4 ms·
One of the biggest mistakes that agencies or freelancers make with big corporations is to assume that their direct point of contact is able to call shots, or is
by jonnathanson 14y ago
One of the biggest mistakes that agencies or freelancers make with big corporations is to assume that their direct point of contact is able to call shots, or is fully empowered to render decisions on behalf of the client. For the most part, the bigger the company, the bigger the bureaucracy is likely to be, and thus the less true this assumption will be.
If at all possible, try to figure out where your day-to-day point person sits on his company's totem pole. How many layers are on top of him, or next to him, or between him and "Yes" or "No?" Make absolutely sure that a verdict from him, at any stage in any process, represents the verdict of anyone whose consensus or approval he needs. It's very easy to get burned when your point person renders a decision, then you find out two weeks later that his boss's boss's boss just got back from a two-week business trip and is looking at everything for the first time.
Agency squeeze is usually the result of internal politics at the client firm. Either someone's throwing you under the bus to cover his/her ass, or the Big Boss is putting pressure on everyone (including the agency) to deliver additional work, outside of the SOW, for the sheer sake of applying pressure.
- PeterisP 14y agoThe initial agreement needs to specify the responsible contact person in the ordering company with the authority to approve each iteration. Once it's approved, it's approved - the company gave him the official final vote. You are getting written agreements before investing any significant number of hours, aren't you?
- mikeryan 14y agoThis isn't that realistic in practice. You're going to run into one of two scenarios. First they agree to have a person with the authority to approve, but that person has to run around and gather internal approval before they sign off, and you're now stuck in the same situation you just have a designated "approver" but without veto power. Second scenario. They just don't approve that language in the contract. We have lots of brilliant language like this in our boilerplate contracts, but most of the time it just comes back deleted. We can haggle back and forth on it a while but eventually if its a big enough deal, we're just not going to decline a large contract because their approval process sucks.
- jimbokun 14y agoWhat does it matter how big the deal is, if you don't get paid?
- mikeryan 14y agoThat's what deposits are for. We generally get a pretty sizable chunk of our fee up front (25-50%) and before we first hit design reviews. If crap goes sour during design review we're already holding their money. Now we can still have done more work then they've paid for but at least some of that risk is mitigated while we settle the rest in the courts. I should note that we're kind of young, but this has never yet happened to us.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]