Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

I spend a fair amount of time developing quotes for websites.  Heck - I’m even travelling to the Netherlands to talk about my approach for quoting and planning ExpressionEngine based sites.  One of the tougher aspects of quoting work is that initial feeling-out of the prospective client.  Do they want steak on a hamburger budget or are they realistic about the costs involved for what they want?

You’ll often get the advice to ask about their budget early on.  Prospective clients don’t always have one, or aren’t always willing to share one if they do, but often you can get a response with a number that does a good job of letting you know if it’s a conversation worth continuing.  Put another way, you should ask potential clients: “How much are you looking to spend?”

But I find myself on the other side of that question lately.

And I’m amazed at how frustrating it can be.

Here’s the deal—after being in the basement for 7+ years I’d just really like to work above ground and I’m exploring a number of options for doing that.  One of those options is building something along the lines of a 12x16 shed in the backyard and outfitting it as a cosy office, out of the house but still at home.

I’ve never had a house built.  I’ve never had a pole barn built.  I haven’t had so much as a custom doghouse built.  I have absolutely no knowledge of what the possible costs might be for such a project.

So I found some plans on eBay for something close to what I have in mind, and size-wise what the township allows me.  The plans were only $15 and my thought was I could take these plans to a local builder or two just to get a rough ballpark.  Am I looking at $5K?  $10K?  $15K More?  Because I don’t know how serious I am about this idea until I get at least some rough numbers around what it might cost.  $10K might be doable.  $20K? More? Maybe I should just look for another house with one more bedroom.

The problem is everyone I’ve talked to so far keeps asking that question: “How Much Are You Looking to Spend?”  And the answer I keep biting back is “Nothing.  I don’t want to spend a dime.  I want the perfect backyard office to magically appear one morning, with flowers blooming, a rocking sound system kicking out some Stevie Ray Vaughn, the smell of a fresh pot of coffee drifting through the open french doors, and a triple-screen desktop all warmed up—all without costing me one red cent.  That’s how much I want to spend”. 

What I’m asking for is—just in general - how much might I have to spend for what I’m looking to do?  Pick your biggest brush and draw me a number - I’m not looking for penny-pinching precision here.

Tonight I had to take a phone call from one of the local builders that I dropped the plans off to.  I was put on the spot with questions that I didn’t have answers for (What quality of furnishings?  15 year or 30 year roof?)  And I feel so bad - I didn’t want the guy to put that much time into his quote because I don’t know how serious I am about the work.  I explained all of this when I dropped off the plans, but the quote is being done by someone else in the company and evidently my instructions didn’t go with the plans.  I’m frustrated now, and he’s got a good chance of being frustrated when I look at his highly detailed bid and shake my head.

So I’m taking this as a lesson in my own work - sometimes potential clients won’t have a budget.  They have an idea, a thought, a concept and just need rough numbers to help determine how seriously to take it.  And while I do have some basic ranges that I’ve given out over the years, I need to be better prepared with helpful quick answers.  Whether it turns into a real project for me, it will ease the conversation, require less of my time, and not frustrate those potential clients with requests for details that just don’t have any answers yet.

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1. Christopher Kennedy on September 28, 2009

   Good points throughout. I have to say, that there’s nothing worse than seeing that cold, lifeless stare come out of a client when they’ve been put on the spot. I think though that I’ve learned to mitigate most of this by offering the (potential) client a “three tier” system.

   It boils down to something like this:
   $ – $$ gets you a simple “5 page” (I know how much you hate the term “page” but there it is) brochure site with not much functionality. I’ll integrate EE, but it won’t do much more than allow them to edit the text on each page.

   $$ – $$$ gets you a site with some decidedly more dynamic functions. I usually explain this to them as “For this range I’ll build it so that you can have multiple sections of content like news and products that you control individually” (We’re starting to get granular at this level.)

   $$$ – $$$$ gets you a site with all the bells and whistles I’m accustomed to. This is where the client has what they would call “100 pages or more” of data, when it is spread over more than a dozen different types of content. Granted, if they ask for Ecommerce, I’m out, since I’m still trying to find that perfect integration of shopping cart and ExpressionEngine.

   I offer EE in every project I do now, without really adjusting rates or changing too much for it (save the license and extensions costs). It’s just easier for me to develop than a static site.

   I find that by showing them the three tiers, they can give me a faster measurement of what they want, and I can start writing out a proposal. It also gives them the comfort of knowing about how high the project can go, and start budgeting ahead of time.

2. salguod on September 28, 2009

   I end up where you are a lot in my day job, and it is frustrating.  We are frequently in the place of deciding if a part we’re developing should be made this way or that.  The implications might be tens of thousands of dollars in tooling but that could mean savings over each part that offset it in time.

   So, we call vendors, before we have a part design and drawing to show them, adn ask if we have a part that’s about this big, how much might a tool and the parts cost?  The vendors aren’t set up, as you’ve found, to generate ball park estimates, they want to do real quotes.  They feel, as I bet you have in the past, that these ball parks are a waste of their time since they aren’t ‘real’ yet.  But, we need to know which way to go, as you do now, before it’s real. 

   I’m always appreciative of vendors who will take some time to ‘ballpark’ it so I can figure out where I should go.  I’m also sensitive to their time, since it isn’t ‘real’ yet.

3. Dave J. on September 28, 2009

   I have one engineer that’ll use that 15-or-30-year type questions when we submit a custom quote request. Invariably, if we ask the salesperson, or the customer, the answer is “I don’t know, show it to me both ways”. We go back to the engineer and he thinks the customer is stupid for not knowing what he wants.

   Recently we taken the time to price out ‘standard’ prices for features that go into a custom system. This is proven to give us a huge advantage over competition because we can ballpark a half-million dollar system in less than an hour.

   Luckily, we can separate out the parts, whereas a deeply interconnected website (or building) can be hard to judge. If the 30-year shingles way more, perhaps the structure underneath needs to be stronger, etc.

4. Paul Burton on September 29, 2009

   The only way I can weed through the chafe is to pose the budget question right up front. This blunt approach will tell me two things without little effort, 1) how serious they are and 2) how much research they have done to become familiar with the marketplace. 

   This year alone, I have heard from five past potential clients (from 08/09) who did not select 16toads for their project. Of the five, only one ever saw a functional web site get developed and all of them have one thing in common: They all feel like they got burned by the vendor they selected.

   Only two of the five admitted learning a lesson about value ... that’s the rub.  We get blamed for their lack of preparation.

5. Sean on September 29, 2009

   Hadn’t really thought about it from the clients point of view before and your post really made it clear that it’s entirely possible that they really don’t know what it should cost or if the cost is will be worth it.

   in any case I’m still struggling with putting together quotes for clients and somehow I always seem to bid lower than I should have. Hopefully soon, I’ll figure it out.

6. Christopher Kennedy on September 29, 2009

   Sean, I’ve been in that spot before. The thing that I had to start doing was setting a bare minimum I’d accept, and never waver on that. Of course, I’d rather get charge more than my minimum, but that amount is my final “comfort zone”, and is there to keep me from getting myself into hot water.

   The bidding/proposal dance is probably the least uncomfortable one that we as designers or they as clients can do, but it’s also one of the most necessary. The important thing is to remember that we may do bids on a daily/weekly basis, but clients may do this process only once or twice in the entire length of their involvement with the project. Think of it like “Groundhog Day” with Bill Murray. We have the benefit of learning from each experience, but when we meet another client, they have no knowledge of us doing that. Each time you get a little bit better, and eventually it just gets a lot easier.

7. Peter on September 29, 2009

   Amazingly good and true article. We have the same problems, or let’s say obstacles and challenges when trying to quote. There’s a thin line between what you need to get the project done (as in be willing to) and what the client is prepared to pay – thus getting the figures right initially is everything else than easy.

8. Philip Meissner on September 29, 2009

   Great article. I hope you get your shed. My one friend who is a web developer converted a chicken house into a work space—turned out real nice.

   @Christopher Kennedy
   Have you tried foxycart.com with the fox-ee plugin? Looks like an interesting combo for EE ecommerce.

9. Sean on September 29, 2009

   Christopher,

   good solid advice. Yes I’m sure I’ll get better at with a little more experience.

10. Bob Sutton on December 05, 2009

    Discussing prices (or even a range of prices) without understanding the value to be obtained is always a slippery proposition. As you’ve learned, there are plenty of times when “What’s your budget” is a rhetorical deadend. Either a prospect regards the question as an opening gambit in negotiating or he honestly doesn’t know what he needs.

    Whenever someone wants to know what my work costs before I’ve discovered his needs, I have to remind myself that I’m cheating MY business by giving an answer. A professional website, like anything else hand-made, should be the result of a careful fitting followed by refinement and tuning. Who knows what that might cost?

    Early in my discovery process (and before anyone deserves an answer regarding prices), I usually ask a prospect to identify several competitors that he thinks are doing a good job at web marketing. I review their sites very briefly, looking for evidence that their pages serve some clear, repeatable business purpose, that conversion paths are obvious and effective, and that the storytelling works. I’ll also crack open their page Source and assess the craftsmanship. You can generally tell which sites are big-agency work and which are Heathkit exercises. Clients rarely fund the big-ticket projects unless they understand PRECISELY what they’re buying.

    And that’s the key to price disclosure: make it the result of a consultative assessment. Any business proposition that will double sales in six months or reduce customer acquisition costs by x% or enable y% growth without upstaffing, well, those things have tangible value as investments in a business. And, quite often, understanding the value a project will obtain makes subsequent quibbles over prices just silly. That engineer’s question about 30-year roofs is simply a clumsy way of asking “how often are you prepared to buy this roof again?”

    If you’re finding website prospects to be overly price-sensitive, it may well be because you’re not being value-sensitive enough. Trust me: whenever we start to regard a page of code as a commodity subject to market price competition and identify “pages” as the business we’re in, we’ve stopped adding value.

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