[consulting] Gouging Stupid Clients

[Fred Jones]

OK the subject is exaggerated--that was just to get your attention. :)

I recently spoke with a client who told me his woes about how he had
to wrestle a site away from unscrupulous site builders who built and
hosted it and charged exorbitant fees for any change to their
(hard-coded HTML) site. He was looking for assistance with his new
rebuild in Drupal. According to what he claims, I think his
organization was gouged previously.

Now I have a client myself who has no understanding whatsoever about
what I do. When they ask for a change (and I even ran a training
session with them (twice) to tell them how to do little things
themselves, but anyway they like to ask me) they ask how much time it
will take and what's the price. Usually I say it looks like a half
hour job and so I will charge you for a half hour. I don't want to
discuss rates here, but let's just say my rate is 100 Yen per hour. So
I charge them 50 Yen.

But I realize now that if I would say two or even four hours, I am
fairly certain they wouldn't flinch, and even if they did, I could
whip out a few big words and explain why it's complicated and they
would accept that. They would then pay me four hours for a half hour
of work. So what I could do, to be honest, is to say, "This will cost
400 Yen" and not mention that it's a half hour job. They don't really
care about the time--just the price.

I'm sure others have such clients.

I'm wondering what others think about this. On the one hand, it may be
unscrupulous, because no one (not even Lullabot) takes 800 Yen per
hour. On the other hand, however, they are willing to pay 400 Yen for
this job and the business majors would say "don't leave money on the
table." Wouldn't' they?

Fred