Recently Ben Locker a commercial writer who lives close to me tweeted about the trend for customers to move payment terms from 30 days to 45 to 60. Some larger organisations have 90 day payment cycles, if one of your invoices is not paid they just say
wait until the next payment run
But clients can only do this if you accept their demands.
Ben’s tweet struck a chord. I feel that these type of organisations are training their suppliers to accept their demands. So why not try and train them to accept yours.
Or if that is not possible only accept work from clients who are prepared to accept terms that are acceptable to you.
For many years I worked as a freelance programmer (or software engineer if you want to sound posh). Several decades ago when £30/hour was a good rate, when people asked me how to get such a rate I would reply “Don’t accept £25”.
Jon McCulloch, a freelance writer and marketing consultant has written powerfully and eloquently about this in a comment to this post on Peter Bowerman’s Well Fed Writer Blog. You have to scroll down a bit, Jon’s is the second comment.
Even better in a another comment to the same post Jon writes about the advantages of getting rid of bad clients.
Peter Thomson, a writer and business growth expert, recommends only dealing with people you like. When you deal with people you don’t like all problems become magnified so minor problems become major problems. Peter explains his ideas in his report The 7 Big Mistakes Report which you can download for no charge when you register your contact details.
I recommend you read this report.
If you have not read Peter Bowerman’s “The Well-Fed Writer” I strongly urge you to do so. It might seem that this book is only relevant to freelance commercial writers, but what he has to say on marketing and cold calling is applicable to everyone in business. In brief
- it’s a process
- don’t get hung up on any particular outcome
- do the process and trust results will come, because in time they will
One of my interests is encouraging parents to help their children learn. I have written a book, Starting Arithmetic, which outlines how I helped my children learn primary school maths. The 3 steps Peter recommends are exactly the same 3 steps I recommend for learning maths. This is no great surprise as these 3 steps are applicable to acquiring any skill, or pursuing any long term endeavour.
It is common for people to drastically undervalue their experience and skills. Perhaps they compare themselves to others with a similar skill set and judge themselves harshly. More likely it is because they are familiar with their skill and assume that is easy and/or something that anyone can do.
They forget the reason a client is hiring them is to solve a problem the client has and either
- Does not know how to solve
- Or does not have the time to solve
The client is not interested in some sort of beauty contest. They want the problem solved pronto. What matters is can you solve their problem efficiently and in a timely fashion.
If you can genuinely solve a problem for your client, surely your client will appreciate your efforts, more likely they will be overjoyed. If they are not prepared to pay you in a timely fashion then why would you want to have anything to do with them?
Not only does what you accept determine what you ultimately get so does what you expect.
Am I talking about The Secret or some other new age stuff.
No
There are at least 2 groups of people working in scientific (well scientificish) disciplines exploring the effect of expectations on peoples lives.
Psychologists and behavioural economists. Both these groups have found that expectations are a powerful influence on people’s lives.
Richard Wiseman, a magician who retrained as a psychologist, has written about expectations in his book The Luck Factor which he wrote to describe his investigation into why some people seem to have consistently good luck and others consistently bad luck. And no it has nothing to do with rabbits feet or good luck charms. Expectations are the key.
For me the tales from unlucky people were more powerful than those from lucky people, but that’s just me. For example on page 23 we meet Susan who has had an amazing catalog of accidents.
Apart breaking a few limbs,
- she split her head open on a rock whilst picking daisies
- got her head stuck in grid and had to be rescued by fire brigade
- was hit on the head by a board that fell off a roof
- she had a blind date but the man broke both his legs on the way
- on the next date he walked into a glass door and broke his nose
- the church she was due to get married in was burnt down 2 days before the wedding
- on her driving test she crashed through a garden wall, only to find the car was not properly insured and she had to pay for damage to the car
- after passing her test she had 8 car accidents in a single journey of less than 50 miles.
The book is interesting and entertaining but there is a much stronger reason for reading it. Richard gives a list of practical steps you can take to change your thinking and change your luck.
Dan Ariely is a behavioural econonmist. His book Predictable Irrationality describes how humans are irrational but in predictable ways. Knowing how allows marketeers to direct peoples behaviour. The book starts with an advert by the economist which offered the following 3 alternatives to buy a subscription.
- $59 for a one year web only subscription
- $125 for a one year print only subscription
- $125 for a one year print and web subscription
Why would anyone buy a print only subscription when they can get the print and web subscription for the same price? Why even offer the print only subscription?
Well it’s a sort of decoy. Some people might decide they only want the web based subscription. Others might try and work out whether the print option is worth the extra price, but hey, you can get both for the same price as just the print which makes the choice a no brainer.
Tests show that most people do go for the print and web option, when the print only option is offered, EVEN THOUGH NO ONE BUYS THE print only option. And when the print only option is not offered most people opt for the cheaper web only option.
You see – predictable irrationality.
Chapter 9 is titled “The Effect of Expectations – the mind gets what it expects” and Chapter 10 “The Power of Price” (in general we expect more expensive things to be better). Both chapters describe a whole range of experiments that clearly demonstrate expectations are a powerful influence and in some cases the ONLY influence.
Two examples
People report that a more expensive pain killer works better than a cheaper pain killer even though both contain equal amounts of identical chemicals
In 1955 Leonard Cobb, a cardiologist, decided to test the effectiveness of the current standard heart operation by using the placebo effect on half his patients. This means that
- on half of the patients he operated normally
- the other half he pretended to do the procedure which included opening them up but not actually doing any more (well he sewed them up again!)
Both groups of patients immediately reported relief from chest pain. Electrocardiograms for patients in both groups where the same.
A while ago Peter Collett made a television series called Body Language Secrets. In one sequence people where given two glasses of wine to taste. One was poured from an expensive bottle and described in glowing terms. The other was poured from a cheap bottle and described as plonk. As I am sure you have guessed the catch was that both wines were in fact the same. However the participants brains were scanned whilst they were drinking the “two” wines. It was immediately obvious that their brains were reacting very differently to the “two” wines which they thought were different but were in fact the same.
So what do you expect from you clients and what do you accept?
