Hi Team:

I have a quick question...It just dawned on me...(and I'm not even ready to take on any clients!) Say I started working with a client and he/she hired me to work on a project for him/her, how would you provide the client with a 'draft' version of your work without 'giving' away all your efforts?

What I mean is, do you put a watermark on your work and if the client likes the work, they have you remove the watermark and then you present it to them in its final form? I'm not quite sure how any experienced VAs handle this, but I'm curious.

Thanks immensely for any response!

Kathya

Hi,

I've seen a post that might solve your problem. Many VA's charge a retainer (minimum amount of pre-paid hours) before they start client's work.

This might help if you are concerned about getting paid for a project. I wouldn't start of the work without having them pay something up front.

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www.lloydbusinesssolutions.com
"Getting you back to what you do best"

Thanks, Tomekia. I figured some people might do this but wasn't quite sure. I haven't seen any threads on it but I'll do a search. Thanks for the quick feedback!

Kathya,
You can do it one of 2 ways...if it is a project client and you are to pay before they get the work and you want them to see it, you can send it to them as a PDF or you can watermark the word "PROOF" across it and Lock the doc so that they can't edit it.

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Rebecca Thompson
CLR Virtual Connection * fanTABulous fan pages

Kathya, you guys have to trust people more. I don't ask for deposits for work and in two years have never been ripped off. I don't give the guy who trims trees a deposit before he starts work, my accountant or any other service person and I don't expect one from clients. I'd only ask for a deposit if I had to buy a huge amount of supplies, special paper, binders, postage, etc., stuff I normally wouldn't have on hand.

I trust that business people are professional, as I am. Some of the people I have done work for are people I've never even met. The guy who did our floors when we renovated our bathroom and upstairs hall didn't ask for a deposit and we were talking about hundreds of dollars of labour and materials.

True you can mark the item draft, pdf it or whatever, but if you don't protect it, they can still take the work and do something with it, if they really wanted to. Even password protection doesn't really protect you; for as little as $45 you can buy a program to crack passwords - see http://www.lastbit.com/. So the reality is, PDFing, watermarking really isn't going to help if you want to protect your work.

I learned about these programs several years ago in the corporate world when our department manager had a sensitive Excel file that had been password protected to keep it safe and a year later couldn't remember the password. At the time I think I paid $30 US for a brute force cracker and within 3 days we had the password. Around the same time, my husband had a locked Access database and gave the administrator password to a senior manager. They both forgot the password and I gave them a link to download a password cracking program and within 15 minutes they had their password. Either they had a weaker password or ran the program on a more powerful computer (they were in an IT department with more powerful computers, than a mere secretary would have).

I simply have clients sign a contract and expect that they will live up to the terms of the contract.

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Julia

Wow, Julia...THANK you for this advice. I just wanted to see what the norm is, too. It's just a few of my list of questions I seem to keep coming up with. I'm hoping to launch my business some time this week and 'go live' with my website.

I so appreciate your advice, Tomekia, Rebecca and Julia. Much appreciated. I'm going to err on the side of trust and follow Rebecca's advice. Thank you!

Kathya, I'm in the minority on this issue from what I have seen from these forums. Most VAs seem to want money before starting work but I'm not one of them. Good luck with your new business. It may take trial and error, but you will find what works best for you.

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Julia

I get either a 50% deposit up front for project work or the full amount of the retainer before works starts. It's not so much about trust because often people will be sending a check and as long as I know there is a check on the way, I will start or continue work. My personal feeling is that I ask for deposits or payment up front because it's often recognized as a professional thing to do and it's actually expected by some people.

I admire Julia's ability to trust and respect her business policies as well. We each have to do what we are comfortable with. Just as you can list some professions that don't require a deposit, you can list just as many more who do (i.e. lawyers).

Unfortunately, there are people out there will take what you give them and then not pay you. I agree with Julia though in one respect about the trust. You'll probably have a pretty good idea about the client as you're working with as to whether or not they are more trustworthy than others might be. If you really feel they can't be trusted, then maybe you should review whether or not you should be working with them.

If it's a retainer client, then I wouldn't worry about drafts and such since they've already signed on for a set number of hours. If its a project client, then I'd get a deposit up front. And, in my contract, I have language which is not so much designed to protect me from getting ripped off but rather it explains to the client my policies about work received, corrections or edits and ultimately who owns what in terms of deliverables.

My advice would be to think less in terms of one specific example where someone might run off with what you put together and think broader in terms of your overall business policies as some of the other responses here have suggested.

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Kimberly
Facebook Marketing Magic!

If you are at the draft stage, you would have already had your contracts signed. These should handle the trust issue however it feels most comfortable to you. Either just the contract, or the contract with some payment, or whatever else. So when you are working with drafts, you shouldn't have to worry so much.

When you send a draft, it's for them to check over and see how they may want it changed. So you somehow have to give them a way to relay those changes. For text-based stuff, most of the people I've worked for find it easiest to type their changes right into the document and then send it back for me to finish it up. I would at least ask that they use Word tracking so I could check out what they changed (otherwise it needs to be completely proofread again). So sending a PDF or locking the document wouldn't help much in that case.

And I know they can make changes and add comments in the PDFs now, but I've found that to be more work than what it's worth. Either have to transfer it back to my original Word doc, or convert the PDF back to Word and that often loses most of the formatting.

I like the watermark idea, but not necessarily for the trust issues. Just to brand it to your company while you are working on it. You might use your business name and "draft" on it. That would also help when they have that draft document sitting around on their computer and forget where they got it from. But, as Julia says, it won't work to really protect anything.

Like Julia, my natural inclination would be to not ask for payment up front. But I've also learned that it doesn't mean that you don't trust the client when you do ask for it - as long as it's your chosen policy and you stick to it and treat everyone the same. So I'm more in that camp now and I think Kimberly's response is bang on.

Deb

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Deb at Ivy Freelance
Metrics, Marketing and Macros

Originally Posted by Ivy Freelance

Like Julia, my natural inclination would be to not ask for payment up front.

Hi Deb, maybe it's a Canadian-cultural thing.

I like the idea of the watermark as part of branding. I generally differentiate what I do for clients by adding a version number at the end of the document name. That way if they mess something up while making their changes, we have another version to come back to. It also helps with keeping track of multiple versions (I've had clients open up a version two revisions back and work on it and it became a nightmare).

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Julia