How Long Will it Take?
Author of this post: Fred Showker | About Blog Authors »
Oh, the dreaded question that always comes up in the initial meeting with a prospective client. After more than 7,000 creative projects, that question still sends panic through my veins. Here’s my advice: never state a deadline. That may seem strange coming from a 35-year veteran of the design and publishing business, but understand what goes into a deadline.
The publishing business is built on deadlines. Yet when starting out, you’ll often feel compelled to agree with forced deadlines just to please the client. This is a dangerous path to take. When the client asks “How long will it take?”
you will be compelled to quickly compute a guess and burst out an answer.
Don’t do it. As soon as you reply with “Oh, I think it will take no more than three days,” you’re locked in.
You’ll be thinking that’s how long it will take you to do the project, but the client will be thinking “delivery date.” Once they have a date fixed in their mind, nothing can sway them otherwise. Weeks later they’ll be saying “But you said a couple of days!” They’ll be convinced that you are late — no matter how many changes and revisions they made — no matter that they took a vacation in the mean time.
ALWAYS phase your answer. By phases I mean logical milestones in any project. It will take a couple of days to get roughs to the client. A couple of days will go by waiting for client approval. It will take a couple of days to firm up the roughs into working materials. Then it will take a couple more days for the client to sign off. Then it will take a couple of days to get final art produced and off to the media or printer, or what ever the next step is. LIST the phases and their durations to the client — but above all, make sure they are fully aware that a third of the time schedule depends on their performance, not yours. Believe me, they’ll forget they introduced changes into the project that required another work-and-proof cycle into the job. They’ll forget that it took a week to get their boss’s approval. The only thing they’ll remember is you said three days.
So, automatically think “phases” when they ask “How long will it take?”
April 28th, 2007 at 5:16 am
this was a great post, i’m definitely going to answer my clients this way.
April 30th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
thank you fred for the advice, but also i was wondering how can i get started? just so people can see my drawings. i have completed a couple of posters that i would like to show. can you give me some advice?
May 6th, 2007 at 8:42 am
A great post, this is similar to what I will typically tell a client. I like to recommend the total project times only takes as long as the approval time. It typically gets a laugh but changes the subject and they get the idea.
If they ask further then that I will give them a vague answer, like 1-2 weeks and it is much easier to adhere to that deadline. You just want to make sure that you have the project done well before that deadline so that client will recommend other clients to you based on your skills and tact.