Hi, I'm Specialist Hernandez and I'm here for the field training exercise for the French Desert Commando Course. Let's go! French Desert Commando Course is a course designed for the United States to work with the French. It's a way that we can build foreign relations and we also get the opportunity to kind of learn the techniques that the French would use in an environment like this. It teaches us different things for desert survival, how to get water, shelter, things like that and then how to also operate as the infantry in a desert environment. Today we're more so focused on building the platoon that we'll bring over to the French. It's important to us that we make good impression to the French so we want to make sure that the people that we bring are a good representation of who the United States Army is. We're trying to build who is the leadership positions and we're trying to narrow down the people that we have inside of the platoon. Today we're teaching the basics so that everybody understands what is expected of them once they actually get to the course itself.  Up until 12 o'clock we're going to be teaching different like react contact ambushes and then from one o'clock to probably around like five we're going to start moving down that way.  We're going to do a movement to set up an ambush and that's going to be a majority of our day. It's just walking. The platoon movement going about 15 clicks or 15 kilometers. We're making sure we're moving in at wedge formation so our guys can see us and we can see them. That's it for now. They're working on reacting to contact for the enemy that's down there. There's about four guys or notionally they're doing 10. So they're communicating in the back right now how they're going to flank the enemy and while these guys maintain the support element and they maintain the fire they're going to have the assaulting element come around and flank the enemy from the right. So just working together as a platoon. All right now we're received contact at 12 o'clock. Right now we're going to prone. Just waiting for other leadership and guidance to guide us through so we can conduct this movement. For a vehicular near ambi for the OP4 to come along here we can engage them and clear the objective and then X fill back to the ORP for follow-on missions. Training opportunity for a lot of people they can do joint training with the French. Learn a lot about them and why they're one of our allies as well as it gets allows them to see our capabilities and we can see their capabilities and I feel like being able to work together really like strengthens the bond between the French and the Americans.


Hey guys, I know it's a weird time right now a lot of us have been stuck at home for a bit some voluntarily some not And you can't check social media or turn on a TV without seeing something about a horrifying global pandemic Whether you think quarantines and closures are an overreaction or not I think everyone of every political persuasion can agree on at least one thing Our government has not handled this COVID-19 thing very well for weeks Doctors in the US weren't allowed to test patients for the virus at all Then the only tests available were from the CDC that took a week to get results and many of those tests turned out to be faulty Not only did FDA regulations prohibit private labs in the US from developing their own tests They barred unapproved tests that were already successfully in use in other countries from being imported The first major outbreak in Washington was discovered only after a Seattle lab decided to ignore the regulations and run their own tests In defiance of the FDA Fortunately, the government did eventually drop their prohibition on private labs developing their own tests Which are much faster and you know work But there were still a number of regulations imposed by the FDA and other agencies that stood in the way of rapid progress in fighting the disease Like prohibiting at-home testing and restricting companies like Tesla Ford and GM from producing and selling ventilators Even though they'd offered to do so these problems have come as a surprise to a lot of people in the US But they really shouldn't the FDA has a long history of slowing the progress of innovation in health care And since you're probably stuck at home instead of rewatching outbreak or contagion for the 13th time I'd like to direct your attention to a much better movie on Netflix that actually addresses some of the underlying problems Our country is facing right now Dallas Buyers Club stick around for this short edition of out of frame Dallas Buyers Club was released in 2013 and tells the mostly true story of Ron Woodruff played by Matthew McConaughey If you haven't seen it go ahead and do that Then come back to this video because I'm going to be spoiling some key plot points Feel free to subscribe and hit that bell icon while we wait in 1985 Ron Woodruff was diagnosed not just with HIV, but full-blown AIDS at the time HIV and AIDS were not well understood by the American public Most people considered it a gay disease and didn't think it was a problem even worthy of serious attention Thanks to a deadly combination of ignorance anti-gay sentiment and the novelty of the disease itself drugs that could treat HIV Were barely available anywhere AIDS was spreading rapidly with nothing to stop it or help those who got it When Ron got the news his prognosis wasn't good He had just 30 days left to live But there was a sliver of hope Researchers at the National Cancer Institute had just proposed a breakthrough treatment for HIV using the anti-retroviral drug as a Dethymidine or AZT Unfortunately in 1985 AZT was just starting FDA required human trials and while we all know that rigorous testing is super important What most people don't realize is that the nature of the FDA process takes a really really long time and for most medical R&D companies navigating the bureaucracy can cost over a billion dollars per drug So even fast-tracked it would still take over two years for the AZT trials to be completed and only then could it Have been submitted for approval in the US Who knows how much longer that would take Ron's doctors only recommendation is to go to a support group for other AIDS patients Condemned to die screw the FDA I'm gonna deal a The first act of Dallas Buyer's Club is really hard to watch Reeling from his diagnosis and being rejected by his former rodeo cowboy friends Ron had nothing left But to hustle He makes a deal with an orderly at the hospital to steal AZT from the trial once that gets cut off He goes to an unlicensed doctor in Mexico after a couple months of fairly successful treatment He and the doctor set up a deal to smuggle unapproved drugs into the US and sell them to other desperate HIV patients This eventually leads to creating the Buyer's Club in Dallas Ron isn't actually selling the drugs and supplements He's selling a club membership and club members just happen to get access to these treatments as a perk Unfortunately for Ron and his club members He keeps bumping up against the FDA and their enlisted help the DEA and the IRS Ron is fined his medicine is confiscated. He's threatened with arrest Ron attempts to fight back filing a restraining order against the FDA That doesn't work. He sues the agency for denying him his right to treatment That fails too, even though the judge agrees that the FDA's behavior is morally reprehensible Ron just wanted to survive and believe that all people have a right to try risky treatments when the alternative is certain death We see this play out over and over in real life people with conditions and diseases like HIV Cancer autoimmune disorders and more suffer needlessly because the FDA won't approve drugs that have been used in other countries for years People who use medical marijuana and psychedelics to treat physical and psychological problems Understand the obstacles the FDA and other government agencies put in the way of drug research and approval In spite of the fact that the federal government actually holds patents on a lot of those treatments It even affects people who just want to drink the milk They want to drink right now places like New York City are seeing firsthand how FDA restrictions that prevent companies from Urgently importing and producing much-needed medical supplies like ventilators masks and other protective gear can cause really serious problems And it doesn't stop with the FDA We've all talked a lot lately about overloaded hospitals and our limited capacity to treat COVID-19 patients But what most people don't know is that the government and the American Medical Association Limits the number of doctors we train and we've known for years that we would face a real shortage in health care providers Something we really don't need right now We're still most cities have what's called certificate of need laws that prevent the development and construction of new hospitals Con laws allow other hospitals and clinics in certain areas to decide whether their potential Competitors can expand their capabilities or enter the market at all Contrary to popular belief health care in America is far far from a free market And it's precisely that bureaucratic centralized control and the regulatory restrictions that are killing us right now Just like they did in the 80s during the AIDS epidemic. Oh, and by the way, thanks to illegally acquiring AZT Ron Woodruff beat his 30-day prognosis by seven years and today the drug is approved and used in AIDS treatment and prevention All over the world the good news is that finally some of these rules are being lifted If only temporarily in some cases Allowing people to get what they need when they actually need it if you're searching for silver linings right now It could be that after this is all over maybe just maybe More people realize how involved government at all levels already is in their everyday lives health and well-being and Reject plans to expand its role in the future We need life-saving medicine and medical technology right now and the best way to incentivize rapid innovation Production and distribution is by allowing entrepreneurs to do what they do best But to do that we have to reduce the artificial barriers price controls and top-down Political authority in the health care system the lessons of economics aren't magically suspended in life or death situations To the contrary learning them now is more important than ever Hey everybody, thanks for watching this short edition of out of frame I know this one was a little different than usual So be sure to let me know what you think in the comments If you want to know more about the FDA and the other regulations I mentioned check out the links in the description and don't forget to like share and subscribe to all our social channels on YouTube Facebook Twitter and Instagram


Hi. Hi, everybody. Welcome. Thank you all for being here and thank you for the wonderful introduction. I actually have a confession to make. This is my first presentation that is live without Zoom, so if I look a little bit lost, it's probably because I'm looking for the share screen mode, so just bear with me. But it's so great to be back at Slush. This is probably my third time, the last time I was here was in 2018, and I'm so excited to be talking to you all today about how to talk to users. This is something that's very important. I'm just going to go and introduce a little bit more about me so that you can see where these advice and these tips are coming from. So we started our company in 2006, not as a mobile gaming company, but as a corporate social network. We ended up building fan communities for TV shows and sports teams, and then we pivoted into building games. So some of the games we built were with Hollywood franchises, such as Marvel, Fast and Furious, Star Wars, Hobbit. Basically, if it was a PG-13 franchise, we built a game with them. Our most popular game, you can still download it on the app store today.  We grew that company to over six offices around the world with over 1,000 employees, and then in 2017, we exited to Netmarble and Foxnext. Since 2017, I went to YC as visiting partner. It was there, I think many of you know who they are, but they are the first seed stage money into behemoth companies that you know today, such as Airbnb, Twitch, Stripe, and Instacart. And it's really there where a lot of things just crystallized for me. And with these two things together, you're going to hear a lot about how to talk to users. It's going to be informed by a lot of our founder experience as well as mentoring more than hundreds of YC founders. So when I went to YC, the first thing I learned was their motto. Their motto is make something that people want. And this motto is pretty funny because it's a really great guiding principle for a lot of founders. It's actually the goal for founders. So if you're building a company, this is actually your goal. And I love starting with the end in mind. So looking at this motto, there's a lot of things that can tell us a lot of how we can make something that people want. The first is a lot of people start focusing, particularly founders, on making something. That's because this is within the founders domain. I joke a lot with founders saying you can make anything. You're incredibly talented, incredibly smart. Let's just make sure you're building something that people want. And this is the whole reason why we're here is how do we figure out what people want? And the most important thing to know of what people want is that is owned by the user. It is not owned by you as the founder. And I think that's a really important distinction of who owns what. And then oftentimes, you'll hear that investors talk about problems and solutions. So even within this motto or this guiding principle is that you are responsible for making the solutions and the user is there to tell you what the problem is. So oftentimes, you'll see people interchange that here. Now, oftentimes, I've definitely seen people focus on just one side of this statement. And if you just focus on one side of the statement, you'll get some funny stuff. So I've definitely seen founders who just focus on making something. Oftentimes, we call this a SISP, a solution in search of a problem. And sometimes you end up with some of these inventions. These are inventions from the Japanese. It's called Japanese useless inventions. Some of them obviously are over engineered. I'm pretty sure there's probably easier ways to keep your shoes dry or faster ways to cool down your ramen. I actually think this butter stick is very interesting. I'm really waiting to see if it'll hit the markets. But oftentimes, if you just focus on making something, this is kind of what you end up getting. And if you just focus on what people want, then oftentimes, particularly in the crypto world, you're, you're going to end up building a rug or a scam, right? Because you're going to spending all your time talking to users. But you're never going to build anything. So the biggest thing is really focusing on trying to figure out what is it that people want. The first thing I did want to kind of set the tone for everybody is trying to figure out what is it that people want? Oftentimes, and this is probably one of the few times I'll invoke investors here because investors are not your users and not your customers. But investors are investing in teams that are making something that people want. How do I know that people want this? And they'll either put in their time or their money, right? And you could see this in terms of Facebook, right? People invested so much of their time that it was, it was seen through daily active users that over time, these daily active users were growing. Oftentimes, money is a really good measurement. And for the vast majority of you who are building a company right now, money should be pretty much your top revenue or sorry, it should be your top KPI, which is revenue, right? We see it all the time. I paid money for my streaming services. I pay money for transportation. These are things of value. It's either time or money. But what if you're at the beginning of your startup going from zero to one, and you don't even have anything, and you're wondering, am I going to build something that people want? Well, I'm here to give you some advice. Things to do, things not to do, and some rules along the way. The great thing about a lot of this advice is that even if you have a million users, you could still use a lot of this on kind of how to talk to users.  I know this is really funny. I only say this because this is like one of the two things we repeat over and over at IG. One of the things we do to create an online platform that has a UI combinater for our founders, is you have to get out behind of your screen. Stop writing code and start talking to users, and I think it's probably because code is so much easier to manipulate than people. Not that you should be manipulating people. But to get out and start talking to users, it's a very, very vulnerable thing. The secret You're trying to figure out what is it that they want so that you could build a great solution for them. Rule number two. This should probably be the rest of the rules every single time. You are not the user. I know oftentimes investors will say, oh, you should start on a problem that you had. That's great. Oftentimes a lot of people will start talking about the Airbnb founders. The Airbnb founders, they didn't have any money. They tried to solve that by selling cereal boxes, right? Well, not cereal boxes, cereal, with Obama O's and the Captain McCain's, and they were running out of money while they were exploring this couch-surfing idea, right? And what had happened was one of the founders at the time, he decided to use their own Airbnb product and discovered how much he wasn't quite the user or some other problems along the way. So he went and he stayed at one of the Airbnb's and he got up the next day and he was hanging out with the host and he realized, I have to pay this guy, but there was no way to do it online. So he had to run all over town looking for an ATM and paying, and then he had to pay cash and he's like, this is really embarrassing. And he realized, look, there's no way this platform will get adopted unless we had a payment system, right? So he realized that it wasn't just about making money, it was about making the entire system working so that it could get adopted. And he was only able to do that because he realized, even though he is the user, he's not really the user. Now, before I jump into a little bit more of what to avoid and what to do, I really wanted to focus a little bit more on looking at these problems because the most important thing when you're talking to users is doing a lot of this problem discovery. So for you as a startup, I just wanted to go through three things that make really good problems to solve, right? The first is that this problem is very urgent.  So you could see this in your own life when you're a customer or something's urgent, you're like, I don't care, please take my money, right? The second thing is this is incredibly valuable, right? So the most valuable thing is you'll either spend your time or money on games. We spend so much time on games, TV, when it comes to money, if I need a transportation, when it's raining, absolutely you'll pay more money, right? And finally, good problems are what we call common or pervasive. So if you follow the rule that you are not the user, you will be building for more than just yourself, right? Really good problems are problems that many other people have as well and that helps solve with your technology, right? That's what we talk in terms of scale. So I want you to keep those in mind as you're talking to users of what is some good problems to be solving as you're doing problem discovery. So as you're talking to users, there's a couple of things you should avoid. You should definitely avoid asking would questions. Why? Because everyone has a plan until they get punched into the mouth. We see this a lot in our own lives, right? Where people ask me, oh, Holly, sign up for this. Oh, yeah, sure, sure, I'll sign up for this. Oh, will you tweet about it? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I'm pretty sure there's many more people who are way more committed than I am in the room. But for me, sometimes I either just forget or, honestly, it's to keep that social contract really good and my future self just kind of wrecks things. So it's really hard to answer truthfully, would you do something? Like, would you use our product? And I'll tell you later about how we found out the hard way. Avoid talking too much about your solution, right? So at this point, you're trying to figure out a lot of it. What is it that users want? If you talk too much about your solution, they will get distracted and they will have anchor bias. A great example of this is when I first came out of grad school, I worked at a tech company called AOL and I was a product designer. And what we would do is we'd post our mock-ups around the office so that people, we can encourage conversation, we could talk. And the thing is the mock-ups looked really well done. And nobody would talk about it, nobody would stop, nobody would engage. And what had happened was we decided to move it into much more of a sketch mode, right? And once we started doing that, people thought that they were unfinished. So they weren't as distracted by the pretty mocks and they were able, for us, what we wanted was feedback at that stage. They were able to interact a lot better because they were less distracted. And you see this in your personal life too, as you're thinking about brainstorming, oftentimes they're like, give me your idea, no idea is bad. And how many times do we censor ourselves before we even say what we need to say or give our idea? So you should try avoiding talking too much about your solution, especially if it's not created yet and you're just thinking about things. Now, rule number three, I think this is like a very important one is to know is that humans are evolutionary, not revolutionary. This is actually a picture of one of envisioning of what the first railcar would look like and it's no more than a bunch of horse-drawn carriages kind of pulled together in many ways. And I think in many ways what happens is there's a lot of familiarity with that, you start with one, and then you build from there. And oftentimes it gets really hard to hop. And so in particularly free to play game design, we would talk a lot about how we would need to have one third that was innovative. And it's kind of interesting because oftentimes you think of innovation as like super cool and super neat. But it could be something as boring as a business model. And that's what it was for us. So we kept about two things, or two-thirds of the product, very familiar. And then the one third that we played with was innovating on the business model. So at the time for anybody who is a bit unfamiliar with the gaming industry in the Western world, how we monetized was very similar to how movies monetized. So if you go buy something for your Xbox or even early games here, early mobile games, it was basically you had to pay money. And if you opened up the shrink wrap or you started the game after you paid money and you had a terrible experience, you could say goodbye to that. Right? What we did is we came along and we said, look, you know what? It's going to be free to play. If you don't, if you like the experience and you want a premium one, we're happy to upgrade, you're happy to give you more premium experiences. But if you don't like it, you can still continue playing. Which was like a very new and innovative way of thinking about games at the time. And everything else we actually kept very similar. So we kept our first flagship product, which was called Kingdoms of Camelot. Very normal IP. That IP was open IP. People in the West understood Camelot. You could build a lot of lore off of that. Our genre was very familiar. It was very similar to Civ. It was a strategy based simulation game where you build up your resources, to build up your town, to raise an army and go battle one another. So really as you're building out and thinking about the solutions, just keep in mind as people are talking, humans are very evolutionary and not revolutionary. And in fact, when you become too revolutionary, you might end up with something like this. Now, I apologize to anybody in the room who has something like this. But as a parent, I look at this and I just think, oh my goodness, this has got to be super dangerous. There's just no way. Of course they wanted a faster horse and a faster baby carriage. But I just don't know if I could put my kid into that possible danger. Now, I've talked about things to avoid. And oftentimes with the don't list, you always wonder what should I do instead. So here's a couple of things that you can do instead. You can be user led versus user driven. So in our world in games, oftentimes user driven does turn into data driven. That's because we can record every single click that you do. And that's the only way you play our game, is through clicking things, swiping things, any type of motion. And what happens often is that people become driven by the data or what the user is doing. And I think talking to users really helps paint the entire picture. If it's just data, I'd like to say data helps turn the lights on in the room, but it can't tell you where to move the furniture. And that's really what being able to look at the data in the context of talking to users, it really helps you to be user led. So also be super careful when listening to the user's solution, right? We've all heard the old adage of Henry Ford who said, if I wanted a better car, people would have said I want a faster horse, right? So he listened to the faster side but ditched the horse because he's like, I don't really, he knew that he was in charge of the solution, but what they wanted was something faster. So he had to really, really think about it. So you just have to be careful. A lot of times users will give you some great suggestions. You just kind of have to weed out some of those things. The next thing you should do is ask open-ended questions. Asking open-ended questions is really helpful. And those are really easy as who, what, where, when, why, how. It gets them talking. Remember the secret to talking to users is getting them to just start talking just enough so that you could spend most of your time listening to them and wondering what their problem is. Number five, rule number five, this one's actually really hard. It's more important what they do versus what they say. And we ran into this, particularly our first time with our corporate social network. We invited some friends and family in and they said, oh yeah, absolutely, we'll use it. And then we launched and hardly anybody used it and we're like, oh my gosh, why did they tell us these things? Our friends suck. And when you start out, all you have is people's verbal kind of commits and everything. So how do you get to the root of what is it that they would do or actually do and get a good read into it? So certain questions you can ask is ask about their past. I love asking things like, what was the last game you played? How did you find it? Did a friend tell you? Where did you play it? It's much easier to recall even if you think in your own personal life, you can recall better than saying like, okay, I would do this and actually end up doing that. So asking about the past really helps bring to light what are the things they actually did do and eventually that can translate to what do they do. The second thing is you want to ask them to show you. This has been incredibly enlightening. So if you ever get a chance to embed yourself with your users, I highly recommend this. I have three great stories of like all this context that you can see if you just ask them to show you versus tell you. My first story is about my friend. She had started a very large recruiting software company and she spent months inside another company as part of their recruiting arm. Just doing, just talking to users, talking to recruiters, seeing how they recruit, figuring out what the problems were before she even wrote one line of code. And then finally when she wrote her first line of code, she already had about three marquee customers because she knew that the something that she was going to be building was definitely something that was wanted. So it's more important if you can just follow somebody around. Now some of us don't have the luxury of that. Some of us aren't building B2B companies. In our B2C world, as I mentioned before, many of these tips and these rules can be used even when you had millions of users and we already had millions of users on our fan communities but we wanted to learn more about what they were building. And what we had done is we called up one of the users, she let us dial in and we watched her use our product. And I kid you not, there was just no way I ever would have figured this out. I watched her screen and I've never seen anybody browse the internet with a bookmark pane open. So she was only working with 66% of the screen and the resolution was really low. So that informed a lot of just context. And then finally, my friend, he was working on an insurance, a car insurance product and he was talking to a user asking her to register. And when it came time for her to put in her car registration number, she said, hold on a second. And he was just waiting there for 10 minutes and she came back and he's like, where did you go? She goes, well, I had to go to my car, I had to find it to pull out that registration number. And at that point he realized like, oh my goodness, this is a big problem that we should probably ask for the registration number later. So it's really important to get that extra context if you can ever find any bits of why the user is doing what they're doing. And that could help inform how to make the solution much better for everyone. And finally, in terms of what is important on figuring out what they're actually doing, it's really important if you can record, record, record. Now the most important thing here is after obviously you should get their permission but what's really cool about today is a lot of things are remote. So you can record Zoom sessions, you can record all these things. So you can always go back to it and you can talk with a team about it. They know kind of, you can have discussions on it and not fighting about what happened, right? And finally I'll put in this bonus rule. If you have more than one person on your team, that person should be involved. Talking to users is not only a team effort but it's hugely cultural setting. I love companies that have onboarding. I think it's Zappos. They basically force you to be one week at the call center. Your first week is you are a customer service agent because they put the customer right at the center and they built a whole culture around it and I love that because your users are the ones that are going to make up your company and make them who you are. So at this point when we were even about 30 people we made sure it was a team effort when we were going into games. We had a family and friends night before we were launching our first game away from fan communities so we needed a lot of feedback. We didn't know what we were doing. We brought our fans and family because we thought they'd be kind to us but in reality they didn't hold back any punches. But we asked the whole team to stay. We divvied up people into pairs, not engineers with non-engineers. They watched them do some tasks that we asked. We asked them to talk out loud. We even put them into focus groups, talked about what they played, what they liked, what they didn't like. And finally afterwards, after a long evening we decided to stay in debrief. That debrief lasted probably till 2 a.m. And I remember our quietest engineer, I know it's stereotypical engineer and quiet but she really was our quietest engineer, would not stop talking. She was incredibly engaged. It's because she saw things that we wouldn't have been able to see. She was coming up with solutions and there was just so much energy in the room by involving the entire team. So for as long as possible I highly recommend to never lose sight of your user and to bake a lot of this stuff in at the beginning and in ways like try to scale it across the organization. So just remember your goal is to make something that people want. And the best way to do that is to talk to your users, remind yourself and everybody else on the team that you are not the user. And know that humans are evolutionary, not revolutionary. And be user led versus user driven. And just remember it's more important what they do versus what they say. And if you do all these things this will help you talk to users by listening to what they want. And hopefully likely you will be making something that people want. Good luck and thank you.


What's up everybody, Jason from jazzyandfridjasmicecasebrakes.com. We just sold out 2023 panini flawless baseball 2 block break pickage in number 5 And again guys, we did have to do an R&B for a handful of teams Which we did Is everybody in straight up? Here's the customers with the R&B teams. Good luck everybody. All right, let's have some fun guys Rip open some flawless All right, here we go First one we have is a Eric Chavis that is for Oakland 12 out of 25 Oakland part of the 19 R&B First one on the board Robert was spot-two then we got a Orelvius Martinez for Toronto 10 out of 25 Toronto Robert Ronco about straight up Then we've got a Allen Tremel for Detroit 19 out of 25 Detroit Tigers going to mark and then we've got a Zach Vee nice star swatch signatures. That's awesome right there nice patch Colorado Rock. He's going to kneel five out of 15 There we got a Noma Garcia par for the Dodgers Ed bought straight up 16 out of 25 Noma then we got a Andre Dawson for the Chicago Cubbies Eight out of 25 Chicago Cubs going to Raymond Pudge for Texas Yvonne Rodriguez Very nice momentous autographs 15 out of 15 going to SKS and his Texas Rangers Then we got a Tomar Johnson showcase 14 out of 15 for the Pittsburgh Pirates That's part of the 19 R&B spot for going to David needed that some of that last Bob Mojo It's technically wasn't a last Bob Mojo hit but you did get two teams the last Bob Mojos, I guess right so there you go That goes to you buddy And then last one here Is a duel for the San Diego Padres? How about Roberto Alomar and Tony Gwynn one out of seven? That's awesome Padres Robert B bought straight up with the case parts We've got a Zach Neto 10 out of 15 for the Angels going to Kev That is a double sapphire Then we got another double. I think maybe emerald right now another sapphire 1350 Mason win for St. Louis Three going to Joe There you go Joe and let's see what the encase card is guys Look, oh says Atlanta. How about a little chipper Jones? 24 out of 25 Atlanta Braves going to Neil pretty nice little box there Hope you could definitely get a maybe a little younger prospect catch autograph Maybe a cut or something. I'll get like a bad barrel on one, too. I'm chasing one of those for a little bit now Go one more to box guys. Here we go. I'm doing actually What am I doing? Let's go to the relics at the top. All right first. We got legendary materials Tommy Heinrich Should be Yankees. Let me just double check. I was getting fused with some of these guys I want to make sure that they're the right team Yes Yankees that's going to Matt 15 out of 20 There we got a AJ Smith Schalver for Atlanta three-colored patch and autograph One out of ten Lana's going to Neil We got Brandon Barreira for Toronto Thought straight up by Robert Ronkel There we got a out of five Tim Salmon For the California Angels Going to the Los Angeles Angels Kev How about a little some a little Elijah Green? Going to Kevin W We've got the Nationals nice three-colored patch and all good. We got a little Bernie Williams for the New York Yankees Five out of 20. We got Juan Marshall 15 out of 25 for the San Francisco Giants James with that one We have a Eddie Murray For Baltimore Five out of 15 Baltimore bought straight up with Jordan And then last but not least we got a Diego Cartella For the Dodgers going to have Showcase quadrelics Two out of 15 Alrighty guys final three hits guys. Good luck First one over here We got legends for the Brooklyn Dodgers Pee Wee Reese Going to add in the Dodgers Double sapphire Another legends Charlie Keller 19 out of 20 Now Charlie Keller Is a Believe Yankee Double checker I think it is Yes Charlie Keller Legends diamonds Out of 20 That is going to the Yankees Alright last one right here guys Good luck Looks like 12 out of 15 And it's Masataka Yoshida 12 out of 15 Double patches in autograph For the Boston Red Sox Who's going to Joe Who bought them straight up Very nice Boom just like that guys That is the break Thanks for giving it a shot guys I know again like I said Maybe some teams that went hit list But all in all still some nice hits We did post up another one All new possibilities in that case guys And for the R&B Actually not too many came out for the R&B But we did get a couple of them though So I'm pretty sure the two still last We're getting into the R&B Thank you guys Jasperyskatespakes.com


Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for joining me today. I know there were a few really great sessions at this time, so the fact that you're all here in this one is a really big complement. My goal is to make you feel like you made a good choice by coming today. I'm going to be talking about the freelancers guide to client onboarding. I don't need to introduce myself because I just had a wonderful introduction there, so I'm just going to skip right into it. Today, I'm going to show you how you can design an onboarding process that wins you more projects, delights your clients, and solves some of your biggest client headaches. So it's a tall order. And the presentation has three parts. So the first part, I'm going to really briefly go through what onboarding is and why it's important, just to get everybody on the same page, so really, really quickly go through this. Then I'm going to talk about the four things that make a really great onboarding process. And then in part three, which is the meat of the presentation, I'm going to go through an example of a really good onboarding process that you can copy and use in your own projects. So what is onboarding and why is it important? Well, onboarding is basically the process that moves a person from being a lead into being a client. Now, a lot of people see onboarding as just that part of their proposal has been accepted, and you are getting the client familiar with working with you and starting the project. I actually see onboarding right from first contact all the way till the project starts. So I see it as a slightly longer process. And onboarding is really, really important. I think it's one of the most important things you can do, and that's for three main reasons. First off, you can set expectations during the onboarding. So you can basically prevent so many problems that freelancers have during the onboarding stage. Some of the most common problems that I get asked about all the time are things like clients who are micromanaging, clients who are, you know, there's scope creep happening where they're trying to get more things into the project that they haven't budgeted for. And you can prevent a lot of those things. And actually, prevention is much better than trying to fix them as they actually happen. And you can do that in the onboarding. Secondly, onboarding makes you look really good. So first impressions are so, so important. And how you start the project is really going to set the scene for how the rest of the project goes. If you start on the right foot, your client is going to think really well of you throughout the whole project. If you have a bad first impression, it's a lot harder to recover from. So it just makes sense to just try and get yourself started, get yourself the best first impression that you can. And finally, onboarding is a really quick win. So it doesn't take much to have an onboarding process in place. You don't need anything too fancy. You can get it done really, really quickly. And also the onboarding for every client stays the same, basically everybody. So it can just be, it's kind of like the low hanging fruit, if you like. So that's what onboarding is and why it's important. Now I'm going to go through the four things that make a really good onboarding process. Or really a really good process in general. So a great onboarding process should be useful. It should be reusable. It should be profitable. And it should be delightful. And what I mean by those is, by useful I mean it should be useful for your clients. So there shouldn't be any fluff in it. We're not doing an onboarding process just to tick a box. You're doing it because you want your clients to actually find it useful. So if it's not useful, it doesn't need to be there. But also it needs to be useful for you as well as a business owner. Because as a freelancer you wear a lot of different hats. You're trying to do marketing, you're trying to do case studies and all these different things alongside doing your client work. And that can be really challenging. But you can bake into your onboarding process things that are going to really help you with all of these. And a really good example is something like testimonials. So a lot of people don't realise that actually during the onboarding stage is a really good opportunity for you to ask for a testimonial. You don't have to wait till the end of the project. And actually at the start of the project it can be a really good idea to ask for one because the client is really excited and you've made a fantastic first impression. You can also set the scene for creating a case study. So you can have maybe a questionnaire or something in place. So you can create your case study throughout the entire project rather than just trying to do it and remember at the end everything that you went through. So next it should be reusable. This one's pretty obvious. You want to reuse as much of your onboarding process as possible because that's going to save you time. You don't want to be redoing the same things over and over and over again. It just doesn't make sense and you don't really have the time for that. But actually I'd argue more importantly making things reusable makes it easier for you to delegate things out. So if you don't already have some kind of assistant I think that an assistant, the onboarding getting an assistant to take over the onboarding for you is one of the easiest things that you can outsource. And I really think every freelancer should probably get an assistant sooner than they think. I didn't and I really, really regret it. I think even with a couple of hours a day having someone help you with these tasks that you put in place is just going to take so much off your plate. Interesting. Okay, well the other one was that it needs to be profitable. So this one's pretty obvious but like I said I talk about the process being from first contact to the start of the project so you want to actually win that project first and foremost. But you also want to bake in things into your onboarding process that can help you make a profit later on. So the thing I always like to remember is that every lead is a contact and even if you don't end up working with that client you should still be saving them somewhere if you don't already have some kind of CRM which is basically a database to store people. You should create one even if it's just a spreadsheet. And every time you do a discovery call with a client even if they don't accept the project they should be a lead in your database because as you're growing your freelance business you're going to be becoming more proactive in reaching out to people and you need a network of people that you can reach out to when you have different offerings available. And so baking these little things like this into your process that you can't rely on yourself to remember as you're doing it is just going to be really helpful for you long term. And then finally it should be delightful. So experience is really important and I think it's something that as freelancers we tend to forget. I used to work in a design agency an in person one and we used to bring clients in and we used to give them spreads of food and show them presentations like with the big boards kind of like mad men's style and they loved it and they would pay so much more money to work for the agency than they would potentially have to pay a freelancer but they did it because they liked the experience and I'm not saying that freelancers need to do any of that we tend to work remotely so it doesn't always work out but I think if you can bake little in little bits of your process you can bake tiny bits of delight it's going to really really help you and build those relationships that last for a really long time. So now we're going to get into the example. So this is my sixth step on-boarding process and you might be doing a lot of this already but these are really the six steps that I would do every time a lead first contacts me to when the project begins. So step one, we want to first qualify the client and that basically means that we want to weed out any bad fits as quickly as possible because I'm sure we've all been there where we've spent time and effort doing a call writing a proposal and find out the client had a budget of 50 euros or something like that and it's really really frustrating because you just feel like you've wasted a ton of time so you want to kind of get rid of those if you can and just pull through the people who are going to make really really good clients for you. But the second goal really is you want to respond as quickly as you can so when you're knee deep in client work it's really hard sometimes to respond to all these new leads that come in but responding quickly is so important because now I'm on the other side of freelancing I tend to hire freelancers more than I don't work as a freelancer anymore I tend to hire them and there's something about that first freelancer who responds to me that almost automatically shortlists them and back when I was freelancing I didn't respond quickly because I didn't want to seem like I was too desperate or too keen and now looking back I can see that was a big mistake responding quickly is a really easy way to just get yourself that little bit ahead if a client is potentially looking at a few other freelancers alongside you. So this is what you want to do when a new lead contacts you you basically just want to have a series of templated emails ready to send out now I know there's a lot of information on this slide so don't worry too much basically I had to cut a lot out of this talk to get it to fit within 30 minutes but what I've done is I've written down these four email templates that I think everybody needs as a minimum so we've got the initial response email where we've got five pre-qualifying questions to make sure that they have the budget they have the deadline and a few other things to make sure that they're a good fit working with you you have a template that if they do not pass that initial response and you think no they're not a good fit you want to have a really nice rejection template that doesn't burn any bridges because remember every lead is still a contact they might not be a great fit for you now that does not mean that they're not going to be a great fit for you one day in the future then if they are a good fit you want to have another templated email to book a discovery call and you know how that will work what the schedule is and then finally you want a templated follow-up email to just nudge them to book that call and I've got a link to download these templates at the end there's no catch there's no I don't ask for an email address or anything like that I just couldn't fit them into the presentation so now we've done the qualifying the client let's say okay they're a great fit we want to work with them now we're going to book a discovery call with them and some people don't think discovery calls are important I personally think they are and that's for three reasons first off you're going to build rapport with people so we're working with people and I think any opportunity you can have to humanise yourself and humanise them and build a kind of connection is going to be really helpful I think in-person is the best kind of thing you can do for basically everything every good thing that's happened in my business has usually come down to some kind of in-person event or some kind of relationship that I've made as a freelancer in-person isn't often possible so the next best thing is to get on a call where you can see their face they can see yours and you can chat you also want to provide value on this call so show them how great it would be to work with you but without necessarily turning it into a consulting call so another thing that freelancers often say to me is they do these calls, they're really really helpful and they're spending like an hour, two hours maybe even more just helping the client giving them so much information and they're super super pumped and then their client doesn't even hire them and they're so disheartened because they feel really really taken advantage of so when you're doing these calls you want to have them mapped out and remember that it's your responsibility to make sure the call only lasts maybe 30 minutes, 45, whatever you decide keep it on schedule so have something templated in your script, in your head for when you feel it turning into a more consulting call you can then push it to maybe say something like oh this is a really great topic I'd love to get into it with you even more let me send you some information about this package that I've got that could really help you and you can send them a package to book a consulting hour or two hours with you so that's another thing that's really important with the call and then finally you want to get all the information that you need for your proposal so I'll talk about this next but we're going to be writing the proposal immediately after the call so I actually think throughout the call really the most important thing is the follow-up afterwards and the reason I think this is the most important part is because first off hopefully this is where your clients most excited but secondly this is something that no one really does at least in my experience even though it's so so easy so what you want to do is you want to do three things you want to follow up via email immediately just send one quick email that said it was so great talking to you I'm really excited about this project I'm going to be working on the proposal today and I'll get it to you tomorrow that's it and then hit send in my experience people don't do this and it's such a... it's so disappointing as the client because you don't really feel as valued and the next thing you want to do is add them to your CRM so I say this a lot and then the third thing you're going to write your proposal straight after the call while it's fresh in your mind and you're going to proofread and send the following day which leads me to step three so the proposal two goals here you want to show how great you would be to work with you are saying I'm going to get this proposal over to you tomorrow you are then going to get that proposal to them tomorrow I think doing it quickly is really important don't make them wait too long because you might miss that moment that they're really excited and secondly you of course want to win the proposal so I recommend everybody block out time if you use Calendly or some kind of calendar scheduling tool block out an hour maybe just 30 minutes after the call to write the proposal and hopefully you've got all the information you need you would have a really solid proposal template where most of it is the same and you can just quickly add things that you need to throughout the process so you need a really good process for writing proposals don't put it off like I used to do just get it done straight away nobody likes writing proposals but make sure you wait sleep on it, send it the next day proofread to notice any mistakes and then send it so then let's say proposal gets accepted so we're going to send them the paperwork, send them the deposit send them the contract, this one is super easy basically you want to get paid and you want to cover yourself if there's any problems so getting paid getting paid a deposit is another thing that I hear a lot that is really hard for a lot of freelancers because most people aren't ready to work with their client right there and then there may be available a couple of months in advance but they need the deposit then so you can secure it into your calendar but a client is thinking well if I'm not going to start for a couple of months what incentive is there to pay now I'm just going to pay in a couple of months so I use this email a lot it doesn't work all the time but it definitely helps and there's a couple of things in this email that I think really helped it I can't start till May or whatever month but we can start working together now I'll get familiar with your business you can do some data collection homework all these things that we've got to get started so we can start working together now which helps them pay their deposit right there and then and then I say sound good if so as soon as the deposit has been paid we'll get going and then I add this but at the end so I recommend paying the deposit as soon as you're able to secure your spot and like I said this doesn't work all the time but it does work some of the time especially if you have an expiration date for your proposal because then you can send a couple of follow up emails to that date to create a little bit of urgency you can say there's other people waiting so your spot's going to go and you really need to pay it now if you want to get that booked in otherwise it's going to be a little bit of a longer wait so the next step once we've sent all the paperwork and hopefully got paid is we're going to set up our working environment I like to do this as soon as the deposit's been paid and this is another reason that having an assistant is going to be super super helpful because they can do all this for you and just make all these checks to make sure that you are ready from day one to get going and really the goals for the setup is to preempt any common problems so things like can you log into things you need to log into have they sent you a Google link do you have the correct sharing permissions all that kind of stuff I don't know if you've experienced it but I have so many times where I've been getting started I'm so finally able to start a project I try and open a Google link and it says oh you need to request access from the client and it's so frustrating because often they're not in the same time zone so I've blocked out this time and it makes me look bad right so you want to preempt all of these as soon as you can and just basically be ready to go from day one makes you look super super professional and so the way I do this is pretty simple I set up a structure of folders on my computer so I usually have three phases for a project this is for a website project where I'd have a discovery phase which is all the research, the homework I'd have the website this is the meat of the project and then I'd have documents and assets all those brand assets and contracts and all that kind of stuff in there and oh this slide doesn't work either and so this slide was a slide for a tool I use called posthaste but don't worry because it's in the link at the end I think I linked to it as well but there's a tool called posthaste and it's a free tool basically just allows you to create templates of your of your folder structures so you can just one click have them populated every time you get a new project so it makes it super super easy and then the other thing I'd recommend when you're doing this welcome packet is to just have a single or getting the document set up can't remember or working environment is just try and have a single source of truth for each client project so have somewhere where the client can go to access everything and this could be a Dropbox folder it could be a Google Drive folder it doesn't really matter where the plugin that I have is like basically to solve this problem but it's a portal plugin but you could use a project management tool or something like that just as long as your client has somewhere to access all those things whether it's a link, a file contract, the deliverables whatever it might be then finally the last thing that I like to do for my onboarding is to send a welcome packet and this is my favourite part welcome packets basically level expectations so we talked at the start about any common problems that you see cropping up throughout your project have a think about them they might be different for everybody but there should be something in your welcome packet that tries to preempt them before they potentially happen so if scope creeps a big issue then can you have something in there that says hey, here's what to do if the scope increases in the project that's totally fine but here's the process and how we get this new feature added and quoted for and added to the timeline the welcome packet also helps start the project so if you have things for your client to do intake questionnaires or maybe they need to write the content for the website they can start that there and then finally I think a welcome packet is a really good way to kind of surprise and delight them because not many people do this and it just shows your client that hey you're a professional you've done this before, you know what you're doing and it's just really nice because a lot of the time the experience of working with freelancers might be a little bit might seem a little bit unorganised and that's obviously because freelancers are busy they're doing a lot but to the client it may seem a little bit unorganised so it's always nice if you are working with a freelancer who seems to just know what they're doing and they've done this before so I collect welcome packets because I love them this is my friend Franz he sends these to his client it's just basically some printouts of information about how he works and he sends them like this really nice little bar of chocolate to just welcome their clients into working with them I thought that was a really nice idea I also recently got a quote to get our garden to get a deck for our garden and they sent us this welcome packet and it had these things like the process timeline so a lot of the time clients don't know what the process of working with a web designer or a developer might be so have a process timeline it's got some success stories an agenda for the meeting they even have a little magazine they actually even sent us a hamper a chain and chocolates and all that kind of stuff you don't have to go to that extreme I actually recommend most people with their welcome packets start with a google doc a nicely formatted google doc that you can change and edit and tweak until you've got something that really really works for both you and your clients is the best thing that you can do and you can then polish that up later on if you need to so here are some other things that could be included in a welcome packet because I'm short on time but you could have a getting started guide you could put your paperwork in there information gathering client homework any useful links is really important to maybe if you use I don't know Pinterest for collecting inspiration or something and then any handy guides so this is for things that if you struggle with your client doesn't give you great feedback could you have a little guide on how to give great feedback that you can really use and finally we want to use this as an opportunity to just build a little bit of delight into your process so I always like sending a welcome gift I see loads of people do this and I just think it's really nice you can send like Franz did some chocolate one of my friends I know he sends a book you know a really good book that's been really integral to his business he'll send that to his client some people send coffee beans this is Lauren Hooker from Ellen Company she sends a gift card to a local coffee shop or a Starbucks and just with a note that says hey I'm really excited to work with you I know you need to write your content and that's really really hard but just take a morning use this gift card go to your coffee shop and get your content written for me and I just think that's a really nice touch but also remember that being thoughtful and building delight you don't always have to buy things just be thoughtful throughout the whole process so always be thinking about how you can help your clients how you can build connections throughout be really really helpful and that's just a really nice way to be memorable to your clients so that's my 6th step onboarding process and basically when you're designing your own you need to ask yourself is it useful is it reusable is it profitable and if it does all these 4 things then you've got a great process on your hands so I would recommend everybody if you haven't already spend some time planning out your onboarding experience so from first contact it doesn't have to be as fancy as this just scribble it down spend a morning in a coffee shop in your favourite coffee shop and just spend a morning or an afternoon thinking about every interaction with your clients down to the most minute detail and see the parts that you could template or make reusable and it's going to really really help you it shouldn't take a lot of time the emails I think are the most important things to template the other stuff you can do gradually so that's it from me thank you so much for joining me like I said I've got extras here thank you if you want to download them the link is bit.lywceu-le that's an L not an I but yeah I appreciate you coming and yeah thanks very much alright thank you a round of applause please that was great so I guess the audience they are itching to ask you questions because we need to get more clients and make more money so that's very important you have any questions please let me see your hands ok one anybody else two three and four ok let's start with those four first person please so the mic thank you I'm Kevin Roberts by the way oh hello I noticed in the slide when you showed the email templates using one of those automator template things do you use something like I forget the name of it yeah there's a couple so there's text expanded so that's the really big one that's like super great so many features the one in the screenshot was actually one called A Text which I've used both and I've switched to A Text A Text is so much I think it's like $5 a year or something it's really cheap and it ultimately does the same thing it doesn't have all the features of text expanded but I really like A Text because it just does what you need it to do which is have these templates there so yeah there's that and now I use Help Scout just because I use Help Scout for my emails and that's got the save replies in there as well but yeah A Text is great and the text expander is really good thank you next person okay hello it's here go ahead you mentioned already uncomfortable situation when a client has a low budget how do you filter that in the nice way so client will not feel uncomfortable because you already starting speaking about the budget and you don't want to spend one hour and they have just $50 so in the pre-qualifying email one of the questions is do you have a budget and is it over X and I think the budget thing is really difficult because we're often told ask the client the budget don't tell or show your prices which makes sense to a point but a lot of clients don't know what their budget is because they don't know what a website for example should cost so it can be really difficult to ask that so I find having is it over X amount is a really good way to just make sure that they're in the range or you could say is it between X and Y or you could say websites vary wildly it could be anything from this to that does this sound about within your range and if so where about and that kind of gives them a starting point because I've been in the situation where I'm trying to get a quote for a project and they ask me my budget and I say I don't know like I don't want to offend you by saying something really low I don't want to say something crazy high in case you think oh there we go I'll just say that so I sort of see it from both sides so that's how I go about that then if they say no unfortunately I can't work with that budget I always try to recommend them elsewhere I might either recommend them to someone I know who could work with in that budget range or maybe even just say you might need to try up work or something yeah you're welcome okay next person the mic please hi you mention you have a plug-in to do all that right sort of the plug-in is it's really a place to store deliverables so it's basically if you have a welcome packet and you have all the different files and folders and links dotted around everywhere it basically just keeps it all together for your client so they just have one login and they can see everything it's not a project management tool in the sense that it doesn't do it doesn't have any of those extra bells and whistles mostly because I found when I had project management tools my clients weren't using them so I switched to something a little bit more simple but yeah it just keeps it all together yeah alright there was one more person okay hi there how do you handle like clients slightly bigger maybe they have like an RFP or something where they want you to kind of go down deeper do you kind of put them into your process to kind of work a bit around just maybe some stuff on there so with RFPs I don't I've never answered them personally because when I worked in an agency I learned and I don't know if this is just either maybe it's England I don't know but I found that with RFPs a lot of the time they already know who they are going to work with and they just have to get other quotes they have to get X amount of quotes from people and so you almost never end up winning them so I always just ignored them if you did need to do that I think to be honest it's a little bit out of my expertise range because I've never the only time I've answered one was when I worked in an agency and we had the team members available and they take like maybe a junior member of the team to work on the RFP and they'd have it signed off by a senior member I think it's easier for agencies to do that route but I'm sure there are people who do it successfully I just I wouldn't actually be able to help much with that because I've never done it I'm sorry Thank you Someone read back please Hello How do you differentiate your onboarding process based on whether the client is like non tech savvy or whether someone needs to speed things up because they are comfortable with onboarding themselves meaning that I have seen cases that they feel the onboarding process is really slow because it's really in depth and welcoming for a non tech savvy person but they are frustrated just because of that and on the other hand if you try to speed it up it's much more difficult for a non tech savvy person so how do you differentiate it between these two types of clients That's a good question I think For my onboarding process it was never it was never too slow I think the only thing I would potentially do is if I had a really non tech savvy client I would maybe add in an extra call which would be more of a welcome call where I would go through the onboarding process with them so you know I would go through because I would send the documents and then it's really up to the client whether they read them or not if I got the feeling that this client really had never done the project before and I think one of the questions in the initial question email might be have you worked on a project like this before that kind of gives me an indication of how much hand holding they might need I might just like spend some time and book in an extra call with them and go through all these problems and how it works and go through that way but I would recommend probably having your onboarding process be really really fast and streamlined but slowing it down if you think a client needs it rather than having it really slow and then speeding it up if you feel a client doesn't need it if that makes sense thank you very much do we have other questions please okay good hi I just have a question about when you sent a proposal I learned actually two other tricks that when you send a proposal make a short video explaining the proposal for freelancers and they were talking about actually presenting their proposals on a call in person I found that was quite interesting actually because it's not something unless you do paid discovery which is basically where the client pays you to do a proposal which for that garden design company is exactly what happened we paid them to do a proposal I'm actually very pro paid discovery it's just too much to go into in the talk but yeah I think anything that you can do with like a welcome video is a great idea to just walk them through it or I'd maybe even change what I say and say maybe go through the proposal on a call with them and get them to commit to it there and then but that's not something I've tried but I can see it working really well but the video is a great idea because it's like a mix between the two it's not a live call that you have to do but it's not just sending a proposal and hoping for the best so it's a good idea maybe in the admin bar sorry? that's exactly it, yeah that's it you saw the same thread thank you thanks I'm going to watch that again that was great do you have any advice on writing contracts and if do you ever skip the contract completely or how do you simplify it enough for the client where it's not intimidating so I think that's a good question with contracts what I did and unfortunately this isn't available anymore so I can't point you to the link but there was a service where they, well it wasn't a service they had a contract and then they had a guide to the contract where the contract was rewritten in plain English that just explained what each term meant and I went through it and where you need to tweak it, it was for freelancers where you need to, I think it was Paul Jarvis if anyone remembers him years and years ago he did a lot for freelancers and that was really helpful for me because I felt like before I felt I had a contract that was kind of a standard one that I'd found but if a client ever challenged me about any of it I don't know if I'd be able to really say oh yeah what that was so I really liked having being confident in knowing what each part of the contract was for and why it was there that said, with contracts it's really difficult because depending on the price of your projects how enforceable they are is I've never been in the process where I've had to enforce one and when you're working with clients in different countries I think unless you're doing really really big projects I don't even know if it would be worth enforcing it like if a client didn't pay like I don't know what you could do so it's one of those things where I think yes it's important to have a contract because it just adds a little bit of cover for you in practice how much it would help you I don't know because you'd have to get a lawyer it costs a lot of money maybe it would cost more than the proposal itself and it depends what you're charging I don't know if I would not have a contract yeah it's difficult I think that's just something you'd have to decide for yourself yeah you could potentially not have a contract and just go for it I think yeah thank you very much any more questions please okay have one hi Laura really great talk, really enjoyed it thank you very much when you come to proposals there's acceptance, rejection and ghosting what happens with what sort of process do you go through when you immediately get an email saying oh thanks I'll be in touch and then you know like chasing it and what have you so you know what I mean I know what you mean I do have a couple of follow up emails that I'll send usually you can kind of tell if they're not really going for it if you really think they're just ghosting you I would instead of trying to win them back I personally would try to get to the bottom of why so I'd say something like you know it looks like you're not interested or you found something else would you mind telling me why like why it didn't work out just to get feedback for me to know like where did I go wrong in the process I think that would be more valuable than actually even winning the project in a lot of cases because you don't always know like what you're doing you think you're doing everything right and you don't know what your client's thinking but yeah the ghosting is really really tough the other thing I would say is that's why the pre-qualifying is really important and hopefully by the time you get to the discovery call if your website's really good as well and that's going to help have your clients hopefully ready to work with you you would hopefully be fairly confident in the discovery call and then if not you don't want to have spent much time writing the proposal so it's why I recommend maybe like 30 minutes max to write the proposal after the call have it super super templated and a couple of follow-up emails and then just use it as a bit of a learning experience and like I say the way I just try to think of these things just to make me not too depressed when they happen because they do happen is that every call is another practice at a sales call and every person that you interact with can be added and they might end up using you in the future like it's not wasted as long as you haven't put too much time and effort into it it's not fully wasted but you can't control whether a client gets back to you or whether they accept the proposal you can only control what you're doing and giving the best proposal that you can and doing the best process and just trying to like get feedback on like how you're doing and then doing things like learning about sales learning about how to do calls and just keep practising but I don't think there's really another easy answer for it unfortunately I'll exactly the same just very quickly follow up on what sort of like timescales do you kind of go like okay I've not heard back in like two weeks or something is there any sort of timescale I don't have a specific timescale I suppose I would probably I think yeah two weeks I think sounds reasonable it depends on the size of the project as well though in the size of the budget like bigger projects bigger budgets bigger companies might have a different process that could take longer so it's going to be a little bit of trial and error you know if it's kind of a smaller company maybe you're just talking to the founder I would say two weeks is reasonable if it's a bigger company maybe you would want to find out from them what that process is for getting things like this approved because there might be extra steps you need to take it might take a little bit longer and all that kind of thing so yeah two weeks to four weeks I would say yeah all right thank you I'm afraid that's all the questions we can take thank you Laura once again please a round of applause that was wonderful I totally enjoyed that from you