Shut Up. I'm Talking.
I'm David Perel, co-Founder of Obox Design. I make things. Don’t expect anything of what I say to make sense. You can stalk me on twitter or be inspired on dribbble.
A few weeks ago Cape Town played host to WordCamp and since Obox is a WP theme company based in South Africa we were invited to talk.
Initially the plan was to talk about Obox Mobile in the developer track but I decided that I should rather tell the story of Obox because I think we have a lot to share in that department.
The title of the talk was “Post Boxes to Inboxes.” Click play to find out why.
Despite always telling people that we ‘only’ run a theme company we also have a stealth custom development business.
Last year we closed it down to focus on themes but felt that we were missing out on big opportunities in terms of cool projects as well as turnover. So after only 2 months of closing it (we did wind it down for 2months prior) we ‘reopened’ it but without telling anybody.
Basically, if a project request came along that we liked and made sense then we said yes (we do say no about 4 times a day though).
That decision has proved to be quite a good one and in January we had our best month of business ever in the history of Obox.
The key to doing well in January was our stringent ‘attitude’ we took with our clients. I think we released 8 completely new sites in Jan, four of which were client projects and in all instances we put our clients under pressure to deliver content on time.
Through years of experience, we have come to realize that the biggest delay to getting a project completed is that clients don’t tend to deliver content and feedback as quick as we would like. This issue trumps scope creep every single time.
In fact scope creep is the least of our worries when doing a project. It’s gathering content which is the killer.
So the method that we employ is quite simple and quite effective. There is an extension to this but at the very simplest, do the following:
Get on their case daily.
It is up to you to follow up on your clients absolutely everyday. Create deadlines for them to deliver feedback + content and if they surpass those deadlines remind them about it as much as possible until they produce.
During January I was on skype and email permanently speaking to clients, gathering assets and feedback for projects that we wanted to complete before the end of January. We acted as if we were the client and they were releasing our project late.
It turned out that not a single one of those projects went over time and it was purely because we never let our clients rest in the same sense that they wouldn’t like us to rest.
Advice over.
P.S – Depending on my motivation I plan on sharing many ‘freelancing’ tips with you that we have picked up over the last year or so.
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