Sevenzest

Babble

19 June 05

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Cancelled contract - my first heart-break

Have I been neglecting my clients? Maybe I don’t phone/email/fax/message/page my clients enough for satisfaction – or do clients require communication from me to the point of annoyance until it’s considered I appear serious about the project? I’m not sure, but I distinctively remember having a crisis of Monday of last week, missed a phone call from Ray from XX motels – a project which began in April, and I was not able to listen to the message until Tuesday night in the comfort of my bed – BOOM, there goes my heart: “I’ve been trying to get hold of you, a couple of days now, I want to cancel our deal. Bye.” As I lay in bed numb from the shock – oblivious to reasons beyond my control. I was mildly comforted that I had a signed agreement. but still – the website was at 85% done, and I had spoken to Ray who was happy to proceed onto the next stage in the website development only a weekend prior to that dreadful phone message.

So what had gone wrong? With half of me steaming anger and other half with self-doubt nervousness, I phoned Ray the following morning only to be greeted with a cold answer. “I just don’t have the confidence you can achieve what we want to accomplish in this project.” I understand my business is relatively new, but I have had a lot of experience with website and graphic design so I believe I can do this. “If I think about it, the whole time we have been leading, instead of the other way around”. I work with client by listening to their needs and then come up with something for a solution “You should be impressing us – but we’re not” You’ve seen the progress of this website, and it’s looking good, I thought everything was going really well. “Yeah well I just don’t think you’re well established enough for us to believe in you”.

In the aftermath of this experience I thought about my appreciation of having a signed contract (to cover costs of work I already completed), and how my clients differ in such intangible ways. One says I must comply to all their standards and instructions under a certain time frame, then another one says that I need to be making all the suggestions and idea generation in the design process. Is it possible that I’ve let the ones who wish to take control of the design process tainted my priority role of a designer? Or is the inexplicable matter out of my hands entirely and due to bad luck? I know I must be more careful to be clear in the beginning on how I determine to work with the client, and that I probably need to carry out more responsibility of idea generation in the future.