Hello and welcome to the Working Image Podcast. I'm your host, Jared Michael Gordon. This is episode nine, trust the Professional. Let's get started. If you're listening to this podcast, the chances are high that you are a professional yourself. You may be a carpenter, a lawyer, a plumber, or a dentist. It doesn't matter if your collar is blue or white. You are a professional. I am also professional, but you see, I know my limitations when someone comes to my house to fix something. I know to trust what they are saying because they are the professional. I know to listen to my lawyers because they are the professionals, and you as the professional in your industry, want to be listened to as well. A professional should suggest what's right for their customer or client. To be a professional in an industry means that industry is where you are educated, experienced, and is your main paid occupation. I have a very nice electric toothbrush, but this doesn't make me aist. Someone may know how to take very nice photos, but that doesn't make them a photographer. Here is a problem the design community has been facing for years. Now, in today's world, if you have access to Photoshop or you know a little bit about the web, some business owners will consider you a professional because they don't know any better. How could they? You have to take their word for it, but the design industry requires much more than owning the right software and hardware. You as the business owner need to do a little bit of research on the designer you're thinking about doing business with. Look at their website, ask for a list of previous clients, find their Google reviews. Do they actually have a company or a degree in design? You really need to consider these points before hiring a designer because they are going to do something for your company that will affect your company as a whole, such as designing marketing material or creating a logo or even a website. Do you really want someone who just obtained Photoshop and a computer to create these elements for your business? Think about it. It's easier to listen to a professional from certain industries, for example, an electrician, and that's because there could be catastrophic results if you don't listen to them. God forbid, your house could burn down or all your equipment in your house could fry, if not properly grounded. But when it comes to listening to a designer regarding branding website or maybe your digital marketing, it's easier to ignore that information. Now, I don't mean that your company doesn't have the money at that moment in time to invest in what is being proposed. That's a completely different issue because you are listening. You just might not have the funds to move forward at that time. I'm talking about when you just don't care enough to really listen to what the designer is telling you and you are going to lose business as a result. I've seen this happen a few times and I've heard about it from other designers many times before. Here is why I'm talking about listening to you and trusting a professional. I was watching Pepsi Wears My Jet, which is a Netflix original about the Pepsi giveaway in the nineties, and if you're old enough to remember the issue, Pepsi introduced their point system where you could send points in and get Pepsi promotional gear, you know, jackets, hats, so on and so forth. Well, at the end of the commercial, there was a fighter jet shown and the amount of 7 million points without a disclaimer that you can't actually get the jet. It actually showed the jet and said 7 million tickets and it said, um, whatever type of jet it was. That's it. No disclaimer, nothing else. Well, one kid named John Leonard tried to get the jet and it went to court and it took about four or five years to settle costing, I'm sure a few million dollars in lawyer fees for Pepsi. But the kicker is that when the commercial was created, the art director, the professional Pepsi had hired to create the commercial originally had an amount on the bottom of the commercial for 700 billion or some crazy unattainable number on the bottom of the commercial because that was the joke. You can get a hanger jet if you have like 700 billion. However, Pepsi wanted the number to be seen better, so they lowered the number to 700 million and still had an issue reading it. So they went to 7 million. But the art director warned them to make sure someone couldn't actually obtain that many points or they may have an issue. But Pepsi ran the commercial and chaos ensued and all they had to do was listen to the professional. So I wanted to talk about the importance of listening and trusting the professional. Here are a couple of real life cautionary tales to help you avoid issues in the future. I Just want to point out that I have permission to use these stories. Example one. This one has to do with seo, search engine optimization. I signed on a new SEO client. Now I didn't know them when they created their website or any of their branding. They hired me to gain new clients through Google searches. Seo not an issue. We have strategies that work just fine and we can implement them fast. However, when you want to boost your seo, there are always little things that you need to tweak on your website. So I gave the client a small list of four things or maybe five things I needed to be done on the site. The client didn't have access to the back end of his website. Here's a pro tip. Make sure in your website contract that you are given super admin access to the website that you paid for. Otherwise your website can be held hostage. More on that in another episode. So back to his story. So he needed to email the needs list to his friend who is the web developer. My client told me that he is a rocky relationship with his friend, but he'll get it done. Okay, no problem. The client told me he did it and the updates will be made. I said, great, let's move forward. Now, I can't see if the changes were made because on his site this has to be done on the back end, so I would have to go in and see that these were all taken care of, so I have to take his word for it. Well, the work begins and he gets a few new clients every month, but nothing like the goals that we had established in the beginning. At the end of the six month contract, my client was upset and yelling and telling me that he wasted time and money with my company not getting all the leads that he wanted to get. Now throughout these six months, I asked him if he was sure his friend did these updates to the website. So I asked him again. Then my client says, maybe, I don't know, probably not because we don't get along well. So I said, can you call his friend now and confirm? Well, he called his friend. His friend picked up surprisingly and told my client he never updated his site. He just didn't get around to it, and there is the issue. Not having those updates done prevented us to hit the SEO goals we needed to make. Imagine the number of leads they would've gotten if they had just listened to us and gotten those updates done, but they passed it over and now they didn't get the results they wanted. Example two, and this one is really shocking. A company had an older website that was from the early two thousands and it was HTML based for its time. The website was very nice, but it wasn't mobile responsive, so it didn't change to fit all the different phones and tablets we used today. Also, it was insecure because of its age. There was also a myriad of issues with the site, which I don't need to point out here. Just know that the site was in very bad shape and really needed to be redesigned on a newer platform to meet today's needs. I designed a different project for this company and then they asked me about the website. I told'em what was wrong, how to fix it, and what these updates would do for their company and help them grow. Finally, I gave them a price, which is industry standard pricing. However, I also told them they need to get this done because people can't load their website on a phone, and that's where most people searched the web. Now, in addition, their desktop version was also running very slow. I wasn't pushy. I didn't act like the sky was falling. I simply laid out the potential problems that could occur if they don't move forward, whether I designed the website or not, while they dragged their feet in making a decision and they felt they didn't really need to update just yet, and I think something like six months went by. I checked on them periodically to see if they wanted to move forward, but they didn't and they were very nice about it. And one day out of the blue, they called me. I greeted them and they told me to update the contract dates and they would sign right now. I asked what happened and why the urgency. Of course, I already knew the answer. They had to have lost some money on the site. Well, they told me they lost a bid for ready for this. Are you ready for this? They lost a 6 million project because the potential client couldn't see their portfolio of work on his phone and got angry trying to use their site in general, and the potential client said, if that's how you represent your company, how are you going to treat this project and my company? Overall, that was a very expensive lesson to learn. Now, of course, I wasn't happy that they lost that bid, but it's still a lesson worth telling. These examples, I'm telling you, are on a larger scale, but remember whenever a professional, and in this case a professional designer is telling you something, you need to take it seriously and consider it no matter how large or small the issue might be, whether it's making sure you reply to all your online reviews or being sure to look at your Google Analytics every month, whatever the advice may be, whatever the proposal may be, you need to listen to it because it could have unforeseen, horrible and costly effects on your company. Remember, you are not expected to know what the professional knows. That's why you hired them in the first place. So listen to the professionals. It could just make or break your company. Well, that's it for episode nine of The Working Image Podcast. Trust the professional. All the necessary links and information are in the show notes. If you have any questions, email the working image gmail.com. We know your time is valuable. Thank you for using some of that time to listen. Take care everyone.