where if after a certain amount of time there’s no response, the project is dead, the deposit is lost, we’re done.
Now, I’ve never had to invoke that, but it’s there to protect me, but you have to have good communication along the way with this. Now, I have a great friend, Erin Flynn; Erin recommends this, she calls it The Three Sentence Email, I call it the Friday Email. Every Friday we send an update to our clients of every active project, of what’s going on, it’s three sentences; it’s past, present, future. Past; this is what we did this week on your project. Present; this is where we are in terms of project completion. Future; this is what we’re working on next week.
Any questions just let us know. So, it’s a project status email update, and that’s the place to remind the client, we’re still waiting on the about us page text, we’re still waiting on the fricking logo, whatever. And by the way, this project, if we don’t get this next week, it’s going to be suspended, it’s going to be taken out of our production pipeline, and then when your stuff comes in, we’ll put it at the end of the pipeline and it’ll work its way through, but there’s going to be a delay because you’ve delayed. So, if you bake in systems for communicating information like that, it happens, it’s a beautiful thing.
(34:20)
Jonathan Denwood: Just to finish up before we wrap up the podcast part of the show and go on to bonus content is; would you agree that as soon as they give that deposit check, them disappearing, as far as they’re concerned, that’s your problem?
(34:39)
Nathan Ingram: Well, so this kind of goes back to clients that have never worked with an agency before, versus those that have, it’s part of our responsibility to onboard the client, so from the very first conversation.
(34:52)
Jonathan Denwood: I call, sorry to interrupt, I call it ghosting.
(34:55)
Nathan Ingram: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. It’s poof, they’re gone, where are they? And you can pick up, by the way, these tendencies in clients, if they take three days to return a phone call, or if they miss a scheduled meeting or if they’re just slow in the process or they start out responding quickly, and then now, okay. Now it’s a week before I get, even in the beginning of scheduling the call to understand the scope of the project, those people don’t change, that tendency doesn’t get better.
(35:22)
Jonathan Denwood: Sorry to interrupt, but they say, well, I’m really busy. So, what they’re really saying is, well, I’m really busy and I don’t care a fuck that you’re really busy, that’s your problem.
(35:34)
Nathan Ingram: Yeah. Well, so they reach out when the website that day is their top priority, but then tomorrow one of their other 15 top priorities is the top priority. So, those are clients that you can choose not to work with, or if you do work with them, see, here’s the thing. If you discover a problem in your process, it’s an opportunity to offer a service to solve the problem, so if in your process, clients are ghosting you, well, okay, we need to create a service that does this.
So, for example, the number one place that clients tend to go to sleep is when you’re asking them to provide content for their website. Well, you provide content, how many projects are we waiting on content for, good Lord, It happens to everybody. And the problem is when you ask a client to give you some text, they may not write well, number two, even if they do write well, you’re sending them into an existential spiral of really who am I? And where am I?
And it’s all these questions; so the answer to this is, and I have all these projects on delay, I need to create a service to solve that problem. So, a problem in your process is an opportunity to provide a service to solve the problem, which means I’m going to partner with some great content writers, and so if you have an Invisible Man at the beginning of this project, that’s already starting to disappear. You say, look in my experience this project is probably going to get stalled on content, so let me recommend that we bring in a content writer at the beginning of it, it’s going to add this much to the project.
They’re going to need three hours of your time, maybe one hour over an afternoon, over the next couple of weeks, where they can do some interviews with you, grab the content, write something beautiful, and we can build it.
(37:06)
Jonathan Denwood: Yep. Alright. I think we’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show. We have bonus content, to see the whole interview, plus the bonus content, go over and sign up for the WP-Tonic YouTube channel, we have fantastic resources, we have fantastic interviews, lessons. We have a ton of content over on that channel, so sign up for that. So, John, what’s the best way for people to find out about your agency, John, and also your great YouTube channel?
(37:43)
John Locke: Yeah, it’s pretty easy. I’m Lockedown, SEO, everywhere. So, on the socials. But most of the time you can find me either on my website, lockedownseo.com, and the same thing for the YouTube channel.
(37:57)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, if you want to know more about SEO, folks, go over to John’s channel. Nathan, what’s the best way to find out more about you and your great products, which I use myself?
(38:11)
Nathan Ingram: Yeah. So, monstercontracts.com. Actually, if you’re interested in the book, go to myfriendlymonster.com which gives you links to both the MonsterContract product and the direct link to Amazon for the book; it’s a short read. It’s a lot of fun for the book. The contract is designed to be a great template, starting place for you to put your process into, shape around some of the language we have there, give it to a local attorney just to make sure it meets all the criteria for your local area and you have a great solid contract from there.
(38:38)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, it’s great. As I said, go over to the WP-Tonic YouTube channel and watch the rest of this great interview and subscribe to the channel, it really does support not only the channel but this podcast. We’ll see you next week with another great interview with either somebody from the WordPress ecosystem or from SaaS. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
(39:01)
Outro: Hey, thanks for listening, we really do appreciate it. Why not visit the mastermind Facebook group and also to keep up with the latest news click wp-tonic.com/newsletter. We’ll see you next time.
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