As a small business owner or freelancer it can be very tempting to jump on any job opportunity offered up to you. That knee-jerk reaction to say “yes” to any and everything does communicate eagerness, but it can get you into big trouble down the road if you don’t carefully examine the situation before diving in.
In Luke 14:28 Jesus said, “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?” Regardless of your spiritual beliefs, there’s some wisdom here that’s applicable in your personal and professional life. The moral is, think before you commit. If you make a promise to your client, it’s vital that you deliver on that promise. If you can’t finish what you start, it not only makes you look bad, but it puts your client in a very inconvenient situation.
Sometimes a potential client will come to me with a very attractive project and a very tight schedule. I have to carefully weigh the needs of the client, the scope of the project, and the time frame in which it has to be completed. If I’m confident in my ability to deliver, I move forward on the project. If I don’t feel as though I can deliver all that the client is asking in the time frame allotted, I don’t walk away. Rather, I work with the client to see if we can trim the scope of the project to a more manageable size. I almost never say “no,” because often there are solutions that can be made to the satisfaction of everyone.
To succeed as a business owner or freelancer, you have to deliver a quality product on time and on budget. Before you jump in, evaluate the situation carefully and make sure you always deliver on what you promise.
Boy, ain’t that the truth. It probably serves us to develop a friendly and comprehensive way to explain the complexity of those projects to clients, but I haven’t been able to do so without sounding too geeky or condescending. In this world of Flip videos, people tend to think “How hard can it be?” As producers, we cannot fall for that rationale because it’s too easy to under-estimate post-edit hours.
[...] get the video finished before the deadline. What happens now? Last year I wrote an article entitled, “Deliver What You Promise,” which stressed the importance of fully evaluating the size and scope of a video project before [...]