Project Scoping: Going Wide and Deep, Episode 149

Episode Transcript

Carrie: Hey, Troy. It is a pleasure to have you back on the show today. How are you doing?

Troy: I’m very well, and thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Carrie: Absolutely. You know, between this episode and the last time I had you on, I’ve actually got to meet you in person not one but twice.

Troy: That is a true story, and you are taller in real life. It’s a true story.

Carrie: That’s what they say. That’s what they say.

Troy: I remember meeting you in Philadelphia and going, “Wow, you are really taller in real life.” [00:00:30] That’s part of your Twitter bio, isn’t it?

Carrie: It was for a while, because everyone would say, “Wow, you’re taller in real life,” so I finally just decided to go ahead and dispel any myths.

Troy: Excellent.

Carrie: So whenever anyone meets me, they know. I want to have you on today to talk specifically about project scoping. In my mind, project scoping is sort of that bit that sits in between discovery and then actually writing a proposal to [00:01:00] do the work. You might have a little bit different definition of that. If you would, just in your own words, what does project scoping entail?

Troy: It’s a really good question. It depends on the project. It depends on the client and their desired outcomes. Project scoping, for me, is all about making sure that we put ourselves in the best possible position to exceed our clients’ [00:01:30] expectations, which may be a little unusual for anyone listening to this podcast. That may not be what they think project scoping is. I’m a big fan of peeling the onion skin back and really getting to the core of what’s going on. A successful freelancing business is built on happy clients who refer their friends. I mean, word-of-mouth referrals is the cheapest and best form of advertising you can possibly have. In fact, I just wrote a blog post about this recently. [00:02:00] The best way to have a successful consulting business or freelancing business is to have lots of happy clients speak favorably about you to their friends and colleagues, and the best way to do that is to exceed their expectations with every project and every touch point, and the best way to do that is to be really super clear about what their expectations are and make sure that everyone is on the same page. That really, for me, is the heart of project scoping, is to make sure that what they expect and what they want [00:02:30] and what they envision is exactly what we are able to deliver and, in fact, we are able to exceed their expectations and go above and beyond.

Now, we can talk more about the technical side of project scoping and some of the technical stuff and how you do that, but at a high level, that’s how I see project scoping fitting into a business.

Carrie: I love that. I love that. I want to ask, right off the bat, when you say exceeds expectations, when I think about project scoping, you’re absolutely spot on. [00:03:00] This is about setting expectations, making sure that everyone is on the same page in terms of the work that’s going to be done, but when you say exceed expectations, I’m curious, are you holding back a couple of nuggets that don’t make it into the proposal because they’re ways you’re going to surprise or delight your customer during the process?

Troy: Well, the thing is that the most rewarding part of doing what I do, which is in the web design space and in the online education space, the most rewarding part [00:03:30] of doing what I do is seeing the aha or seeing the pure delight on a client’s or a student’s face when they have a breakthrough or when something is revealed to them. It’s really difficult to explain to a client when you see your new website, this is how you’re going to feel. It’s really [00:04:00] difficult to explain that. I mean, it’s impossible. For example, if you’re talking about a membership website or an e-commerce website, it’s really difficult to explain every single detail. Let me give you one very practical example. If you’re running an e-commerce website, one really cool feature that, as an e-commerce store owner, you may not even be aware of is that your customers can log into the online store, have a look at their old history, and click a button to reorder their previous order. [00:04:30] I do this all the time. I wear contact lenses, so I do this all the time. Every 8 to 10 weeks, I log into the [Aussie 00:04:37] Contacts. It’s owned by a buddy of mine up in Queensland. I log in to Aussie Contacts, and I go to my old history and I go yeah, bang, reorder. Within 15 seconds, I’m done, and the next day, my contact lenses arrive.

Now, if you’ve never had an e-commerce store be, you don’t know what you don’t know, so you may not even know that that is possible. If I’m going to write a proposal that’s going to detail every single possible [00:05:00] variable and detail of the project, I’m going to overwhelm you with too much information, and the project is probably not going to get off the ground, because you’re going to be confused by this huge proposal or this functional specification document that I’ve written and you’re not really sure what you’re investing in. Whereas, if that’s a little Easter egg or a little golden surprise that you weren’t expecting that I know is actually quite simple to implement and is a standard feature of an e-commerce store that we would build, then I know that’s a little magic trick up my sleeve that is going to [00:05:30] wow you once the site goes live. I can say, “Check this out. When your customers log in, they can do this,” and you’re going to be delighted by that experience.

There’s no need for me to detail all of those variables and details in the actual proposal before you sign off and approve it. Does that make sense?

Carrie: That makes total sense. You bring up an interesting question for me, which is where is that balance between providing the detail that helps it be clear what [00:06:00] the deliverable is and what the functionality is without going overboard on the minutia of what all that entails?

Troy: That’s a really good question. The balance is you need to understand, in great detail, what your client is expecting. Again, let me give you an example. Your client expects that when they launch their website, [00:06:30] it’s going to be fairly easy for search engines to understand what your website is about, the index it, and then to start maybe offering your website as a possible solution to some of its customers’ questions. For example, Google has billions of customers that ask questions every day, and Google’s job is to answer those questions. Now, interestingly, the whole search thing is kind of moving. There is a bit of a trend of moving away from Google towards Facebook. For example, [00:07:00] I’m renovating my house at the moment, and I’m asking lots of questions on Facebook to my network, because I get a quicker, more valid response than asking Google because they’re my friends and I trust the network. Google still has its place, and if somebody’s searching for what is the difference between a beveled-edge tile and a rendered-edge tile, and believe me, I’ve learned a lot about this in the last seven days, then I’m going to go to Google to do that research. [00:07:30] I end up on a lot of tiling company websites to learn that information.

Now, it’s an expectation of your client that when we launch our website, the search engines are going to understand what it’s about and be able to index us and serve us up. You and I both know that there are many moving parts to make that happen, and one of the little ahas, one of the little golden nuggets that we can offer our client is we can show them, when we launch their website, how they can log in and how they can actually control the snippet that is going to show up on the search engine results [00:08:00] pages by using the Yoast SEO plugin. I don’t need to detail that in the proposal. I understand that my client’s expectation is that their website is going to be search engine friendly, and I know straight away that I’m going to use the Yoast SEO plugin and I’m going to teach them how to use the Yoast SEO Meta Box in a page, in a post, and how they can control their search snippet, and how they can control their images that get served up on Facebook and Twitter when their post gets shared, and we can go on and on and on. But I’m certainly not going to detail that in the proposal. All I need to detail in the proposal [00:08:30] is that their website will be search engine friendly and will improve visibility across search engines, because that’s what they’re expecting.

Carrie: That makes sense. I’m curious about your process, and I know that you teach a lot of freelancers how to repeat the process that you’ve seen successful in your business. There’s the proposal that goes out to the client. At some point, that [00:09:00] proposal gets there, and a project scope, pieces of that project scope, make it into that proposal. Is there sort of an internal document that is a functional spec or maybe some sort of a level of effort that you’re using? I don’t know if this question makes sense, that not all of that ends up in front of the customer but it’s back of house for your reference?

Troy: That’s a great question. We’ve just got enough experience now that we know [00:09:30] what we know. We also know what we don’t know, so we tend only to take clients on that are in our wheelhouse. We haven’t done the e-commerce for years because it’s actually not our specialty. It’s not our sweet spot. As much as I love e-commerce, for me, there are just way too many moving parts and way too many things that can go wrong, so we kind of got out of that, because we realized that wasn’t our skill set. We’re really good at lead gen and lead capture, and we ended up being really good in the nonprofit space. Part of our wheelhouse [00:10:00] was specializing in doing lead gen and campaign websites for nonprofits, and that was something that we found very rewarding and profitable and successful for our clients. We kind of know what it is and what it isn’t. We know the moving parts that we need. We have our processes, our development processes, in place. When we get a brief from a client, we kind of just talk amongst ourselves and we know exactly how we’re going to deliver this.

The way our process works is very simple. The proposal [00:10:30] just needs to answer the client’s questions and talk to the client about the benefits that they’re going to receive from this new website, the investment required, the time frame, and we don’t go into too much technical detail. Just like when you get your car serviced, the sales document that you buy for your 14 point safety checkup says we’re going to test your brakes, we’re going to test your gear box, we’re going to test your tires, we’re going to basically make sure the car is running [00:11:00] and it’s safe to drive. Cool. That’s all I need to know. When you get the invoice for the job and everything is itemized after the job’s been done, there might be a detail in there that they had to remove and replace an air filter. Well, they didn’t know that until they did the job, so they have now detailed that on the invoice so that you know exactly what you’re paying for, but there’s no need to put that in the proposal up front.

So the way that we work is our proposal is detailed but brief enough to get the client nodding and say, “Yes, this is exactly what I want.” Now, if the project is super, [00:11:30] super complex, like if it’s going to include a membership aspect where customers have to log in and access protected content or there’s some kind of advanced functionality that is just a little above and beyond a basic lead gen website, then what we will do is we will sell a prototype before we sell the project. A prototype, for us, has replaced the good old functional specification document. Again, it’s because it’s really difficult for me to explain to you in words how this is going [00:12:00] to work when your clients log in and hit the reorder button, whereas it’s very easy for me to show you that using WooCommerce and a couple of plugins. For example, when you hit the reorder button, you are then taken to your checkout page, where we can use your credit card that we already have in file. You click checkout, and then you’re taken to a thank you page where your receipt is shown. Well, explaining that in a func spec document is really difficult and inefficient. It’s just much quicker and easier if I show you how that works in a browser.

[00:12:30] The proposal gets the client onboard. Then, if it’s a fairly simple project, then the proposal is for the project, and we go and build a very rapid prototype in the browser, get them to approve the functionality, and then we skin it up based on their branding document and their style guides. If it’s an advanced project, then the proposal is actually designed to sell the prototype. Once they’ve approved the prototype, then we can say, “Right, to bring this to life and to actually make it a proper functioning, working website that looks and smells like it belongs to [00:13:00] your brand, then this is what it’s going to cost.” At that point, we’ve actually been paid to scope it out and to work out how we’re going to build it. Typically what we do is we use some quick and dirty plugins to get a proof of concept, and then we’ll replace some of those plugins with our own custom functions. That’s the way we do it internally, and we try not to bite off more than we can chew and charge the client 12 grand and cross our fingers and hope we can make a profit. We generally try and avoid that situation.

Carrie: [00:13:30] Yeah, I like that. Oh man, how things have gotten better over the years. I’ve actually shown clients functional spec documents before. It was brutal for me to write, and I imagine it was even more brutal for them to read, that they might rather poke their eyes out than …

Troy: With a blunt plastic fork, yeah.

Carrie: … read through the details. Yes. A rusty one, at that.

Troy: Correct.

Carrie: One thing you did say in there that I want [00:14:00] to be sure and draw out is that you’ve got projects that are in your wheelhouse, and therefore, you know sort of a baseline to expect every time. I think more than often, people are saying niche down, niche down is the way to go, and some people disagree with that. I think a benefit there when it comes to scoping is that you kind of have an expectation already of what’s going to go into [00:14:30] that, so perhaps can be a time-saving process on your end.

Troy: Yeah, absolutely. Niching down, I think the problem with that whole mentality is that people think that if they niche down … There are two misunderstandings about niching or niching, as you guys say, and that is that if I choose a niche, then it has to be an industry vertical. So it has to be like accountants, or nonprofits, or [00:15:00] lawyers, or realtors, right? Well, that’s not true. It can actually be a psychographic niche as opposed to an industry niche. It could be marketing managers in medium-size businesses who come from a traditional marketing background who haven’t really gotten their head around digital, for example. Then, that opens you up to a whole bunch of different industries, but you’re targeting a specific type of person within that organization. That’s where we ended up. We actually started with we wanted to be [00:15:30] the digital sidekick for marketing managers, and then we ended up specializing by accident working with marketing managers for nonprofits.

The other fear is that if you niche down, that you’re going to miss out on all this other work. Of course, that’s not the case. I mean, we had a very profitable project with an accounting firm that walked in our door one day, and we didn’t say no to them because they weren’t a nonprofit. The point with picking a niche is that it just gives you a focus for your marketing efforts, and it gives you a target to focus on. It doesn’t [00:16:00] mean that you’re going to miss out on other work. In fact, what happens by osmosis is that you end up attracting other leads because you are putting some effort into marketing yourself and positioning yourself as an authority.

Carrie: I fully agree with you on that front. Getting back to project scoping, let’s talk about what are the actual steps? I know that this is going to look different in every agency or for every freelancer, but [00:16:30] what has worked for you?

Troy: The first thing is to take a really good brief from the client and to understand their expectations and really to understand their motivation behind why they’re doing what they’re doing. We have a technique here called go wide, go deep, which we’ve shared quite publicly and we teach it in our program. Go wide, go deep is a circular series of questions that you can ask to really uncover what’s going on for a client. I’ll give you an example. [00:17:00] One of the earlier clients that I worked with was an osteopath clinic. He approached us and said, “Look, I want to build a new website.” The first question I ask is why? So we sat down and we said, “Okay, why do you want to build a new website?” He started saying things like, “Well, I really need to be found on Google, because I need to attract more people into the practice, so that when you Google ‘osteopath Melbourne’, ‘osteopath Hawthorne’, ‘osteopath Richmond’ that I come up really high in Google.” I said, “Okay, that’s fair enough.”

Then, the next question is, “Why else do you need a website?” [00:17:30] He said, “Well, our current website looks a bit dated.” Okay, so it’s a branding issue. That’s fair enough. Why else do you need a website? He said, “Well, I do need to really get more people in the clinic and increase the … ” He had a recurring subscription plan for people who had chronic, ongoing ailments, so that was something he wanted to focus on. Once you’ve kind of drawn out all the different reasons that they want a new website, then the magic question is which of those is most [00:18:00] important? If you could only pick one, which of those is most important? He said, “Definitely the search engine stuff. I really want to come up high on search engines.” That’s called going wide. You’ve extracted all of the motivations out of your client, and then you go deep on one of them, the most important. I said, “Okay. Why is that one the most important?” He said, “I just think when you type in ‘osteopath Melbourne’, I want to be right up there, because people will then discover us. I said, “Okay. Why else is it important? [00:18:30] Do you just want to show off to your mates when you’re out playing golf that, hey, Google ‘osteopath Melbourne’.” I was just having an open conversation.

Then, he said, “Well, the truth is I’m selling the business.” I said, “Ah, now it makes perfect sense. You want the potential new owners, the people who are going to buy the business, to start Googling around, and you want to be seen everywhere so that the business is more valuable.” That’s a very different strategy than actually using search engine optimization to get people to come into the practice. If you actually [00:19:00] want people to come in, your ads might be talking about a first-time coupon or some kind of loyalty program, whereas if it’s just visibility, that’s a different strategy. So we uncovered the truth of what was really going on by using that go wide, go deep questioning technique. Once we’ve drawn a really detailed picture of what that looks like … It’s funny. We’re having some work done here, some signage done here in the office, and the design agency that we’re working with, they use a similar kind of approach. They really try to get inside [00:19:30] my head and understand why this is important to me. Once you understand why it’s important to your client, then the proposal, as I mentioned before, is brief enough but kind of detailed enough just to get them nodding and say, “Yes, you understand.”

I use a lot of their language in the proposal back to them, so I kind of mirror their motivations and their desires back to them. That way, they understand. They can see that I empathize with them and I understand and we’re on the same page, and it’s an emotional kind of document, then, rather [00:20:00] than a dry technical document. By that stage, they’re saying, “Okay, this is great. We’re ready to go ahead.” Then, depending on the complexity of the project, you might break it down into various stages, and the point is to collaborate with the client as much as possible. I’ll give you an example from the graphic design company that we’re using. We’re having a wall mural designed here for the office with our values and our mission statement and our branding on an entire wall of the office here. The [00:20:30] first thing I got from the design agency was a sketch. It was basically a mood board of a whole bunch of different images and inspirations and colors and a very, very rough, pen-on-paper sketch of some different concepts of what this might look like. It was literally back-of-a-napkin stuff. It was very rough. They just sent that to me in InVision, which is a collaboration app for designers, and we left a couple of comments on some screenshots, and then we had a quick chat on Skype, talked it through, and then they iterate on that.

They send me a version which looks a bit [00:21:00] better, and then they send me another version which looks a bit better, and we’re getting closer. I’m constantly part of the conversation, rather than what I see a lot of freelancers do is put in a proposal, get the green light, disappear for three weeks or four six weeks, and then come back and say, “Ta-da! I’ve finished your project.” The client’s like, “Oh, wow. I’d kind of forgotten about that. That’s actually not what I was expecting.” The longer you leave between communication touchpoints between your client, [00:21:30] the more chance the whole thing’s going to derail and your deliverable and their expectations are going to end up far apart. So, constant communication and collaboration with the client is really key.

Carrie: Excellent. There’s no wonder that you’re the guy teaching other freelancers how to do this. I love it.

Troy: I’ve just made so many mistakes, and I have the battle scars and war wounds to prove it. I just don’t want other people to go through the pain that I’ve been through.

Carrie: Right. I am right there with you. Let’s talk about some tips for [00:22:00] folks that are listening for the show, if they’re approaching a project or have a new client coming in and they’re doing some discovery work. Scoping is … People are afraid of getting it wrong, because scoping leads to proposal, which leads to amount of cash that is agreed upon for a piece of work. What are some tips that you might have for someone approaching the topic? I’ve gone wide, I’ve gone deep on one, I think I have an understanding [00:22:30] of what they want. Now how do I translate this into an actual scope of work that helps define my proposal?

Troy: It’s a great question. I think that the problem, a lot of the times, is that we rely on the written word to communicate what it is we’re going to do, and that’s fine if you’re a copywriter and you are selling copywriting skills or some kind of writing skills. Then, that may be all you need to rely on. [00:23:00] If your medium that you work in includes other forms of communication, so audio, video, graphics, for example, then use that medium in your proposal and in your scope of work. Send examples. I’ve done this before, where I do a little bit of voiceover narration work. I would just quickly record something on my iPhone, it’s not a broadcast-quality microphone by any stretch, but I’ll just send that to a client. I’ll say, “Look, [00:23:30] here’s what I’m thinking,” and I’ll just read something so that they can get an idea of pace and tone. Then, straight away, we’re having a meaningful conversation, because we’re comparing apples with apples. We’re not comparing a written document to what is going to be a logo or to what is going to be a corporate video or to what is going to be a live event.

If you can use as much communication medium at your disposal [00:24:00] to really make the proposal and the scope of work experiential, if you know what I mean, rather than it just being a flat, two-dimensional written document which you then have to translate into some other kind of medium, I think that’s where a lot of the challenges are. If you can use your medium to start communicating that with your client, the earlier the possible … That’s why I love prototyping, because I love just getting my clients in the browser. We’re talking about a website, and websites live in browsers and they live on phones and they live on tablets. So let’s have a look at a prototype on [00:24:30] a smartphone and see how it behaves. All of a sudden, we’re having a meaningful conversation, and the whole project propels a lot quicker rather than me trying to explain things in words. Sometimes words are just inefficient.

Carrie: It sounds like your approach is very iterative and collaborative, as you mentioned. I like that.

Troy: Absolutely. I think the more ownership you can get, the more buy-in you can get from your client early on [00:25:00] in the process, then the more chance they feel like they have some ownership in the project. The decisions that people will defend the most are the ones they make themselves, so when they finally launch the website … Most clients are terrified of launching a website, by the way. When they finally launch a website and their business partner or their spouse or their friends are offering some constructive criticism, they’re going to defend their website because they’ve been a part of it. They can’t just say, “Ah, yeah, well, my web designer did it and he [00:25:30] doesn’t know what he’s doing. He disappeared for six weeks and then came back with this, and I’m not happy.” If they’re part of the process, they’re more likely to defend it.

This is an approach that we’ve taken to our online education as well, because instead of just going away and going dark for three months and planning a course curriculum and then coming back and launching it, we actually get our students involved in the process right from the get-go. They actually help us design the curriculum for our training, so by the time we release it, they’re like, “Yes, this is amazing. I can’t believe you included that in module three. That was my idea.” We’re like, “Yeah, awesome. [00:26:00] Thanks for making this course really good.” That’s why our engagement rates and our refund rates are so low, because our students help us design the curriculum.

Carrie: I’m pretty sure you meant your refund rates are low and your engagement rates are high.

Troy: Yes. Is that what I said? Our engagement rates are low and our refund rates are high. Oh no, sorry. Exactly. Good catch, thanks.

Carrie: You lumped both in the low category, which I knew that wasn’t so. Getting down [00:26:30] into the nitty-gritty details as we come to a close here. What else would you throw in, just a word of advice or even technical do this, don’t do that kind of thing?

Troy: Here’s something which is more of a mindset thing, but there is a technique you can use. This has been around for years. I didn’t invent it. It’s called the sweet spot. It’s a really simple exercise. Take out a sheet of paper. Don’t do it on a computer. Don’t do it on Evernote. Take out a sheet of paper and a pen. [00:27:00] Draw a line down the middle. On the left-hand side, write down everything you enjoy doing, everything you’re really passionate about in your business. If you’re a photographer and you hate shooting weddings, don’t write it down in the left-hand column, because the left-hand column is all the stuff that you’re passionate about and that you enjoy doing and that really makes you feel alive. For me, it’s not SEO. Even though I’m really good at SEO, it doesn’t go in that column, because I don’t love it. I don’t thrive on it. So write down everything that fuels you in that left-hand column. I call [00:27:30] that passion, what I’m really passionate about. Podcasting is definitely in that column for me.

Then, in the right-hand column, you write down what you’re really good at, and I just call that my skills column. What are you really, really good at? I happen to be really good at SEO, but I don’t love it, but it does live in the skills column. Design lives in my passion column, but unfortunately, it doesn’t live in the skills column, because I’m not very good at it. I wish I was. Then, once you’ve filled that bit of paper, you just look at where the commonalities are. For me, [00:28:00] it’s podcasting, communication, training videos, client interfacing, running live events. That’s all the stuff that I’m really good at and that I really love, so that’s what I do in my business. Therefore, if a client walks in the door with an e-commerce project, I will pass on them, and I will refer them to someone else in my network, because I can’t do them justice.

Here’s the mindset for me is I only want to work with clients where I know I can hit a home run, because they are more likely to refer [00:28:30] me, because they’ll think that I’m Santa Clause because I’ve hit a home run. I’m playing to my strengths rather than taking on projects that are outside of my wheelhouse. That has been a game-changer for me. Once I’ve worked out my sweet spot and I just focus on doing those activities, it’s made everything else fall into place.

Carrie: That’s brilliant and a perfect, wonderful note to end up on. Troy, I so much appreciate your time and your sharing with my crowd. [00:29:00] Where can people find you online to follow up, say hello, or just see what you’re up to?

Troy: On Twitter @TroyDean is a good way to reach out to me. If you’re in the web design space, wpelevation.com is a good place to come and check out what we’re doing there. If you’re a business owner and you want to learn how to use the Internet to leverage your business, then rockstarempires.com is where we have that conversation over there.

Carrie: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Troy.

Troy: Thanks for having me, Carrie. Keep up the good work.