October 16, 2021
This is part 3 of a 4 part series all about boundary setting in your design business. These boundaries will have you covered for frustrating situations that occur around client project management.
If project management is feeling a bit out of control and you feel at the mercy of clients who keep going rogue, you are definitely not alone.
Project management issues can have a huge impact on your design business—not only on your financial bottom line, but also on your wellbeing and mental health.
We hope that by bringing light to some of these issues we can help you avoid some of the situations we faced throughout our careers, especially in the early days of our design businesses.
Let’s get into the examples…
So, your client sends you a DM on Sunday afternoon, emails at 7pm on Monday evening, and then calls and leaves a long voice message on Tuesday morning at 8am (while you’re brushing your teeth, no less). It’s not only quite hard (and stressful!) to keep track of this correspondence, you end up feeling guilty about not responding straight away.
Suggested Boundaries: Set clear expectations around communication from the get-go. A welcome guide for new clients is a perfect vehicle to explain the parameters and expectations around communications. You can even specify this in your proposal and contract. You can include information on how and when you will communicate throughout the project.
To avoid the pressure of responding on weekends and outside of your regular business hours, let your clients know your availability and your policy around response times, for example, you’ll aim to respond within 2 business days. Also consider including a note about your availability (in your time-zone) on other touchpoints such as your email signature.
A gatekeeper can be used such as an auto-responder when you are out of the office. Otherwise, we can end at the beck and call of our clients around the clock, and never actually feel like we are ‘out of the office’.
You’ve just spent 2 hours hunting down the assets you need for a project you are working on. You know the client sent them, but where? There was an image sent via DM, and different drafts of copy (some of them incomplete!) have been emailed in dribs and drabs.
Suggested Boundaries: Insist on assets and information being supplied in a certain way, such as using a portal, or a project management system like Trello as a communications tool and also to set boundaries around how deliverables (both yours and the client’s) are provided.
The client said they would have the final copy to you by last Friday, and yet it’s Tuesday and you still don’t have anything from them yet. They keep missing deadlines and it’s causing congestion in your workflow!
Suggested Boundaries: Time and scheduling boundaries, sending reminders for due dates for deliverables, sending reminders for meetings, letting your clients know when you will be working on their project and sending regular updates. Consistent communication is key. Being proactive is key.
As soon as said deliverables don’t arrive in your inbox, don’t wait half a week to chase them up. If you are doing a design sprint type of project, make sure the client is available for correspondence during the hours you are working on the project. Pre-arrange this.
So you’re have a design project on the go and you thought everything was going swimmingly. And then one week slides into the next and you realise you have not heard a peep from your client in weeks. They’ve gone incommunicado!
Suggested Boundaries: Have a system in place for regular client check-ins. We’ve noticed a tendency for designers to shy away from reaching out for fear of being annoying, but you have a right to check in, and client’s love to know that everything is taken care of and on track. Think of it as part of your caring, nurture service.
Also, before you panic, consider what your client may have going on in their own lives. Check in to make sure they are ok—perhaps something has happened of a personal nature for them, like an illness or a death in the family.
If you receive no response after multiple reach-outs, it’s time to remind your client of the consequence—that you have a non-communication clause in your contract. This could mean shifting the project date with a reactivation fee to be paid once the project starts up again. Your client may not realise how much time and energy it takes to get back into the groove of a project after a long pause and may need educating around this.
Or, in extreme cases of incommunicado (and serious red flags!) the consequence may be project termination without a refund.
Oooh this can be a big frustration. This problem is when you have a really time-consuming client who LOVES to chatter….meaning, every meeting blows out time-wise.
Or perhaps you have a client who is often late and seems downright careless and disrespectful with your time! It’s so frustrating!
Suggested Boundaries: A simple solution if you have a client who is often late or careless with your time, keep the meeting to the agreed finish time (make sure you meet between a set period of time), i.e make it clear it is a 30 minute meeting, a 1 hour meeting etc. Be the time keeper, let clients know when the meeting is 10mins out from finishing.
Stay tuned for the fourth and final instalment of this series, which will be all about setting boundaries around creative process. Warning: some of these will be boundaries you need to enforce on yourself. 🙂
With love
Kris & Donna xo
[00:00:00] Donna: Hello.
[00:00:01] Kris: Welcome to another episode. Thank you for listening in again., listening to us talk about more boundaries, more design business boundaries.
[00:00:09] Donna: We’ve got four parts in the series planned, but I can already see that there’s going to be more down the track. There’s going to be bonuses bonus boundaries. I think because we’ve just got so many, we were excited to be sharing them.
[00:00:24] Kris: So this part three is all about project management boundaries. What we’ll do is we’ll talk about common problems that you might be having, and then a suggested boundary for each one.
[00:00:34] Donna: Yes. Sounds great.
[00:00:37] Kris: Don one thing we keep forgetting to mention to all the people who are listening to the podcast on apple and Spotify, is that we have also got these over on YouTube. So if you want to have that extra dimension, if you want to see us, see our faces, see a smiling, have eye contact,
come over there to YouTube. The link is in the show notes. So, uh, we just keep forgetting to mention it.
[00:00:59] Donna: Yes please do come over and join us in that little land. And we’d love to see you.
[00:01:06] Kris: Yeah. it’s just the same as our podcast, except a little extra, extra, cause you get to see the visuals.
[00:01:11] Donna: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That’s nice. So for people who do love that extra dimension, you will love it. It feels more personal, I guess, to be able to look at faces
[00:01:19] Kris: Having a little chat with us.
[00:01:21] Donna: Yeah. Let’s get into the problems.
[00:01:23] Kris: The first problem that we’ve seen coming up with project management is clients DM-ing or calling or emailing at all hours, and intruding in your personal time.
[00:01:38] Donna: After hours, that kind of thing.
[00:01:41] Kris: This can be a problem because of a global audience, because you might have a global client base, but it’s really important to set a parameter, set a boundary around when you are available so that you don’t feel like you’re at the beck and call twenty four seven always available to clients.
[00:02:00] Donna: Absolutely. And this is a lovely little boundary that can be set on your email communication. You can have it on repeat all over the place on your website, everywhere you just pop your hours, that you are available to your clients in the time zone that you are in on those touch points. So it’s a really clear little boundary that’s there and it gives you permission, immediate permission to adhere to those boundaries, but inevitably we’ll still have people popping into our DMS on a Sunday and calling us on, you know, late in the afternoon or first thing in the morning when we’re trying to get ready for the day. So that will still happen. So there’s an extra boundary that you can do when that happens as well. So you can have a gatekeeper on your email. And on your voicemail, even if you’d like with an autoresponder, if you are out of business hours. I just want to say with having gatekeepers set up, use them really carefully. ’cause gatekeepers can become barriers. So just make sure that you’re only using gatekeepers in times when it is a true boundary for you and not creating that barrier during work hours. It’s really important. We’ve noticed that some people have a gatekeeper just on repeat constantly for every DM, every message, and it can really shut people down. It can be really off-putting. So just make sure that you are really strategic with your gatekeepers if you were to use those auto responders.
[00:03:35] Kris: Mmm don’t have full time gatekeepers.
[00:03:37] Donna: No, full-time gatekeepers are a little bit too much and can be really disheartening, especially if clients are reaching out for something that feels quite urgent to them. Um, yes. It’s important that they don’t feel blocked all the time.
[00:03:51] Kris: Another really important touch point is having a welcome guide explaining when you’re available, how long it will take for you to get back to people, having your availability in your time zone, those sorts of things, making sure that it’s very clear.
[00:04:04] Donna: have it on repeat.
[00:04:06] Kris: It’s all about communication because it’s very confusing if you’re getting, you know, a DM on a Sunday afternoon, and then you’re getting an email later on that night or 6:00 AM Monday morning, and then you might get a phone call later. It’s it’s actually really hard to keep track of all of this. It’s, it’s hard to keep track of all the correspondence that’s happening as well. So you want to set that expectation, which, um, leads us into the next point.
[00:04:33] Donna: Yes, it does.
[00:04:34] Kris: So communication being all over the place. So, another problem we wanted to talk about today was when you’re spending hours and hours hunting down assets that you need for a project or hunting down the copy or hunting down that little bit of information that, you know, the client emailed you, or did they DM you? Or Where is this thing? Where is the image? You know, like they’ve sent you an image via a DM, then they’ve emailed part of the copy as a draft in one email and then three days later, they do a completely different email stream with another bit of copy, which it’s just all a bit of a convoluted mess. So what do we do about this problem?
[00:05:10] Donna: Dribs and drabs left right and center yep. And you’re trying to madly curate and collate those and put them together. But you can miss things when it happens like that.
[00:05:20] Kris: It’s so consuming..
[00:05:21] Donna: It’s so time consuming. That’s right. And it’s nerve wracking. I don’t like the energy that it brings when I’m having to be sure that I’ve collected everything. It’s like, oh, have I got that, If I got that, have I got that? We need our clients to be really accountable for what they’re giving us to work with. It needs to happen in one transaction in one correspondence. That needs to be outlined before the client does it so that they know, okay, I have to have everything ready. All my ducks lined up in a row.
[00:05:50] Kris: Hmm. Yeah, you don’t want to be like, what have I missed? What have I missed? It’s like horrible feeling.
[00:05:54] Donna: Okay. So insist on assets and information being bundled and supplied in one email. Or, what we love is the idea of introducing a project management portal like Trello, which is something that we use in love, but a portal where everything is in the one spot. So you don’t have to go searching. It’s an ideal way to pull everything in. And clients love that they’ve got this portal that they have access to. All of their assets are in there. All of the information pertaining to any project is in there. They can check on things, make sure that they’ve got everything for you. They can pop things in dribs and drabs in there because they are popping it into the one portal. And then once the deadline arrives, hopefully all the assets will line up and they’ll all be there. Ready and waiting for you to take over with the project.
[00:06:43] Kris: yeah, having the one spot makes everything so much easier to manage, like communication, files, assets. All in the one spot and there’s lots of different apps you can use. You don’t have to use Trello. There’s lots of ways that you can do it. We just happen to like Trello And we, actually teach that in the academy. It’s one of our bonus lessons on how to use it as a portal. Cause we love it so much for it’s ease, not just from our perspective, but from client’s perspective as well, because a lot of designers are dealing with clients who aren’t very tech savvy. So we find it’s a really beautiful solution for that.
[00:07:18] Donna: Yeah. It’s a win-win clients and designers, are winning when it comes to solutions like that.
[00:07:24] Kris: All right. Another problem.
[00:07:26] Donna: Okay. The client said that they would have final copy to you by a certain date. So let’s say it was by last Friday and here we are. It’s Tuesday of of the next week and there are crickets. There is no copy and there’s no correspondence from your client. So what do you do?
[00:07:45] Kris: Yeah. So what do you do in this situation? So when you’re your workflow is getting congested and they’re missing deadlines, the boundary is that you need to have timing, scheduling boundaries for your clients and you just send reminders for due dates regularly. It’s about having consistent communication and don’t worry about being annoying or, being right on top of them all the time. It’s okay to have regular communication in their inbox about what is happening, what we’re up to, what you expect from them. Consistent communication is key.
[00:08:19] Donna: And scheduling deadline emails. So when you do a timeline for your client, you’ll have milestones already set out. You’ll be able to send the client the timeline and what we like to do is highlight the client’s accountability on that timeline. Then for yourself, you can come back and you can schedule in some touchpoint emails where you have reminders for the client. This is due by this date. So that’s a couple of boundaries that you can set there. There’s the full timeline boundary, then there’s the email strategy around reminders. And this third boundary is that it’s really important, the minute they miss the deadline, the day of missing the deadline, you need to reach out. So you need to have an alert in your calendar that says you are expecting this particular asset from a client or this particular copy from a client that day. And when it doesn’t arrive that day, you contact them and you let them know that it hasn’t arrived. And the consequences of that are that their deadline that you are working towards may have to be moved out. And what will happen is if it is moved out, then you may have to have a reactivation fee or rush fee if they want to keep that deadline. And it’s really tricky. We keep saying this, we’ve said this in a couple of the boundaries that we’ve mentioned so far. But getting back into the groove is really tricky. So this is another one of those must do boundary settings because if you allow the client to waiver and, and take their time and really not meet deadlines, what will happen is you’ll be out of flow for one, not to mention all the other bits and pieces that we’ve just said, but that’s one thing that’s really critical to keep you on track with your project and with their project.
[00:10:06] Kris: Yeah, And if it’s the kind of project where you really need them to be available, like just say, you’re doing a design sprint, or you’re doing a, a quick turnaround, try and work out an arrangement that the client is going to be quite available for your questions. And. You know that they’re going to be there and then they’re not going to just disappear off the face of the earth. We want to make sure that everything’s clear.
[00:10:30] Donna: Yes, absolutely. I love that. Teeing it up and prearranging it making sure that they are available to you on the days that you are going to be working intensely on their project, because any quick questions that come up, you can answer them and resolve them really, really quickly, and you can keep the flow going. But essentially, having boundaries around, making sure your clients deliver on time, as promised, is essential to you having and maintaining your workflow the way that you’ve got other clients work coming in, you need to be able to manage that you need to be on top of it.
[00:11:04] Kris: Yeah, All right. Another problem that we see happening is clients ghosting the classic ghosting job, you know, like where have they gone?
[00:11:14] Donna: Yeah, where are they gone? What, and I can’t believe this happens. It happens. I get so shocked at this because you know, I’m old school. Good manners. You just tell people what’s happening, like get in touch, but you know, what do we do when it does happen.
[00:11:31] Kris: Where on earth do they go anyway? Okay. Um, there’s lots of reasons why they can disappear, but we need to have boundaries in place to help you support your clients and discourage ghosting as well. So suggested boundary for this is to have regular check-ins in place. So, yeah, like I said before, you have a right to check in. It’s not annoying if you haven’t heard from them for a while, don’t leave it too long. Get in there, reach out, reach out, reach out. It’s absolutely perfectly fine.
[00:12:03] Donna: Yeah, nurture, nurture, nurture. Consider it as a nurture, as opposed to being annoying, you are nurturing your client. You are caring for them. You are guiding them. You’re keeping them on track. You are keeping your business on track and it requires that level of connection and nurture as opposed to just letting them go rogue and letting them do their own thing. Because, when are they going to come back on board? Do I keep this job open? If you’re ghosting me, if, if you’ve just gone absolutely off and there’s crickets, do I keep this project open for how long, how long do I save space for you when I’ve got other client work that’s coming in. So it’s really imperative to know where they’re at and what they’re doing, and then what you’re doing, what you’re doing in your business. And you’ve got every right to know that.
[00:12:49] Kris: Mm, and try some different methods of communication. So if you’ve only been emailing, perhaps reach out a different way, maybe via DM or even a phone call, cause you never know what’s going on for your client. Maybe your emails are going into junk for whatever reason. Um, maybe they have some big personal issue that you don’t know about. You don’t know what they’ve got going on. So we won’t just assume that they’re idiots or they’re just being rude or they’ve turned nasty or something bad has happened,
[00:13:21] Donna: Or they hate everything you’re doing. And they usually that’s. That’s where we go. We go, they hate everything. I can’t believe they hate everything that I’m doing and they haven’t got the guts to tell me, you know, maybe something really awful for them is happening and they, and they just need the space to get through whatever situation they’re going through. So from a human centered heart-based business model, the first thing we would do is check in and say, are you okay?
[00:13:47] Kris: Say, everything all right?
[00:13:48] Donna: Is everything all right? So that’s really, really important that you check in like that, first, before we assume that everything we’re doing, you know, not enough, or whatever the case may be.
[00:14:00] Kris: But if they really have fallen off the face of the earth and they don’t seem to want to make contact with you anymore, there needs to be a boundary in place about this. And this could be a project termination boundary, which hopefully you’ve got in your contract, which allows you to terminate a project if you wish. Um, And there will be a consequence. So they need to be informed of the consequence. Because we haven’t heard from you, this consequence will apply on this date. So it could be, a termination fee or it could be that you don’t get your deposit back, or it could be, if they wanna re kick off the project, then there will be a reactivation fee like Donna mentioned earlier. Because clients don’t realize how much time and energy it takes to get back into the groove of a project. And I’m pretty sure we talked about that in the last podcast, but it’s so important that long pause is
[00:14:53] Donna: Yeah, It really is. And the other thing is you start scheduling other projects and then that’s that congestion that we’re talking about in the problem before, congestion happens and you can’t manage everybody’s work all at once. There’s a reason that you plan. There’s a reason that you have your timeframes and your timelines with all the accountability in place. So it’s just reminding gently and with respect and kindness, reminding the client of that and bringing them back on track. So, yeah.
[00:15:23] Kris: The last problem that we wanted to talk about today with project management is you’ve got a really time consuming client who he loves to chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, and every meeting blows out. And every email takes a very long time to go through. And, you know, they’re just a time-consuming client. Or often they’re late to meetings or they just seem downright careless or disrespectful of your time. That could be the issue too. It might not be that they’re just a chattery person, but they just might seem a bit disrespectful and not really care that they’re late or don’t really care that they’re taking up your time. And it’s so frustrating.
[00:16:05] Donna: And it really is disheartening when that happens, but I think we can all relate. I bet you, I, I hear lots of ahas and nodding of the head out there. We’ve all had an auntie or a family member that we’ve done a job for. And they see any touch point to do with their project as an opportunity to catch up about family and friends as well. So every time it’s like, no, I’m literally just calling about the print production to make sure we’re on track. And then they’ll go into gossip or whatever.
[00:16:32] Kris: Yeah, or, when beautiful clients become like friends and they might be chattery and then you need to set a limit. So what is that boundary that you can put in place?
[00:16:43] Donna: Um, so a simple solution to this is being really clear about the time you have for that particular client. So if it is a meeting say, great, we have a 30 minute meeting on this date and then let them know. I have another commitment after this meeting. So we’ve got 30 minutes, let’s make the most of it. So we’re always making sure that they know. And at 25 minutes into the meeting, you actually give them a little bit of a heads up. So we’re 25 minutes in. We’ve got five more minutes. How are you going? Have we answered all the questions? If we need more time, we can schedule more time, but we’ve got five more minutes to go. So we’re really being timekeepers when it comes to these beautiful chatty clients. Or if they call you on the phone, that’s a tricky one. So they’ll call up and you still need to set a boundary even for phone calls. So you’ll say to them, it’s great to hear from you. How can I help you if they ask you if you’ve got time, that’s wonderful. That’s wonderful because not all friends and family and chatty clients actually ask if now is a good time. So allow that to fall, allow that to land with you. And if it’s not a good time, it’s okay for you to say. Now is not great, but I can schedule some time for you and you choose when to schedule that time. But likely if you’ve answered the phone, you’ve got 10, 15 minutes. So just let them know I’ve got 10 or 15 minutes now, so happy to help you. I’m happy to be here for you. And then when that time is up, just say, look, I’ve got to go. I have to run, but thank you. And, wrap it up. However, it naturally organically needs to wrap up, but don’t be afraid to be the timekeeper with beautiful clients like this.
[00:18:18] Kris: Yeah. And when it comes to written correspondence, the lines can blur between friendships and family and clients and all those sorts of things. And especially as we get to know our clients, they do become friends. So it can be helpful to have separate communication channels for friendship and separate communication channels for business. So your friendship, your, your, your messaging on your phone, um, with business, anything to do with business correspondence, you specify how that happens. So it might be through slack, or it could be through Trello. We love Trello for correspondence.
[00:18:51] Donna: I
[00:18:51] Kris: like
[00:18:51] Donna: was going to say here, here we are. We’re going to talk about Trello again, but it is the ideal platform to keep everything business. This is a business portal and we can separate our friendship out.
[00:19:02] Kris: Yeah. That’s the key. So hopefully that helps that’s part three, next session. We’re talking about creative process and this will be a little bit more designer focus rather than client focused, well, it’s both, it’s a bit of both, but sometimes us little designers need some boundaries for ourselves.
[00:19:24] Donna: We need to be timekeeper for ourselves, so we don’t get lost down lots of rabbit holes and, get lost in the joy of research. So there’s ways and means to pull us back, be our own gatekeeper, Be our own timekeepers. We can talk about those next time.
[00:19:40] Kris: Yeah. So look out for that one and please do check out us on YouTube so that it’s not just, we keep having a joke that it’s just Donna myself and our mums watching at the moment. So you want to check that out.
[00:19:56] Donna: That’s it. That’s what it’s like, isn’t it? But anyway, we are confident that there are other people who like this dimension, so it be nice to see that you’ve been there. All right. Lovely people
[00:20:07] Kris: Until next time.
Bye.
[00:20:10] Kris:
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