From Client Attraction To Lifetime Revenue In 3 Essential Steps

"How does anybody make money from their clients?" My client "Nate" was thoroughly exasperated.

Nate had been laid off from a corporate job. He was starting a new business as a Virtual Assistant.

"Last week my client asked me to create a special edition of their company ezine," Nate told me. "They said "It should take about an hour."Well, actually I spent almost a whole day working on their project. Maybe I should become a dog walker."

"My dog walker makes a good living,"I said. "And she gets to spend he r days in the dog park, wearing jeans and sneakers. But let"s look at what happened. Why did you let them pay you for one hour? Setting up an HTML ezine layout is a big project."

"They already had the code,"Nate said. "I was just supposed to go in and make changes. They wanted me to add photos, crop the photo, and edit the text."

"Nate,"I said, "I know just enough HTML to be dangerous. And I know you could easily spend several hours working with those images. It"s up to you to educate and manage your clients."

Nate is not alone. A few weeks ago "Gillian" told me, "I am getting out of the editing business. My clients keep calling me and they"re always asking for changes. Five minutes here, ten minutes there. And I need time to work on my marketing."

Many new business professionals leave money on the table or give up altogether (as Nate is considering). They're so focused on marketing for new clients they ignore revenue opportunities after they make the sale.

(1) Set realistic time frames.

If you need 4 hours to complete a project, plan for 6 or even 8. Professionals (especially writers and designers) forget to budget for downtime. As you get busier, you need more time because you're fielding more requests from prospects and juggling more projects.

(2) Charge for learning your client"s business. Design your service so you"re compensated for start-up, intro, and diagnostic services.

Nate was apologetic because he wasn"t familiar with his client"s site. "Next time it will go faster,"he assured me. But why should he bear the cost? When I hired a cleaning service, they told me they would charge extra for the first visit. They needed to learn their way around my house. Nate should do the same.

(3) Educate your clients. Nate"s clients were probably very nice people who honestly thought the job would take an hour. When they did the task, it probably did: they knew exactly what they wanted.

Clients used to ask me to tweak a page of copy. They"d offer to throw me a few bucks, saying, "Well, it will just take you a few minutes."

I had to explain that tweaking takes almost as long as writing the copy, because I needed to understand the client"s business. Eventually I added a note to my services page: "I don"t do tweaking."