[00:00:08.05] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:08.16] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:08.25] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:10.22] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:12.18] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast, where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And in fact, for this episode, we're talking about things that have affected our business over the last two weeks, because we haven't had two episodes due to me being away and you being really busy, right?

[00:00:34.11] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:00:34.29] - Gordon
Yeah. Oh, and my phone is going. Typical, isn't it? The answer phone will get it. So let's get straight into our topics. Do you want to go first or shall I?

[00:00:45.05] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.

[00:00:46.02] - Gordon
Off you go.

[00:00:47.00] - Taylor
So this week, I wanted to talk about UI design. So I have been working on a project for a friend of ours, and it is building a booking system. Now, the booking system already exists. However, we have basically hit some issues where his customers are struggling to use it and struggling to understand. The way the booking system works is the customer puts their venue address in for their party. They put the date that they want the party and then also the duration, whether it's like a one hour show or two hour show. And it then shows them the time slots available to them, based on his calendar. But what it does is it makes sure that the calendar shows the time slots calculated by the travel times. For example, if he has a show in the morning and a show in the evening, it will use the venue address to calculate the travel to time and the travel from time and make sure that's included in the duration or the period that needs to be free. If the travel time was half an hour there, half an hour from, and then the show was one hour, you would need to make sure there's a two-hour window between the two events that he's already got in the calendar.

[00:02:10.16] - Taylor
So, the way it worked before is you just filled in the input fields and it then populated a select field like a drop-down. However, the people that were using it said they struggled because it wasn't easy to change or see a different day. Say they looked at a Saturday, they couldn't see, "Oh, is it actually easy, more free on a Sunday?" It was a bit finicky. So, what we've done is we've actually taken some ideas and inspiration from other calendar tools, and we've made our own version of that. It shows a weekly calendar view, and then it greys out the time slots that are available or not available, sorry, and then only shows them the time slots that are available. It also then shows if it's a two-hour party, then it highlights two time slot boxes, so it was obviously for one hour and two hours, which again makes it very, very visual and easy to see, "okay, I'm booking a two-hour party, and so it's going to take up two slots for the two hours." Again, we had the same issue where we had this visual calendar weekly view, but it only highlighted the first box.

[00:03:21.27] - Taylor
And so, he was worried that people wouldn't understand that although they are booking the two-hour slot, they're just booking the start time. So, we amended that to make it a lot clearer and a lot more easy to understand. It's come along really, really well. Then all that does is that then just goes through to his booking form or calendar with the URL parameters. So, it doesn't actually do any of the booking itself. It's just a way for people to find out the availability without having to make a booking and without having to click back and forth, essentially.

[00:04:00.10] - Gordon
Yeah, it's very good. Have you got to a point yet where you've tested it with real customers or potential customers?

[00:04:07.28] - Taylor
No. So the plan is to launch it next week and then he will test it and then give me feedback. I shared it with a couple of friends as well, some of my webdesigner friends, and they really liked it. They said it was much better. And yeah, it's just overall, the user experience is the biggest thing there. It was less about getting it done, but getting it done to a point where it's actually usable, because we built the original proof of concept, which has been working, but not as well as it could be. This is kind of a version 2, or an iteration 2 that we've been working on. It's also hopefully going to be a lot more maintainable. He uses it on two different websites, so the idea is to give him a little settings page so that he can add things like his logo. He can add things like content and stuff specific to that website. Because at the moment we were editing the core files just directly in the browser for the plug-in, which then we had to copy over into the other plug-in, into the other website, which isn't an easy way or good way to maintain plug-ins. So the new way he'll just upload the latest version of the plug-in and all of his settings will automatically get configured and we don't have to worry about things getting overwritten.

[00:05:26.26] - Gordon
So have you written a plug-in that he's adding on to an existing system that you could then use on other websites as well, for example.

[00:05:35.19] - Taylor
So this doesn't actually connect with anything. This is just a standalone page that just sends URL parameters to wherever, whichever page he wants to be sent to. Technically, I guess, it could be used for other people, but it's a very niche and unique system with specific criteria. So he's got things like, if he adds the word ignore as the first word in his events, for example, it will ignore that as a busy event, essentially, so it will show it as available. Then if he's got events that don't have any locations, again, that gets ignored from the booking. It's very specific and unique to him. It probably could be made to work with other people, but the UI is just not going to be good enough for anybody to use. It's obviously going to be "this is how you can use it" and stuff, but there's still going to be probably a lot of hard-coded stuff in the plug-in that's specific to him.

[00:06:37.26] - Gordon
Are you pulling all this information in from a Google calendar?

[00:06:39.24] - Taylor
Yes, it connects with his Google calendar. It's all live, based on when it was pulled.

[00:06:46.26] - Gordon
It's very good.

[00:06:47.19] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:06:48.09] - Gordon
Well, I look forward to hearing the progress on this and see what if any iterations are made once it goes through the testing stage.

[00:06:58.07] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:06:58.20] - Gordon
Well done. Anything else you want to say on that?

[00:07:00.08] - Taylor
I don't think so.

[00:07:01.21] - Gordon
So my topic this week is having the power to say no. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been extremely busy because I've been away. But now I'm back, there seems to be a whole huge list of things that I need to do, or projects that I need to work on. It's got to the point when I'm unable to take on on any further work at this point. So it's always difficult when you work for yourself and someone comes on the phone and says, "Can you do this?" And you think, "Oh, that's not going to take too long. That's like half a day or that's a few hours work. I could do that." And you want to say yes, but by looking at your existing workload and what you've got on, you need to be able to say no sometimes, because if you take too much, you're just going to get swamped and nothing will actually get done. And you'll end up just getting so overworked that you just want to relax and rest for a while and then nothing will get done. So having the power to say no is a really important tool.

[00:08:15.29] - Gordon
Something that was quite relevant to this came through my email last week, something that I think you would have got as well from a gentleman who runs The Admin Bar. His name is...

[00:08:33.09] - Taylor
Kyle.

[00:08:33.26] - Gordon
Thank you. Kyle Van Duzen. And he sends out a newsletter every week. And the one that I just received was really, really interesting. So he was listening to his customers, and sometimes they would come on the phone or they would come over email and they would say, "Oh, that's really expensive, isn't it?" And the natural reaction for someone who's self-employed, who wants to make that sale is, "yeah, I guess it is. I can do it for a little bit less than that if you like," or "I can give you a discount," or "I can take something off the project list and do it cheaper for you." Or, "yeah, let me just whack off 30% for you and give you a special deal." And it's like, by doing that, you're telling your customers that the price that you're asking for is not actually the price you're willing to do it for. It's basically saying, "okay, so if they're going to take 30% off, why didn't they give me that figure in the first place?

[00:09:41.14] - Gordon
Does this mean that every figure I get from now on is going to be over inflated and he expects it to be cut down? Therefore, should I just, every time he sends me a quote, haggle with him or her and tell them that's not what I want to pay, I want to pay less." And that word will get around. So Kyle's solution, which came from another source, was to say, "Yeah, that is very expensive," and to agree with the customer and leave it at that. They then have the choice and going, "Okay, well, maybe I can get it cheaper, but now I've got to start over and I've got to go to another supplier and I don't know anything about that supplier, and are they going to actually be able to deliver what I'm asking for. How long is it all going to take? Do I pay what this person is asking? Because yes, it might be a little bit more expensive, but I know it's going to be a good quality product. The deliverable is going to do what it's supposed to do." And you are not getting into a situation where you're trying to justify your price.

[00:10:55.07] - Gordon
And that I thought was really interesting. So in the magic world for me, when I give people a price on how much my magic performances are going to be, I don't discount at all, ever. I tell them how much it is. And something I learned a long, long time ago is once you've told them the price, shut up. Don't say anything further. Let them think about it. Let them be the next person to say something. And if they come back and say, "That's very expensive," or, "That's more than I thought," my reaction has always been, "Okay, well, I completely understand. My performances are... They have been created over many, many years and I've got a lot of experience, but that comes with a higher price tag. And if that's too much for you, I completely understand. Maybe there'll be someone who's starting out who'll be cheaper, maybe someone who's not quite as experienced. Whatever you do, I hope you have a great party." And I leave it at that, ready to walk away. And the number of times that they go, "Do you know what? Let's just do it." As the response is much, much higher than you would think.

[00:12:10.17] - Gordon
But you do need to be willing to walk away. You have to expect that there will be some customers who will walk away and you will lose the sale. But are you doing better off by losing a sale that is at the full cost that could potentially be replaced by other work at full cost, or taking a job and discounting it, or giving the customer the control in the negotiations and giving them much more than you should do for the price that you've quoted. It's something you need to decide for yourself, really.

[00:12:52.18] - Taylor
It's interesting that you do it one way for one business and the other way, and you have been doing it the other way for another, where you're very, very firm on your prices for the magic, but not so much on the web design side. And is that because you don't feel that, you're not as confident in either the price you're charging, or is it because one's more productised service and one is more like you've packaged it up already and that is down to a T, what the product and service includes, and the other is more of a, I guess more bespoke, planned based on what the client wants, rather than one size fits all, which is what most of the packages are?

[00:13:41.26] - Gordon
I think it's a really good question. And I think the answer to that is, with the magic, I know how much I want to make, or how much I believe I'm worth based on the time it's going to take me to fulfil that job. So if I'm doing, let's say, a corporate dinner, I know that I'm going to be there for maybe two, two and a half, three hours, and I know what my time is worth for a corporate dinner, and I know exactly what's involved in that. I know all my expenses, all my costs. I know how long it's going to take me to get from home to the venue, to do the job, and get home again. I know exactly the length of time it's going to take, and I know how much I want to earn and what my value is. And therefore, my price is pretty firm. That's how much it's going to be. If you don't want it, then I know that they will go to other people and other people will charge similar amounts. And there are some people who want me because they know me, they like my style, they like my performance, they've seen me before, they know what they're getting, that sort of thing.

[00:14:54.06] - Gordon
So people will come to me because they want me, and no one else will do. And therefore I know that because of that, they're not going to go elsewhere because elsewhere is not going to be me. Whereas with web design, web design in particular is a movable feast. It might take X amount of hours to do a website. It might take 2 times X to do it. It's really difficult to estimate. And for me, that is where my estimation of how long something is going to take, and experience comes in. And I sometimes get it wrong. I sometimes underquote, I sometimes overquote. With a product like hosting a website or doing an update service, that, again, is something I know how long it's going to take. I know what my costs involved are. I know how much I need to charge for that. They, again, are not negotiable. If people come to me and they say, "I want to host my website, it's already done, I just want to host it with you," then I know how much that's going to cost. It's a set price. Building a website is very, very difficult because...

[00:16:12.11] - Taylor
Do you, I mean, do you track?

[00:16:13.26] - Gordon
I don't, actually no.

[00:16:15.26] - Taylor
That's probably part of it.

[00:16:16.24] - Gordon
And that's part of my problem. Yeah, you're right. I should track exactly how long I do actually spend on a project and how much I've actually estimated for that project. Another part of this, though, is that with the magic, I have a show, and that is my show. And I know what I'm doing because I've done it many, many times before. Whereas with the web, the technology is changing all the time, and I might have to learn a new skill to be able to do a particular website. We've got one coming up that requires us to deal with subdomains. Now, that's not something I've ever had to do before, so that's something that both of us are going to have to learn about. And so we now have to estimate how long that's going to take to learn and then make a decision as to whether that's a cost that the customer should incur because it's something that's required for their job, or something that we should incur for ourselves because we are upping our skills, and these are skills that can be transferable over to other projects in the future. So again, it's who pays for that? Is it a training thing? Is it a customer-only thing? You need to make decisions as to what the answers are going to be for those.

[00:17:37.04] - Taylor
There's something else that Kyle does, which I think I might have spoken about before, which is paid discovery. What he does is that before he even quotes for a project, he'll do what's called a paid discovery, and that's where he will sit down with them for maybe two, three hours. He will basically discuss everything with the customer that they want. He will then go away, take all of the meeting notes, and probably spend maybe another two, two and a half hours on it, writing up a very, very detailed specification document with everything that they've discussed, and then from that, he will then quote for the website. Now, he doesn't include the project discovery inside of the total cost. So if they decide to go with him to build the website, then it's the paid discovery plus the website. If they don't, well, he hasn't lost any of the time that he spent mapping out the entire website, but that customer can then take that document that he's worked on and take it to another company. And the company that they end up going with is most likely going to be very very thankful because he's pretty much given the company the roadmap to "this is what the client wants." It's detailed enough that there's not going to be any surprises where they're like, "Oh, can we add on this page," it's like, "Well, that wasn't originally what..." You know, because you have your goals, your objectives, your target audience, and things like that. All of this is documented in this file. And so, there's no hidden things that will pop up that you're going to go, "I'll just include it, whatever."

[00:19:16.19] - Gordon
He's also being paid for his time to do that. So if they decide not to go with him, he's still being paid for his work.

[00:19:22.28] - Taylor
And that's a fixed price because he knows how long it should roughly take. And then he then has a much much better idea of how long he reckons, or how much he should charge for this website based on if they're a real annoyance, the client, then he knows that he's going to have to add a bit on to the project cost just to deal with that and have to manage that. If there's other reasons and he knows what he's getting himself into. So it gets, and also makes sure that clients aren't going to waste his time. If someone's not willing to invest, what would be a small cost up front compared to the entire website, then you know that they're not willing to do it. And again, it also goes back to the tried and tested method. It's probably why when people try and book any time slot with you, you basically say no, because you know that the best time slots are X and Y.

[00:20:24.27] - Gordon
That is for performance of magic, yeah.

[00:20:27.18] - Taylor
And he knows that if you don't do a paid discovery, the projects don't turn out as well. And so he's very, very firm on that. And say that you end up probably spending twice the amount of money on the project without the paid discovery because you find out things later down the line where it's like, "well, we didn't factor this in and we have to now rebuild everything that we've just done because it doesn't work with what you want to do."

[00:20:52.17] - Gordon
Let me ask you a quick question. Is that something you're now doing?

[00:20:56.05] - Taylor
I haven't. It's something I really do want to do. I think it could be really useful.

[00:21:05.04] - Gordon
It's beneficial for everyone, isn't it?

[00:21:06.08] - Taylor
I think it's doing it the first time and either being rejected or having it accepted, that is the hard part, being up front and say-

[00:21:17.19] - Gordon
The unknown, always the leap of faith, isn't it?

[00:21:21.29] - Taylor
Yeah, I think... I need to set it up. I need to make sure that I have an idea of what I'm going to include, what the deliverables are, and things like that. Then I will give it a go and see what happens. But it should hopefully, if I do it, I'd hope that it was successful. But it's just the scare, because you potentially lose work before you've even quoted for the website. And so it's also, I guess, thinking about the-

[00:21:49.12] - Gordon
But you haven't lost any time on it. So you haven't actually wasted any time. You haven't had that discovery call that's not being paid for, that you've effectively told the client exactly the best way to do everything and not being paid for that time, and then them go off to someone else if your quote's too much. So, yeah, I think what we should do is we should put a link in the show notes on the website and in the show notes under the YouTube video so that you can check out Kyle's newsletter because it comes out once a week and it's always really interesting. Sometimes he has a bit of a rant and a go at people and processes and things that have happened. But more often than not, it's really, even if it's a rant, it's really interesting information that I think we can all take something from. So I'll put a show note link to that.

[00:22:45.07] - Taylor
It's mainly targeted toward web designers, but most of the stuff he talks about applies to pretty much any business apart from the specific ones, like the paid discovery that I know he's done a newsletter about. But you could still probably pull out information.

[00:23:02.23] - Gordon
Well, even as a customer, you can look at that and go, "Yeah, do you know what? I didn't think a paid discovery is actually going to be worth the money. But now, having read this, now I understand why we're doing the paid discovery. And in fact, it's really beneficial for me as the customer." So yeah, I think it's well worth checking out. And Kyle, if you're watching, thank you very much for your newsletter. It's read by me and Taylor and loads of other people based on the feedback that you're getting. So thank you for that and please keep it up. We really enjoy them. Anything else you wish to say this week?

[00:23:36.17] - Taylor
I don't think so.

[00:23:37.21] - Gordon
So this is episode 196. We are getting pretty close to episode 200. So we have decided to prerecord episode 199 and 200. And in fact, we've already done it. They are already recorded. And we have two special guests that we will be talking to in those two episodes. So that is 197, 198 to go. So there's another two weeks of our normal episodes. And then we've got two special episodes to celebrate our 200th anniversary for this podcast, which I had no idea we were going to get to.

[00:24:19.21] - Taylor
It's a pretty big number.

[00:24:21.13] - Gordon
It's a huge number, isn't it? When you consider what, the time and effort that goes into these and the recording of all of our thoughts on these podcasts as we do them. But yeah, it's something I actually enjoy doing every week. It gets your mind thinking about "what am I going to talk about? What can I say? What's happened this week that might be of interest to others?" So if you enjoy it, then please let us know. We would love to hear from you. That's it from us this week. Thank you for joining us. As always, you can like, share, and subscribe on our YouTube videos.

[00:24:57.03] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes. You can watch them, listen to them, find out anything that we've spoken about.

[00:25:05.23] - Gordon
And of course, we are on all the podcast platforms as well, if you would prefer to listen to us. And they can be found just by searching for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." Thank you for joining us. We'll be back for our next episode next week at 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:25:27.10] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:25:29.24] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:25:29.29] - Taylor
Bye.

This Week's Topics

Show Notes