May 20, 2021

“How do I manage a client who constantly changes their requirements?” and more...

In today’s group coaching session, we had a bunch of good questions that touched on topics like:

Plus, I provided three tips for growing your podcast audience.

Good stuff!

Here are some of the questions I answered today:

I want to work on strategy with my clients, but they never have the technical nuts and bolts together for the basic work so I get sucked into hands on work. Therefore, I am creating paid courses to capture all of my technical knowledge, so when I engage, I can direct the client to my courses for technical info, which frees me in a strategic advisory retainer. How does this sound? (timestamp: 1m 56s)

Hi Jonathan, How would you deal with a client with whom requirements are constantly changing? Even at the outset of a project, requirements end up being completely different. How would you manage this when it is happening all of the time, seemingly across every project, making it impossible to plan? I’m tired of playing whack-a-mole! (timestamp: 7m 6s)

Lately, I have written quite a few retainer proposals (with the pricing tiers) for product teams that need outside help. Here I have a challenge. Primarily I’m a Product Designer. Clients usually want me to take their product idea to the research phase and design. I have a challenge in combining product development, which is research+consulting and hands-on work, which is design. I find it hard to get a deal one without the other. How do you even structure something like that? (timestamp: 19m 28s)

Any tips for growing a podcast audience? Our format is short 15-minute episodes every two weeks with me and my partner. We just published episode 22 and haven’t missed a beat. Growth is slow and steady, around 2000 downloads total. I post new episodes on Twitter and just started on LinkedIn this week. Inviting a guest is a possibility we’ve considered, but with the short format seems limiting. Any recommendations? (timestamp: 30m 33s)

I find that engineering directors/managers like the idea of doing things the right strategic way, but as soon as any pressure come, they drop all good practices and start their teams on frantic short-sighted work processes, thus the consultants work gets undermined. Any advice on how to deal with this shift in client attitude? (timestamp: 45m 51s)

How would you deal with a client who has shown they can’t be trusted to deliver things on time(feedback, assets, copy, even payments), but whose project is actually fun. How would you correct course? (timestamp: 55m 46s)

(If you’re curious, you can review the entire list of past questions here)

Do you have questions like these that you’d like to get answered?

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Yours,

—J

P.S. Would you like to see a FREE sample of what group coaching is like? Here’s a past session: FREE replay of Group Coaching session

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