Not every contract you have is going to go perfectly – even if you deliver what you promised. In August, I had my first freelance contract that I consider a failure. The client ended work early, and wasn’t satisfied. I’ve spent a while reflecting to see what I can learn from the experience.
Goal: Increase Marketplace Subs
What’s a little bit crazy is that the contract was to generate additional submissions to the marketplace on their website. My proposal indicated that my goal was to increase legitimate submissions by 50-100%. We did so, and were only 75% of the way through the contract. Ideally, it could have increased even further, but I’m not certain. One of the variations was performing 100% better than the others, so potentially with that variation running for all traffic you’d get an additional 50-75% bump. The stretch goal would have been a 400% increase (we’re dealing with small numbers here, so it was plausible), but we hit numbers that the contract said we’d hit.
Problem: Junk Subs
The problem, though, was that it also increased the number of “junk” submissions to the marketplace by 400%. To me, that was a reasonable tradeoff and strategy, but to them it meant that they had to dedicate time and energy to dealing with the junk. We didn’t spend enough time thinking through what would happen, and who was going to handle the additional workload: I probably could have saved it if I had been willing/able to communicate with them in real time and deal with the junk automatically instead of leaving them to deal with it. I knew that it was going to happen, but letting them try to handle it themselves was likely a misstep on my part – and if I could have I would have much preferred to just handle that manual work with inexpensive interns, or automation, but they seemingly don’t feel like they’re in a place yet that they can afford not to handle each one with expensive, knowledgeable communication.
Reflection: Manage Risk expectations along with the upside
In any case, that scenario ended with a mildly unhappy client, and certainly no great referral or goodwill for me. It was a learning experience in terms of expectation management, though. It was my first contract, so I think that I just didn’t do particularly well setting expectations and interacting with them like I did with others.
Communication note: Getting added to the slack team with some of my other clients has been by far the best way to stay in touch. It makes you feel MUCH more like part of the team. I know that with the couple long term contractors I have hired, the ones that felt like that stuck around a lot longer and had a much better relationship. Looking at my experience so far, the ones where I have done that, I’m successful and the ones where I haven’t were not. It’s a pretty stark comparison, actually. In addition, I’m not doing a ton of consulting anymore, but the relationships that I built with some of my clients are good enough that I continue chatting with them.
