Adam Sewell

Sysadmin, WordPress Developer and Entrepreneur

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For the benefit of charity and your business

August 4, 2015 by adamsewell Leave a Comment

I love visiting other towns and cities. Especially ones that are still small with more mom and pop businesses than corporate entities. The people who run these small businesses generally have more flexibility in their marketing, menus, and services, so you’ll see some experiments from time to time.

For example, I once visited a small town that had an independent frozen yogurt place. It was a nice layout, clean and the service was great. What really struck me though was what they did after I paid.

They said that for any order over five dollars, they would give the customer a gum ball. You could place the gum ball into one of three bins, each of which represented a different local charity. Whichever charity had the most gum balls at the end of the month would receive a donation from the yogurt place.

I absolutely loved the idea. It lets the customers know that this business really cares about he community. It makes the customer feel good knowing they are supporting a charity. It also helps promote the charities to the public. It’s a win for everyone.

I stored this idea away for a while but recently brought it out for a trial run. I modified the idea slightly to better fit our business model and called it MyGeeks for Charity. We picked two local charities and let the community decide which one would receive a percentage of our residential sales. The public would vote for their choice on our website, once per day for a period of three months. When the voting was over, we’d review the votes to ensure integrity and we’d award the winner a check.

We ran this from April to June and I have to say we got a great response from it. We have over 1500 votes, an article in the newspaper, and most importantly new business. I continue to have people comment on the contest and what a great idea it was.

What’s even better is that all parties involved gained visibility during the contest and potentially new business or donors.

From our initial trial run I do believe we will do this again, but with some modifications to the contest. Primarily a shorter period of time – likely a month rather than three. In addition to the time, I will likely give a set amount rather than a percentage. The reason being we have no idea how much revenue we will have during the time and I want it to be worth everyones time since they are promoting it as well.

There’s always ideas out there for an opportunity to market your business. You have to keep an eye open and watch the small guys rather the large corporations. We small guys have much smaller budgets to work with so we are generally more creative. Go visit your favorite mom and pop restaurant, and see what they are doing differently.

Filed Under: Freelancers, Marketing

My Web Client Interview Questionnaire

July 28, 2015 by adamsewell Leave a Comment

Over the weekend, I gave a presentation at WordCamp Asheville that focused on customer service. As part of  my presentation, I suggested that a freelancer has a process that they put each customer through. That is a onboarding, project work, and offboarding. Adhering to a process like this keeps everyone on the same page and helps to keep an open line of communication.

As I mentioned during my presentation, part of my onboarding process is to ask a series of questions to each client, a questionnaire if you will. I personally don’t have one written down but just a group of common questions that gets the drives our conversation. I don’t keep strictly to these questions, but it’s a good place to start.

Since my presentation, I had a request to share my questionnaire. Since I don’t have anything written down, I figured that I would put together the most common questions I ask my web clients.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Customer Service, Freelancers

Customer Service: Communication

July 21, 2015 by adamsewell Leave a Comment

I believe a lot of small businesses lack adequate customer service.  This is especially true in the freelance market, but its also apparent in local mom and pop establishments.

Just yesterday I went to a new restaurant in town that has reopened itself under a new name, with a new menu but with the same owners. The inside of the place looks wonderful, the food was great, but the customer service experience had a lot to be desired. When I walked in there was a sign to “seat yourself”, but no clean tables were available. I stood there for several minutes with waitresses flying by and not saying a word to me. Finally, I flagged one down and asked for a table to be cleared so I could sit down.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Customer Service, Freelancers, Marketing

Customer Service: It’s the small things that build trust

July 14, 2015 by adamsewell Leave a Comment

A few weeks back, my employee’s and I were discussing how we should handle a particular situation that had arisen with one of our clients. We work with a lot of non-profits, which means we are often able to procure software for them at no cost or a reduced rate. With this client, we had assumed that the software they needed would be donated (as it had been in the past), but because of pricing changes the vendor was no longer able to donate their software. This meant additional costs that neither we nor the client had budgeted for. Thus the topic of conversation, should we pass the costs along to the client, or eat the loss?

One of my employees in particular balked at the notion of absorbing this expense for our client. “No other company out there would do that.”

As part of our business model, we offer flat rate pricing as a way to allow our clients to budget for their IT support costs. This is beneficial to them because they know what to expect and can budget for it rather than being hit with $1,000 this month and $4,000 next month. This fixed cost factors in a lot of things, including some of the software that we use for our clients. In our contract with this client, we factored in a donation from a software vendor to cover the costs of a piece of software that we would have otherwise purchased. Since this assumption had been spelled out in the contract, we could legally pass the cost on to the client. The client would most likely understand the situation, since donations come and go and they have to work with what they have. But, this would be an unexpected IT expense that they had not planned on.

After much internal and external debate, I opted to eat the cost.

The reason behind this decision is simple. This was a sudden cost that was not budgeted for by the client. Rather than forcing my client to dish out money they had not expected and risk breaking my commitment to my client (to keep costs level and expected), I’d rather be the one to take a slight hit.

So maybe my employee was right, maybe there is no other business that would do this for their client and most likely the client would understand the situation. But because I feel that trust is one of the key traits to a great client relationship, I decided to keep that trust intact. There are several traits to a great client-vendor relationship that factor into customer service, and I plan to write more about these in the future.

To sum this up, I believe it’s important to the client-vendor relationship to not break the trust of the client. That is, go above and beyond to keep to your word to the client, even if it’s not in the contract. The more the client trusts you, the longer the relationship will last.

Filed Under: Customer Service, Freelancers

Client Retention: Dealing with difficult clients

May 31, 2014 by adamsewell 1 Comment

This is sort of a follow up to a couple of other posts I wrote about picking your clients and doing pro bono work. In those posts, I talked about how to avoid bad clients and how to avoid getting stepped on in general. Even if you try to avoid those clients, some will slip through the cracks. In this post, I want to talk about how to handle those “bad clients”.

bad client, bad

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Business, Freelancers

Marketing & Advertising: Networking Edition

February 21, 2014 by adamsewell Leave a Comment

Marketing and advertising are not the same. Advertising is like throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Marketing is building relationships, and relationships sell services. People typically like to work with others that they know or trust. This is why only certain people make very good salesmen; that is, they have the personality that people just gravitate towards. Now if you’re like me, you may have a good personality but are a tad introverted. We are developers and computer geeks over here but we don’t naturally make good salesmen.

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Filed Under: Business, Freelancers, Marketing

Pick Your Customers Through Price

February 1, 2014 by adamsewell

When I first started my IT business, I set a table in the back of my in-laws store in the evenings when I got off work from my day job. When I came in, I would pull out a table, put my signs up, and run my power cords. At the end of evening, I would put everything back up. I had this setup for roughly two years and it worked well. I learned a lot during those first two years but nothing more important than my customers.

Online shopping on white background concept

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Filed Under: Business, Freelancers, WordPress

Why Pro Bono Work Is Never A Good Idea

January 30, 2014 by adamsewell Leave a Comment

Business man and meeting table background
I see this all the time, young WordPress professionals who are trying to learn the ropes ask what can they do to build their business. Almost every response I read to this question contains the words free or pro bono. “Build a portfolio by doing free sites.” That is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Business, Freelancers

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