Question about charging

All right, quick questions for some of the seasoned veterans on the board. I have been working as a corporate video production company and have found that I recently experienced some issues with a client who is asking for more and more work than we agreed upon.

The issue is that they do not believe that they should have to pay for extra work. My issue is the following, what do you do? Especially as someone trying to get a foot in the door, do you let them walk all over you and do the work for free or do you just tell them that they can have the footage that exists and you keep the deposit.

This is not just a few seconds of editing, he is asking for additional shoots that even though they are relatively minor, are going to take me at least a few more hours.

I’d really appreciate any feedback.

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Anyone ever work with http://www.scorchlondon.com?

 

This is quite common problem in doing business. The answer always depends on a context of the particular case.

1) Is this a big client (or regular) who you can't lose? Then it is easy to answer - you are likely to do it, for free, because you benefit from it.

2) Is this a small client who is unlikely to come back regardless how kind you are? This is much harder case. In this case, you check your contract. Does it define exactly the amount of work you are about to do? If so, just follow the contract. If the contract is not well define (most common situation), then you have a choice. If you do have better things to do (like work on other contracts), I would suggest not to do more than 10 % of extra work for free. However, this really depends on the contract. You should never break a contract even if you realize later that you agreed to do more work for less money than you actually thought you would.

It is more important to learn from this situation and define the contract well next time. This is not an easy thing to do, but it is necessary for doing business in general. It is always better to invest some time to your client before the actual work starts, and properly define everything, than to be disappointed later. Of course that sometimes, especially in case of very small tasks, this is not worth the time and you just go and risk it ...

 

I think O-D-T here, explains things quite clearly. You need to ascertain your current position and take up a fixed stance that you need to follow. If you mess up your relationship with an important client, you might lose out on important projects in future. However, if you are willing to offer slave labor right now, the client could expect the same, in future too!

 

Hey, I even ran into that problem with a friend one time. He asked me to make a simple site for him. So I did. Then he started emailing me asking to update this, change that and so on. I finally got pissed off enough to say: find somebody else to do the job.

In your case, I'd ask them to write a nice review of you, as a designer, or your company in exchange. I think it's only fair.

 

Charge extra for everything/ And that from the begining. Don`t let yourself blackmailed. Any extra he asks, you reply sure, that would be xxx $. And that`s it.

 

Your initial proposal/contract needs to spell out precisely what is to be done and what will be charged for any additional work "out of scope." In this case, tell your client that his requests are outside of the scope of the project, which you will allow this one time; however, any additional work will be quoted at standard rates. Get the review that qwikad suggests as part of the deal.

 

Have to agree with most, this will depend.

A few hours more is going to be a big deal if the first hour was cheap.

But if it was a 'decent' project to start, what's a few hours more?

 

Always make them pay for every second of work you do. Otherwise, you're nothing more than a common slave.

 

I suggest maybe saying you'll do "x" amount of work for no extra charge -- maybe 30-60 minutes' worth as a promotional effort. However, you also will have to find a graceful way to let the client know that "x services" will cost extra. (Substitute "x" in this scenario for types of work and/or amount of time it will take. )