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Larry Phipps is a North Carolina licensed land surveyor with more than 20 years experience owning and operating a surveying business. Additionally, as president of Land Surveyor’s Workshops (www.landsurveys.com), he has spent the last decade traveling and teaching at conferences around the U.S. His goal is to help surveyors be better at the business of surveying. Recently, Larry Phipps and Carol Hiatt Huff formed T. P. Consultants, a company that works with surveying firms on reducing liability and implementing value based pricing. T. P. Consultants and Land Surveyors Workshops can be reached at 800-533-4387.
The project is complete. Your (hopefully satisfied) client has moved on to other things. It’s time to turn your attention to the next project safe in the knowledge that all is right with the world. But is it? Is the client truly satisfied? There is only one way to know for certain: You have to ask.
Last time we discussed the importance of managing your project. But no matter how well you plan, unexpected things happen. Clients change their minds or their specifications change. Sometimes, our work reveals details that necessitate a new course of action.
In one way, pricing and project management are totally separate. How many times have we seen bad things happen when surveyors confuse business decisions with professional decisions?
In the last article (POB February 2013), we discussed presenting the proposal
to your prospective client. The notes you took during that presentation (you did
take notes, right?) will form the foundation for the fixed-price agreement
(FPA).
Last
month, we discussed pricing the client rather than pricing the work. Once you
have identified your price, should you then present your one price to the
client and wait for a yes or no answer?
Listening is somewhat of a lost art. Many of us are so busy thinking about what we are going to say next that we forget to really listen to what our clients need and, more importantly, want.
Let’s play the “what if” game. What if you
walked into a grocery store on a mission to buy a loaf of bread, and, when you
went to pay for the bread, they told you they couldn’t tell you the price?
Last month, I wrote about moving away from
pricing schemes based on time. Many readers were undoubtedly skeptical of the
idea, and with some clients, the skeptics are exactly right.