The Rock-Solid 8 Part Client Agreement For Starting Every Project Off Right | The Infinite Clients Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 292

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello, welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, hi. Hey, hello, welcome. So glad to have you here. You are in the right place right now if you are a creative who offers freelance services and you want to make more money from your creative skills without selling your soul. If that sounds like you, then you're in the right place. If that doesn't sound like you, then go away.

For my returning listeners, people have been with me for a long time. We're 292 episodes into this show, so some of you have been with us for a long time, and I'm winking to you if you're watching on YouTube.

If not, then I'm just telling you that I'm winking at you, which is way less cool than just winking at you. We are continuing our series this week. I'm actually renaming the series. It started off as something really bland. I'm not even going to tell you what it was if this is your first episode.

This is the Infinite Client Series now. Sounds way cooler, doesn't it? The whole concept of this series is what can we do to make sure that every single client that we work with refers at least one client to us? If we can do that, we essentially have Infinite Clients.

That's almost an impossible goal, but it's something we can strive towards. And this episode is our first and what is likely going to be a long series when it comes to how do we make that happen? So anytime you hear me say Infinite Clients, it's a cheeky kind of like air quotes. There is no such thing as Infinite Clients, but again, we're trying to strive towards that. And getting an Infinite Supply of Clients starts with making sure your clients are happy and getting what they want.

They pay you, you do the work, they're happy with that work, that's point A. That's the first thing we have to do. Clear and obvious. The biggest killer of referrals and repeat clients, which is what we always want, is unmet expectations.

And the reason we get to this point, this toxic area where there's unmet expectations of some sort, it's because we didn't properly set expectations at the beginning, and or we didn't put those in writing with the client. So they think that they're gonna get something that they don't. They think that you do something that you don't. They think this payment that they've made to you includes something that it doesn't. They think the deliverable looks like X, but it's actually A or Y or P. And thus, we get to the point where expectations aren't met. It's the killer of referrals, it's the killer of repeat clients. And we look at unmet expectations kind of like a spectrum. It's not black and white, it's not ones and zeros, it's not binary, it is a spectrum. The unmet expectations could just be anything from something as minor as just like a weird, bad taste in their mouth because there was just something off at the very end of the project. And on the extreme other end is they hate you and they actively bad mouth you and they actively push people away from hiring you.

And beyond even that is a level that I don't think many freelancers have gotten to, hopefully you haven't, is where you get sued by your client. That's like unmet expectations times a thousand.

None of us want to get there.

Obviously we don't want this to happen, but it would make sense that clients would be unhappy with unmet expectations. Anytime we're in a situation where we feel like we don't get what we expect, you tend to feel wronged. And anytime you feel like you're wronged, you tend to react in some way, shape, or form, depending on the severity of those unmet expectations.

A simple, stupid example would be like if I'm going to dinner out with friends at a restaurant, and I'm expecting a nice meal where I can talk to my friends, have a great conversation, and we sit down at the restaurant, and the atmosphere is extremely loud, everyone's talking really loud, the music's blaring really loud, and I have to scream, and I struggle to hear what my friends are saying in the conversation. That's an unmet expectation. My expectation was that I wanted a nice dinner, that I could have a conversation with friends.