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How to deal with a problematic client
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Walter…I’m not saying there’s anything bad about using that business model and have said as much in many posts regarding this issue.
I’ve just never understood why it’s ok from a business model standpoint for musicians, artists, photographers, software programmers etc. etc. to own the work they create, but many people in our industry don’t believe it’s ok for us to do the same thing…and equate it with professional suicide.
From our experience, this issue rarely comes up with clients, but when it does, it’s typically in cases where a client doesn’t want to pay for the work they’ve had done…or when they want to take a project elsewhere to save money. In those cases, it gives you a tremendous amount of leverage. That said…we have and do give footage to clients in certain circumstances. It all depends on the relationship with that client, payment history etc.
If you just put it in your contracts, it’s virtually a non-issue, and in the few cases where we’ve had clients object, we point out that they cannot take photos, or music and use them any way they wish or in multiple print or multi-media pieces without paying for that usage. They pretty much have no leg to stand on at that point.
I think these forums tend to make a bigger deal out of the issue than it really is in the real world.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Please don’t take any of this as criticism if it seems a tad harsh:
– Per-minute rates – TOTAL SUICIDE. I would never run a video business this way, it’s guaranteed failure. There is no way for you to put constraints or parameters on the project if the cost is purely based on TRT, so you will always butt heads with clients, and are far more likely to see meager (possibly negative) profit margins.
But what should be even more worrisome to you is that any higher-end, video-savvy client will (rightfully) interpret a per-minute rate to mean you are only going to be able to put so much work and dazzle into each “finished minute.” What if that minute calls for complex 3d animation, motion graphics, and John Mcenroe hosting? Are you still going to do all of that for $700? If your response is “we don’t offer any of those things” my response is, well, the shop down the street does.– Client tapes – When you do a work for hire GENERALLY it is assumed that the hiring individual owns the copyright to the material, including tapes. Project files (such as edits, After Effects files etc.) are different because they are considered proprietary in nature. It is solely for you to decide how you want to run your business, but this is an unnecessary wedge between you and clients. If you are worried they will take it somewhere else to edit it, then you need to evaluate your editing services and WHY a client would elect to go through all that hassle.
– Questions about rates – You wouldn’t need to wonder on any of these issues if you were charging per service, per hour from beginning to end. Now you are going to confuse your client by telling them that, while the original project was billed per finished minute, you’re now going to charge them per hour of labor. That is pretty inconsistent service and clients hate that almost more than they hate a shoddy final product.
It’s only natural, in this business, that there will be issues you find yourself butting heads with clients on. That said, some of your policy choices seem to be creating needless problems, and this is something everyone on this board has surely experienced. Over time you’ll resolve them but only by looking at the big picture and asking what is best for the client and the experience you are offering them.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
[Chris Blair] “I’ve just never understood why it’s ok from a business model standpoint for musicians, artists, photographers, software programmers etc. etc. to own the work they create, but many people in our industry don’t believe it’s ok for us to do the same thing…and equate it with professional suicide.
“It depends on the work they are creating.
I have worked with musicians to create themes for events and corporate videos. In those, the client walks away with the music.
Photographers hired to cover an event as part of a video or shooting photographs to be included in the video. All photos are handed to me and then given to the client on DVD.
At my previous job at Foxwoods Casino, we hired a team to build a custom software database for our department. Foxwoods owned the software when the job was done.
As people have stated many times on this forum, technically copyright laws will stand up to your argument most of the time and you can keep the tapes if you feel you must. I just don’t believe that it is ethical business practice to keep raw materials from a client who paid for their project.
Can they take those materials elsewhere and have someone else create something cheaper? You bet. But I’ve yet to have that impact my business in any way shape or form. Most often when this does happen, the client comes back for the next project because you do get what you pay for.
Now what I WON’T give to the client are the project files and metadata. Those are the property of our company because we were paid for our creative services. Those project files are part of our creative services. So I’ll give the client all the raw media, but without the project files, anyone else they bring alone is starting at square one to recreate something.
[Chris Blair] “or when they want to take a project elsewhere to save money. In those cases, it gives you a tremendous amount of leverage. That said…we have and do give footage to clients in certain circumstances. It all depends on the relationship with that client, payment history etc. “
As soon as we receive final payment, we give the client the Master and all raw materials.
[Chris Blair] “If you just put it in your contracts, it’s virtually a non-issue, and in the few cases where we’ve had clients object, we point out that they cannot take photos, or music and use them any way they wish or in multiple print or multi-media pieces without paying for that usage. They pretty much have no leg to stand on at that point. “
If that works for your business model, then that works for you. I don’t have the need to put anything like that in our contracts or keep any raw materials from clients and it has worked ridiculously well for my company.
When I started in a spare bedroom 8 years ago I was $80,000 in the hole due to a failed partnership I had to help pay for and the cost of my first NLE system. Today we have three HD suites and should be purchasing land for a new facility in the very near future as we have badly outgrown our current space.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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Ditto to everything Steve said, including the part about hiring someone else to come in and cut down the piece. I do this very thing quite often when something pops up and we need it done right away, I’ll bring in one of several freealancers we work with all the time.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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My boss used to use a thousand dollars per finished minute as a sort of rule of thumb in the 80’s. And more or less it was about right, for the kind of work we did. But you have to understand that things were very much simpler and more constrained then, and that that figure was more of a coincidence than a hard metric.
That figure represented shooting one to three 20-minute umatic or beta tapes in a one-day or half-day shoot, basic three-point lighting, lav mic, tripod, no dolly, 2-man crew in studio or within 20 miles of the studio, edited online A/B roll to one-inch on a linear editing system with a Chyron VP2 for graphics and pre-paid needle-drop music. (Using real needles then!). The edit would be a one-day job in most cases.
In terms of man-hours, it would have been about 15 hours, and we were doing it at a loss as part of a government public service. In that era, the room cost a quarter million dollars and up most everywhere you went, was tended by actual EE degree-holding technicians, rates were $500 an hour and up to edit, and there were few format choices and few facilities to compete. None of those factors are true today.
Go back and figuer out your true costs of doing business, calculates a break-eve rate from that, then figuer a profit margin and some money for upgrades and maintenance, divided intot he number of days a year you’re working. THAT will tell you what your day rate, and by extrapolation, hourly rate, should be, *just to survive*.
Anything below that rate, you are a charity, a tax deduction, or a hobby, not a business. Not for long, anyway.
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[Mark Suszko] “needle-drop music. (Using real needles then!)”
Mark, from one old fart to another, good one. Just a day ago I was explaining to someone where the term “laser drop” came from.
One additional thought on tape ownership (then maybe this topic will go to rest again for a couple of days). We recently had a client, for whom we’d already made a bunch of compromises, ask in advance of a shoot if they could have the camera tapes. My reply was, “Sure, but why would you want to pay an extra third for the shoot just so you can have the tapes?”
I went onto explain how in many forms of creative enterprise a “buy-out” of the material always costs a third to a half more because it’s essentially telling the creator that the business will be going elsewhere and the material can be used to do anything.
The client, I assume fearful of raising the cost of the project any further, immediately dropped the question and we moved on.
It really does all come down to what Chris and others were saying about service. That’s what they remember and that’s why they come back.
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It seems that the industry is using less and less physical media in many cases.
What’s the best practice when the project involves no physical media? -
[jamie thorne] “How to deal with a (lack of tape)”
[jamie thorne] “It seems that the industry is using less and less physical media”
This should probably be a new thread. Lack of tape is not a lack of physical media at all.
There’s XDCAM disc and SDHC and other flash cards which are now in a similar price range. One can also back up to various optical discs (DVD, DVD-DL, Blu-ray). Hard drives are very much physical too. All of these can be handed to a client. In fact it generally is easier now that one has to worry less about compatible decks in some of the above cases.In fact, at least somewhat related to part of the above discussion, non tape based formats are usually much faster to copy so if one chooses to give the client a “master” you can easily and quickly make a backup “clone” so you still have a complete set of the “footage” (maybe bitage is a better term these days).
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Walter,
That’s why these forums are so great. It gives members so many differing points of view about these issues. And they can see there isn’t a certain way to do things nor is there one way to be successful.
5 years ago I would’ve agreed with you 100%. But after a couple of ugly client experiences, I’ve done a one eighty on this issue.
Neither experience was caused by anything we did improper, in fact both clients LOVED our work. But we’ve found there are a LOT of unscrupulous people out there who if they have the opportunity, will take advantage of small firms like ours (7 employees). Sadly in our experience it was two very large companies that tried to screw us out of payments AND get their hands on hundreds of tapes so they could go do the same thing to someone else. Our only line of defense was that footage. One company relented, paid us, and still uses us today (under different ownership but with the same core marketing staff)
The other company is mired in litigation from dozens of companies (including us) they did the same thing to. They would contract for services under the guise of their name and size, demand credit, then basically not pay for anything. And they’re solely owned by a prominent mega millionaire that owned an NBA sports franchise for 14 years! Think Mark Cuban rich.
Believe me, if you ever have a company do to you what these companies did to us, I bet you’d at the very least rethink your views on this issue. Both instances nearly put us out of business.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
[Craig Seeman] “bitage”
“Bitage”! Now there we go. I am hereby dropping the term footage when referring to non tape content.
What I’d really like to is for people to stop saying that they are “filming” when the only film they know about is the film that covers them after not bathing for a few days.
Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
2-Sony EX-1 HD .
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