What do your mother and kept promises have to do with running your creative agency?
Well, when children, our mothers firmly encouraged us (i.e. forced us) to keep our promises. Naturally they wanted to teach responsibility, honesty, commitment, and values like this….and they might not even think it all ‘stuck’.
But when it comes to dealing with your clients and running a successful creative agency, it turns out your mother was spot on.
But should you even make the promise?
One of the things we’ve become aware of is that in order to keep promises to your clients, you first need to make sure you’re able to fulfill it. This is a classic mistake for creative agencies – to take on loads of work because it’s fun, enjoyable, new, exciting, profitable. But as time goes on and we take on more and more work, more clients, more projects, our well-meant promises can drift to the point that we’re not keeping them anymore. (Sorry, Mum.)
How are you doing with your promises? Are you carefully evaluating what you can do, or are you giving an enthusiastic “YES!” to every work request you receive? If so, you’ll know as well as we do that it’s impossible to handle all the work you’ve committed to.
And when promises aren’t kept, expectations aren’t met, and projects drag on, it becomes failure for your clients and a negative image for your creative agency.
How do you ensure you keep your creative agency promises?
Here are our tips to help you manage those promises and ensure that they are kept, clients pleased, projects completed – and, of course, profits improved.
1) Should you even make the promise (take on the project)?
We want the work, we like our ego to be stroked and we enjoy doing anything creative. So we promise more than we should. But wait… before instinctively accepting a job with a promise, first analyse whether you are accepting it from conviction, or from obligation.
Accepting every project or task is not your obligation. You must be convinced that you can handle it successfully. For example, if your client asks you to adapt their new website to add an e-commerce section, enabling them to sell products online, that’s all well and good. But when they ask if you can get it done in two weeks before their new exhibition, you need to stop and consider whether you actually can do this. The work is exciting, but we all know how much can go wrong with these types of projects. An alternative solution is to offer to do the work at a “premium cost” for the rush service, or at the normal fee but two weeks later (or however much additional time is needed).
2) Learn to say “no” sometimes
It’s very tempting to say “Yes! I can do it!” to every job request, but let’s be honest, the day only has 24 hours and even if we want to add a few extra hours (or days to the calendar), life happens. Perhaps a team member goes off sick, or a client you were waiting on for content suddenly delivered it all to you. When you disappoint your clients, they not only lose trust in you, but they might not want to work with your agency again, or even worse, they can tell others why working with you is not the best idea.
3) Share honestly with your client how long the work will take
When you make a promise, explain to your client about how this will work, and how long you anticipate the job will take. For example, if you’re producing a digital video and need 5-10 days, explain the steps included. Explain what happens if additional features such as animation or links are requested. Make sure the client understands that you don’t just sit down at your computer and churn it out in twenty minutes. Explaining this and making sure your client understands the time needed to meet all the requirements for a “100% satisfaction guaranteed” job, means that you can invest the proper time for each task and show your dedication to them.
4) Allow yourself some wiggle room – things rarely go to plan
Make sure to consider extra time for contingency – those unexpected circumstances that interrupt your well-laid agenda, or disorganise your perfect work plan. Define the average time you need to finish a job and add a 10-20% extra time. So if creating the video we mentioned above takes 5-10 days, promise it will be done in 11 days. That way, even if you take the maximum of 10 days, it’s still ‘early’ to the client – and you can have time to finish the work well.
5) Write the date you promise the work in the project brief
It is a very simple action, but it can bring great results. When you write down the date for delivering a project – for example, a website launch or brand logo draft design, it not only helps show your commitment as a trustworthy and professional creative agency, but allows you to better manage your time with a panoramic picture of all the projects underway. That way you can be tracking the progress of each task as project deadlines loom.
6) Deliver early sometimes
Getting a job done on time is the least a client expects. But if you finish it before the committed date – or well before, such as a week early – then you have gone beyond and exceeded expectations instead of meeting them. The “under promise, over deliver” mantra fits well here. Not only is your client thrilled, but you have extra time to do other jobs.
As an example, one of our clients always adds on 24 hours to the promised time for delivering the work, and then delivers early. Always. Isn’t that a great result?
Just bear in mind that delivering a job sooner should never involve sacrificing the quality of the final result.
So, your mother’s injunction to keep your promise is a good one. A promise is an invitation to trust – and a promise kept is a confirmation that the trust was well placed.
Don’t waste any opportunity to make your initial promise become a long lasting, trusted relationship between your agency and its clients.
