How clients perceive you – your reputation, your brand.
Friday, December 5th, 2008Some of my thoughts from a recent workshop I attended at The Werks, titled “Developing and demonstrating your reputation“.
The beauty of a workshop about this, is that it doesn’t apply to just web industry, see what points you think you offer and perhaps start working on the others!
Why do some people seem to get all the interesting projects to work on, and be able to easily go from one project to the next? Why are some people able to charge higher daily rates than others?
Here’s a list of reasons why :
- Employers require from freelancers, that they are pleasant, eloquent and ‘get it’ – no matter what industry you are working in. Also get on well with their in-house full-time staff.
- Clients want you to do job more quickly than full time employees – there is no shorthand way of communicating with a client or freelancer, it all depends on how are you working with them – you can make it easy, open or hard and slow.
- You should be honest, and face up to problems by communicating when ‘don’t get it’.
- Do it on time, especially if you have been drafted in to complete a tight deadline, but if you don’t deliver that will let you and your reputation down.
- Do it well – quality of work – should be bulletproof, and stand up to audits and reviews, ie: accessibility (WAI) and semantic code (W3C) standards.
- Price (not the most important in this list – if your reputation is good, you will be worth your costs) unless new clients find you on forum – like freelancers.net will be price only as they wont see the other thing.
- From what I have learnt from quite a few years contracting and running my own business, you should be proactive with your clients and you suppliers. Be clear what you can offer clients as part of your services/brand.
- Provide case studies of how you have worked in the past. Testimonials always help as clients can identify with other people hiring you for work.
What works for you? Let me know because this list is obviously not a holy grail, just a list of pointers to make you work more effectively with your employers by providing extra value for them and strengthening your reputation at the same time.
