Best Practices for Making Requests

Please consider the best practices for requests for the most efficient use of both your time (waiting for finished work) and your money (less labor needed to complete your project).

  • Try to prepare all of your copy and images and instructions so that it is as explicit as possible, for example if you need a quick poster design, give us a word document, or email with exactly what you want it to say on it.
  • Be diligent when it comes to giving us feedback so that we can implement changes and revisions as quickly as possible. when making revisions try to make an organized list of as many things as you can think of all at once.

We understand this is not always possible but making your requests as clear and complete as possible allows us to plan on doing your work with plenty of time to give it the attention it needs, and let’s us do it in fewer more  productive sessions which means less billed hours and faster turn-around.

It is our policy that all requests/work sessions are billed at a minimum of 15 minutes. This considers the fact that we are stopping for a dedicated period of time to work on what you have asked for, even if the job itself may only take 5 minutes.

Here is an example of two scenarios:

Scenario #1 Best practices used:

  1. Customer sends an email that says to create a poster and sends the text over which includes a main body of text plus a bullet point list with 7 items described and 3 images to use and a sentence or two about how they want it to look.
  2. M Designs expects the work to take about an hour and a half and plans to complete the work in 1 session within 3-5 days. M Designs creates a poster and uses all of the text that was sent and adds the images as described the the email within 3 days.
  3. On the 3rd day The client sends their feedback, they ask for the images to be made larger and to eliminate one of them. They also decided that 6 of the bullet points need to be edited and they send the list of what they want it edited to say in an attached document.
  4. On the fourth day M Designs punches in and within 15 minutes has changed the size of the pictures and copied the new bullet point list, pasted it in in place of the old list and formatted the new text to match and fit into the layout.
  5. On the 5th day the customer asks for just one more change, they want to remove a sentence from the main body of the paragraph, M Designs punches in for another 15 minutes and completes the last change, sends it to the customer ready to go to print and the customer approves within 24 hours.

# of revisions: 2 Total design time spent: 2 hours; Total Turn around on poster: 6 days

 

Scenario #2 Best practices NOT used:

  1. Customer sends an email that says to create a poster and sends the text over which includes an idea of what the poster is about but no exact text plus a loose bullet point list with 7 items listed in incomplete thoughts and 3 images to use with no description about how they want it to look.
  2. M Designs expects the work to take about an hour and a half and plans to complete the work in 1 session within 3-5 days. M designs creates a poster and uses all of the text that was sent and does their best to correct spelling, punctuation and make the sentences complete and to the best of our understanding represent the client’s thoughts and adds the images within 3 days.
  3. On the 3rd day The client sends their feedback, they ask for the images to be made larger and to eliminate one of them. They also decided that the bullet points need to be edited and they say to take out 3 of them and ask to change the wording on one of them.
  4. On the fourth day M Designs punches in and within 15 minutes has changed the size of the pictures and made the changes to the bullet point list, and formatted the new text to match and fit into the layout.
  5. On the 5th day the customer asks at 9AM for just one more change, they want to add  a sentence from the main body of the paragraph, M Designs punches in for another 15 minutes and completes the change, sends it to the customer ready to go to print and the customer responds at 12PM with another edit. The customer asks to remove the body paragraph that we put together for them and sends us a new paragraph they wrote to replace it.
  6. M Designs punches in for another 15 minute session and makes the changes and they email it to the customer, but meanwhile they find another email sent at 12:30 asking for M Designs to also swap out another one of the bullet points.
  7. M Designs at this point spends another 15 minute session, makes the swap and sends it to the client.
  8. At 5PM the customer responds that they found another picture they like better and to please add the picture.
  9. M Designs starts this next request promptly the next morning of the 6th day and spends only 15 minutes on this and sends the client back the final changes, ready to print. Within 24 hours the client approves and the work is complete.

# of revisions: 5 Total design time spent: 2.75 hours; Total Turn around on poster: 7 days

If most work is billed at $40-$75 dollars an hour, having the extra .75 hours spent due to disorganized requests can add up to $30-57 in avoidable extra design costs!

Even if you are not paying hourly, the second scenario has 3 additional revision charges even though in the end all of the edits are the same as in the best practice scenario.

Here is a list of our hourly rates: https://mdesignsmarketing.com/operations_manual/2019/08/05/variable-hourly-rates-for-clients/