Thanks, Jesse; you just showed me why every business I ever started failed. ;^) Enjoyed hearing you share experiences like that. Whenever I tried web design, photography, producing photo videos for high school graduation, people copied me or stole my intellectual property. The rural midwest where I lived for a dozen years after marrying Karen was notorious for that. How could I go after the school where Karen taught after they took my clearly marked "proprietary - competitive sensitive" website mockup and gave it to someone else to implement. Business wise, I don't do well with the whole chiseling aspect of negotiation - there is after all, that old saying the worker is worthy of his meat. Such negotiations literally take food out of your mouth. Thankfully, with age I learned to say NO and need give no excuses or rationale for being a rock.
Tanks for the Ko-Fi, Jack. There's no way around it, it's tough to run a business. We've ended up tweaking our approach to websites (when we were doing them more) so we would break it down into a strategy phase before we dive into design work. This way we are already under contract before the client sees anything they can take to someone else. With AI, it's getting tougher than ever because there is more competition and the value of experience is being diminished because non-experts don't notice the nuances that separate good enough from great, or they just don't care or value that difference. Regarding negotiation, the only thing we negotiate on is the scope. If you can't afford "X", what can we cut to help get your price down to "Y"? If someone asks why does it cost so much, the response is "those are our rates." That would be followed up by something along the lines of "why did you want to talk to us?" This recenters the conversation on value rather than price.
Thanks, Jesse; you just showed me why every business I ever started failed. ;^) Enjoyed hearing you share experiences like that. Whenever I tried web design, photography, producing photo videos for high school graduation, people copied me or stole my intellectual property. The rural midwest where I lived for a dozen years after marrying Karen was notorious for that. How could I go after the school where Karen taught after they took my clearly marked "proprietary - competitive sensitive" website mockup and gave it to someone else to implement. Business wise, I don't do well with the whole chiseling aspect of negotiation - there is after all, that old saying the worker is worthy of his meat. Such negotiations literally take food out of your mouth. Thankfully, with age I learned to say NO and need give no excuses or rationale for being a rock.
Tanks for the Ko-Fi, Jack. There's no way around it, it's tough to run a business. We've ended up tweaking our approach to websites (when we were doing them more) so we would break it down into a strategy phase before we dive into design work. This way we are already under contract before the client sees anything they can take to someone else. With AI, it's getting tougher than ever because there is more competition and the value of experience is being diminished because non-experts don't notice the nuances that separate good enough from great, or they just don't care or value that difference.
Regarding negotiation, the only thing we negotiate on is the scope. If you can't afford "X", what can we cut to help get your price down to "Y"? If someone asks why does it cost so much, the response is "those are our rates." That would be followed up by something along the lines of "why did you want to talk to us?" This recenters the conversation on value rather than price.