Dealing with Client Changes Like a PRO in 2024

I'm going to begin this episode with a metaphor be bamboo my friend be bamboo grows fast it's very flexible and is super strong when we're talking about clients you're going to run into a situation where you're not sure if you should go against what they ask for or if you should comply if you're younger creative you just think automatically the answer has to be go against the client because they don't know what they're doing and you do at the ripe old age of 22 let's think about that for a little bit most of the time I'm going to

tell you this you're in the service business and the only way that you have business is to be of service to your client you have to understand they're not interfering with your art you're interfering with their money they afford you the life that you have the ability to live and express yourself creatively and pay rent buy food and save money for a rainy day a lot of creative people mistakenly believe themselves as artists where you have a patron who just pays you to make whatever it is that you make and often times when the client asked to I don't know make the logo a little bit bigger or to move things around you have an adverse negative emotional reaction to it and what happens then and you don't know this because clients are pretty good at hiding their emotions they just say to themselves when they get in the car never again and whoever hired or recommended rich or Chris they're dead to me at this point so not only have you burned that relationship you burned the person to introduce you which is an irresponsible thing for you to do that's why when a client asks me for referral I'm very careful as to who I refer them to I want to make sure they do good work and they take good care of them because now my reputation is on the line it's something that many people don't take into consideration cuz you're living in your little bubble of designery and you think this is what

it's all about I'm going to give you some real life examples of when it's good to bend and when it's not good to bend we'll start first like when it's good to bend often times we work with clients who have extremely good taste who have great ideas and understand their clients really well and they challenge us they say you know what those ideas are great but how far can we push it that gives us the kind of confidence to say you know what most clients reain is back in but this client in particular is pushing us to go crazy to push to find the edges of what they think they can sell to their client and those are dream relationships many times those relationships if you have an open mind bear the best fruit like you do work that's better than what you could normally do because the clients pushed you they gave you room to sort of hang yourself I mean if you wanted to you can go and create some pretty crazy things and often times creatives we do that we give them that extra mile because they said you know what push it let's go and we'll spend More Money More Time more resources trying to find the edges of our creativity and that's a good time to bend to the client's wishes here's the time when it was not good many years ago we were shooting a commercial for Audi it was the introduction of the A7 in Europe is the brand new debut of this kind of hot fast four-door sedan that was like very coup likee in its design or Coupe as they say in Europe it was beautiful and the budget was tight we could not rent a techno crane okay camera that was controlled with motors that we can repeat certain motions or it wasn't stable all we could afford was a crane which was handheld and we're trying to pull off a very precise shot and to keep focus and to keep the shot stable is the very difficult thing to do when you have humans involved and so what ultimately happened was we got the footage back and my visual effects supervisor looked at the footage and said it's kind of unusable so what he had to do was he had to take frames from that camera move break it apart and photo map it back onto a 3D CG car it's called photogrammetry to create a photo realistic version of it that wound up taking a lot of time and energy he said that it was not necessary for us to shoot it on a jib arm if we couldn't use a techn cran so in a case like that when the client's like well we want you to do it this way but we don't have the budget for you to do it the way that you want we had to just say no we can't do it this way we do not take responsibility for the shot given the circumstances and we know that you will not be happy with the result if we do it this way so we have to devise a new plan according to my VFX supervisor he said we should have just gone in there with a Ste camera taking a bunch of photos they would have been more usable less work less painstaking frame to freeze frames and try to stitch together reverse engineer static frames cuz you know when you take a photograph it's much sharper higher resolution than if you were pulling video frames from a camera and so that was the challenge so in a case like that we implemented a new rule which is when we know better when we know that this going to lead to back result do not agree do not comply to what the clients asked for because we know at the end of the day they're not going to be happy we're and we're going to be eating it in the shorts because we're going to spend all kinds of money to fix something that we knew was not going to work but there aren't that many cases when you know that in fact that this not going to work it's a technical thing and we as a technical people in this situation in this relationship know better most of the times you want to die on the hill for an aesthetic thing and you believe your aesthetic or your taste is Superior and therefore has to be the way that it's going to go we know this Aesthetics are subjective no one has the ability to say this is always the best solution it's contextual and it's relevant to the client and to the situation and the time

a lot of us have relationships with our clients and we look at ourselves as a vendor and a vendor has no power in the relationship we need to shift our mindset from being a vendor to a collaborator or a consultant in which case they're paying you good money for your opinions and ideas and recommendations and often times you may disagree you may have a better way as long as it's not purely subjective and egotistical here's what I suggest that you say this phrase usually gets you out of a lot of trouble and gets you to have your way and them thanking you for it here's the phrase everybody you're the boss at the end of the day I will do exactly what you asked me to do but hear me out on this one thing I'm concerned about X because it would lead to Y having given you that information I'm relinquishing my responsibility you need to make the decision that's best for you so what we're doing there is we're saying you have the power I respect your Authority but I have to voice something that I know is not going to work but at the end of the day you get to make that decision so the next time you get pushed

back from your clients run through these three things before you can give them an emotional reaction number one ask yourself is the request reasonable if it's a reasonable request it's within the scope of work well then you should just say yes number two is the request something that you know technically is going to lead to problems if that's the case what you need to do is you have to say stop we have to have a serious conversation I need to explain to you something it's not about subjectively me wanting to do it X versus y it's like here's the problem what's going to happen and in this way I think you're tapping into an idea called The Challenger sale which is not to sell something but to get the clients to question if this is the right way to proceed so now you're tapping into the like the idea from the Challenger sale which is not to close a sale but to get the clients to think huh I never thought of it that way before and to make them part of the decision-making process number three is if it's purely subjective where it's if you if you're pull 10 creatives 10 designers 10 directors 10 editors and say which one's the best and you're not going to get the same answer maybe you just need to let

that one go as always if you enjoyed this episode share it with someone who needs to hear it and if you have a nightmare client situation where you're not sure if the clients are pushing you too much or if you should push back let me know in the comments send me a DM