Business

We've been contending with a pricing model for our clients at Foliovision. As Foliovision has grown outside its old bounds as a single person company doing relatively contained projects, our rates have had to rise.

It's not such a problem as we are a lot more productive.

There are two primary models: flat fee and pay-per-hour.

In principle, flat-fee is more profitable (if you charge $1000 but through automatisation can get your time to render the project down to 2 hours from 12 hours you've just made $500/hour instead of $80/hour.

On the other hand, we mainly do made-to-measure work. There is rarely the opportunity to automatise to that extent. We get exponentially better results in our markets than the competition so made-to-measure clearly works.

With made-to-measure work one can spend more time quoting and negotiating spec back and forth than working.

Gradually the client can grow to hate your emails demanding expansion of project scope and budget. Generally the (busy) client would prefer to pay more for something delivered with no hassle, complete and working. Then he or she only pays once for the project, instead of twice.

Twice is their time spent micromanaging what ends up costing more or less the same anyway.

Keep reading Pricing a Project: Hourly Billing versus Flat Fee

Contrarian business advice from Trizle is always a thrill.

For a taste, Why You Need a Chaotic Business:

Order = Bad Advice

The dude’s well-intentioned “let’s-order-everything, cuz-we’re-like-the-world’s-nerdiest-businesspeople” mindset stands as one of the several “bad, bad, bad” advices we received when we started.

Why? The mindset drives you to do nothing. Nada. Standstill. Blah.

• Instead of moving forward, you’re documenting.
• Instead of increasing sales, you’re recording every little detail of your past order.
• Instead of improving employee morale, you’re entering data of past employee feedback.
• Instead of fattening your bottom line online, you’re trying to perfect every freakin’ detail of your freakin’ website that’s going to take a freakin’ looooong time.

I think the Trizle guy has the E-Myth myth guy clearly in his targets. Michael Gerber is obsessed with turning every company into McDonalds, turning every company into a turnkey franchise.

Keep reading Chaotic Business versus the E-Myth

Sometimes a website can be setup to help one party and instead help another.

For one of my websites, I need to license some photos.

I haven’t had the right language for the contract. I looked at the contracts from the stock agencies but they were way too elaborate. I tried to find a local lawyer but none of them were competent in intellectual property. I sent somebody to contact the international law firms but they wanted thousands of dollars.

Thanks to Carolyn Wright, I now have my new contract by piecing together the parts which are supposed to worry photographers.

I did rewrite my contract to make it more fair to the photographer, allowing exhibition and print rights.

My main concern is to ensure that these images don’t turn up on other websites.

I ran across the most amazing niche website yesterday – dedicated to the possibility of a crash in house prices in the UK…. His forecast for house prices is for “a 30 to 40 per cent fall over the next three to four years”, a fall he describes as “a healthy correction”.

A very interesting discussion at Slashdot earlier this month about how to stop spam.

There were many suggestions involving images with obscured characters, but that's just not acceptable for business.

A lot of these suggestions are fine for personal sites; but if you're actually in business they aren't practical.We use Javascript. You don't want to make life more difficult for the person trying to correspond - the point is to raise the cost to the spammer. If they have to add a Javascript parser to their spider, it's going to slow them way down. It's not going to make financial sense for them to do a custom solution for each site (and if they do, the "image" methods will break down as well).

What do we do for our own clients to lighten the spam load?

Keep reading Foiling Email Harvesters and Coping with Spam

Veerle Pieters lashed out recently at freeloader clients. The client in question would be a big client (city website in Belgium).

That particular city wasn't content with a design mockup alone oh no they even had the audacity to state that the design revisions to that mockup had to be free too. You only got to have the nerve to think that's normal. This pisses me off and I have one clear message to all those freeloaders "stick it where the sun doesn't shine"! I don't work for free! Somebody has to say it out-loud.

Time to put a stop to it

The purpose of creative pitches are to give clients a better understanding of the creative capacity of the selected agencies. To me it is a lame excuse to not browse around in the portfolios and let someone else do the work for free. I wonder what goes on in the mind of the people who write that stuff down, do they expect the freebies in everything else also? From what understand it is not only a Belgian problem but an international one.

So when was the last time that somebody did a day of work for free for you? Think about, let a painter do a few rooms as a proposal and maybe you'll order the rest later. Good luck in finding one that will do so. Those RPF's are 8 to 10 pages if you are lucky and doing everything to the letter it will cost at least a day of work.

From my time working in major advertising agencies, I know we do these things free all the time. We used to call them pitches. The creative department (I was television production) would end up staying all night for a couple of nights doing mockups, phony storyboards, new looks. The account executive types would be putting fat binders of research together.

Keep reading A Short History of Free Proposals

For the company lunches, I just bought an enormous 10 litre Tescoma home profi soup pot.

I was curious about the company who made this fine piece of stainless steel.

Looking them up Tescoma in Google coughed up this great case study of the company history. It turns out that Tescoma is a about a ten year old company which went from water coolers to cookware, selling tens of millions of dollars of cookware around the world.

Keep reading Eastern European Success Stories for the Taking

To make the web work for you. What do we mean by that? Your website will work to expand and support your business, seamlessly.