Negotiating Deadlines With Clients

[Music] so Alfredo sent over two questions the first one was how many clients can you take before it gets too much and it's kind of an overload that you have to refuse clients and the second question when you want to take time to create a quality project for example he says five-page website and you want to spend 10 weeks working on it but your client urges you to spend less time on it how do you kind of negotiate this deadline so great questions Alfredo and here's what I think for me personally I usually work on two projects at the same time that is new school proso my business and my retainer clients that's my base normal uh work week which I feel really good about I can concentrate uh on both of them and that's great uh sometimes I take on kind of an extra project sometimes I branding project or a small kind of small scale app or something like that and that's kind of like puts me a little bit in a stress mode but I can still do it and deliver good work but I ALS I always try to make sure that this is shortterm because I don't want to be in always in a stress mode but I feel like three is probably my limit if I take more than that I kind of try to I lose complete track of what's going on it's too much overhead to handle all the clients and all the files and everything that you have to do so for me personally the barrier is probably at three and I'm not going to take more project than that but I think this is very personal and it also really depends on what kind of projects you do so I usually work on long-term product based Tech based product which requires long attention and like deep concentration for long periods of time but I know other designers that are making kind of like let's say print projects and or advertising or stuff like that that are really quick and they can handle like 10 clients uh at the same time and that works for them so I guess it's pretty personal and it depends on the work that you do for me personally the limit is three and I will not get into more than three projects at the same time onto the second question what happens when you want to spend time working on a project because you want to deliver high quality but your clients want you to work less time so personally my belief and I always communicate that to my clients is that you can do anything in any time frame but the quality will change I usually start by asking the client what's your deadline and then I try to see how I can deliver high quality work by that deadline but sometimes that's just not possible if that's not possible I'm just going to say look man I can't deliver good work on that good for me but if you want lower quality than that maybe you can go find somebody else maybe I'll even recommend somebody else but I don't want to do that because I don't want to deliver work below this quality but usually what I'll try to do is to say okay this is your time frame to deliver good quality work by this time frame let's think how we can maybe simplify the project perhaps you know remove some of the pages some of the complexity something that can simplify so that we can create good quality by the deadline so again it's personal you have to decide what's the you know the Baseline of quality that you're not willing to work below it but the clients also have their own you know needs and if they can't afford to wait for 10 weeks for a great website then they have to deal and probably they're actually willing to afford losing quality or whatever because they need to stand in their own deadlines they got their own pressure shes and S that they need to work with so my suggestion or the way that I do it again is try to negotiate or try to deliver the best you can within the time frame that's available for the client anyway today is a client day I've had a super productive morning so I'm going to take a little bit of time now to learn and then cook lunch and continue with my client work check out this beautiful beautiful website with really nice interactions that you can do I really like it you scroll the background changes all the links are really cool all the interactions are really subtle check out this background that moves and when you scroll it kind of moves between them this is really nice and the really crazy thing about it is that it was created all in web flow I mean there was completely no coding involved and this is such a high level like I thought I was a good webflow you know designer but I have no clue how they did some of those interaction and hover and everything with without code completely but the most beautiful thing is that since this site is featured I can actually see how they build it within web flow so I'm going to check out right now I'm going to go over this and study everything that they did here cuz I really I really want to know how to do that myself and kind of now I really want to make a Prosper a website much better and cooler with subtle information like interactions like this I really want to spend time getting better in this software [Music] this work is literally genius how they came up with these interactions coroll interaction and masking just beautiful beautiful I learned a lot anyway this week uh aan gave me his osmo mobile to play with and I did for like 5 minutes but I really feel like this is a tool that I need to learn so I'm going to spend some time trying to learn this and play with it to get better with it just another skill that I I think might end up being useful one [Music] [Applause] [Music] day all right so my comprehensive product review as Casey would say it for the osmo mobile probably is cool for kids who are like shooting skateboard videos or something like that but for shooting Vlogs daily uh I don't think it's really practical or I don't know improve the quality that much so thanks so much Aiden for letting me experiment with that I really really wanted to do that cuz obviously I'm a gadget geek myself but uh I don't think I'm going to be using that or buying that for myself anyway time for lunch draw more art again against the sky crawling up the shadows in the inky dusk nearby silhouettes of Serenity I I just woke up today with a real craving for a misu soup so I went down to the supermarket and bought everything I needed to make obviously it turned out more expensive than if I would just buy it at a restaurant but it I never made this at home so it was kind of a challenge and something that I wanted to try and experiment with going to check it out now go back to doing client work and that's the end of the week so I'll catch you guys next week and I'm losing my serenity [Music]