When it came to interacting with clients, there is a a value that I oftentimes also repeated with my employees, which was if we are going to heir, we're going to heir on the side of generosity. Right? So, if we're going to heir with our clients, we want to make sure that we don't heir on the side of holding back. We want to heir on the side of giving too much. Um, that's also a a value that I apply into a lot of interpersonal relationships.
You want to heir in life, air on the side of generosity. And we found and you know that that was much appreciated. You know, sometimes when you're running a business and you've got bills that are coming up and you see that the invoices might not quite cover all the bills and you start to get really nervous about, you know, paying your rent, uh, paying your salaries, uh, you may have a temptation to try and, um, uh, squeeze a little bit more profit out of a job, which means sometimes kind of cutting some corners.
Maybe the client won't notice. You know, this these temptations, they're there, you know, regardless of where you're coming from because you have a business to run. And there's a certain fear that's always present. Maybe not always present, but can often be present um when um your cash flow is not as healthy as it should be. And that's where those that that um that value came into play many times is to just trust that we needed to continually give what we promised to give. um if sometimes that meant giving a little bit more than we should, but it also meant that um we needed to have very clear upfront contracts with our clients so that um if we needed to kind of put the brakes on requests that we had an agreement up front that said this is the scope. we can do a little bit over the scope,
but if we've gone over the scope because of additional requests that have been made on your behalf, we really do need to sit down and renegotiate that. Having a a clear upfront contract was really an act of love for them because it's easy for people to forget agreements, to um have misunderstandings of what exactly deliverables should look like. Um, and so it took me some time also to kind of figure out what do those upfront contracts look like?
How do they look fair? Uh, taking the time to um to hone them because there were some times, you know, at the very beginning where those upfront contracts weren't very clear. We're going to make some videos for you. Great. You know, and then it's like on the third Oh, no. On the sixth rounds of edit, you're like, I should have told them it was only like two rounds of edits, you know, or they've added a new logo.
Oh, we just had a new logo designed, you know, but that wasn't in the upfront contract and we've been working with your old logo and so now we have extra hours and so you end up kind of in a bitter sort of relationship. And so you you try to keep your relationships from from turning sour and it's good for the long run because we really wanted to have long-term relationships with our clients, not just um short gain relationships like we'll get this video done, we'll make some money, and then hopefully we'll get another project from them.
