Comments on: Some recent business mistakes and the lessons learnt

By: phil

phil — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:51:43 +0000

@Richard: I won’t be revealing my day-rate here… for many reasons:) but I’m not charging so much as to make a £50 dent everything other than a very large dent!

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:50:48 +0000

It happens sometimes – even with the most careful planning, there’ll be things out of your control that will probably cost you money.

I think we’re getting better at spotting that sort of project, and we usually cost in room for things not going our way, though with smaller projects it’s near impossible to do that and be in budget!

How much do you charge a day (if you don’t mind revealing it?) – at £3 for 15 – 20 photos (total of around £50, let’s say), it’d be an annoying dent in the work’s pay (especially for the sake of a day’s work), but can’t be too bad, surely?

By: phil

phil — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:54:46 +0000

@James: I wholeheartedly agree: talking to the client is the best way of situations like this but in this case, I left it too late in the day before realising my error. Had I realised sooner I could have had that conversation and politely asked to renegotiate the quote, as it was it dragged on a bit too long.

By: James

James — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:55:56 +0000

Hi Phil,

Sorry to hear about your mistake – but to me, you just made a simple, common error of judgement which could have easily been rectified.

For instance; you could have told the client that the code was in an unforeseen state – therefore it will take longer than originally quoted? Likewise; you could have told the client that stock photography was supplied at an additional third-party cost – or apologised for omitting this minor detail from the quote?

Sometimes the best way out of issues like this is to talk to the client, rather than blame yourself – because apart from being trigger happy on istockphoto, you didn’t do anything wrong.