Tirekickers & Co. Ltd.
Yes, we still get requests from people that want us to work for free or deliver comps and sketches “just to see”. And we did some work for tire kickers in the past and once got really screwed by a couple of con-men. So actually we do have some advice for young creative companies and students that work in our field.
Tire-kickers
Tire-kickers? Tire-kickers are those people that go check out cars whenever they can. They act as if they want to buy the car and ask for special deductions and conditions and they take 20 test-drives just to “change their mind” in the end. The true reason why they don’t buy is: They don’t have the dough.
Tire-kickers and Creatives
Wherever there is something to buy there are tire-kickers. Now as a creative guy you must have encountered lots of tire-kickers. Tire-kickers usually ask for tons of free work, comps and estimates on and on, but no real project ever evolves out of that work. The problem when dealing with tire-kickers is that the tire-kicker often acts as if he were a decision maker. He promises you many follow up contracts and tons of money. But nothing ever happens, often “because things have changed”. The true reason is: He is not a decision-maker.
Tire-kickers and Con-men
Tire-kickers are not to be confused with con-men. Tire-kickers are not evil. They’re just wasting your time. A full on con-man that asks for free work and then run with it to produce your ideas with a cheaper agency. Yet the line between tire-kickers and con-men is not always clear.
How to deal with Tire-kickers
If we only knew! Of course you should always work only if you have a contract, but with new clients you sometimes have to go a step further. And from a step further to the next step ahead it’s only a small step as you know. And then the more steps you have taken the more you have invested into a tire-kicker and the more difficult it is to draw back. In other words: If you have a talented tire-kicker you’re in a pretty awkward situation. Because you don’t want the decision-maker to feel like a tire-kicker. One thing you should still do: Ask who is making the decision on the project. Decision-maker will directly tell you that it’s them. Tire-kickers have trouble about being clear on this point. (Tire-kickers that say they make the decision while they don’t are con-man.)
Signs of Tire-kicking
- Did you get a formal, signed RFP (request for proposal), before getting into it, or is all you have an email? Alarm Beige.
- Can the guy that asks for work make the decision to buy the work he is asking you to do? If he can’t: Tire-kicker Alarm Yellow.
- Have you dealt with the same guy before on a very promising project that didn’t go through, “because the boss doesn’t understand”?: Tire-kicker Alarm Dark Yellow.
- Have you met the person that makes the decision? If you haven’t: Tire-kicker Alarm Orange.
- Have you had plenty of meetings and delivered loads of estimates and comps and the project is still only “soon going to happen” but you still have no contract? Tire-kicker DefCon1.
Why do tire-kickers kick tires?
- Lack of attention: They’re unimportant and finally want to feel important too
- Career desperation: They think that when they produce a lot of new projects their boss will promote them
- They’re bored: Especially when you work in a creative field you have to pay attention for those guys that just like to hang out with “cool designers”, that now the “cool stuff”, a hard to deal with crowd that usually acts snobbish and arrogant to the outside, especially with unfashionable people in cheap suits.
- They just love it: Tire-kicking is a sort of sport that some dudes get into.
What to do with an identified tire-kicker
Don’t answer emails. Don’t pick up the phone. Don’t write new estimates. Just forget about it.
Art Student Vampires
We discovered the following post of a post on Motionographer. Note: iA did NOT write the following text and neither did Motionographer. The following text was posted on Craigslist as an answer on one of those “seeking artist” ads and was quickly removed.
Every day, there are more and more Craigslist posts seeking “artists” for everything from auto graphics to comic books to corporate logo designs. More people are finding themselves in need of some form of illustrative service. But what they’re NOT doing, unfortunately, is realizing how rare someone with these particular talents can be. To those who are “seeking artists”, let me ask you; How many people do you know, personally, with the talent and skill to perform the services you need? A dozen? Five? One? None? More than likely, you don’t know any. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be posting on craigslist to find them.And this is not really a surprise
In this country, there are almost twice as many neurosurgeons as there are professional illustrators. There are eleven times as many certified mechanics. There are SEVENTY times as many people in the IT field.Graphic artists, illustrators, painters, etc., are skilled tradesmen. As such, to consider them as, or deal with them as, anything less than professionals fully deserving of your respect is both insulting and a bad reflection on you as a sane, reasonable person. In short, it makes you look like a twit.
- So, given that they are less rare, and therefore less in demand, would it make sense to ask your mechanic to work on your car for free? Would you look him in the eye, with a straight face, and tell him that his compensation would be the ability to have his work shown to others as you drive down the street?
- Would you offer a neurosurgeon the “opportunity” to add your name to his resume as payment for removing that pesky tumor? (Maybe you could offer him “a few bucks” for “materials”. What a deal!)
- Would you be able to seriously even CONSIDER offering your web hosting service the chance to have people see their work, by viewing your website, as their payment for hosting you?
- If you answered “yes” to ANY of the above, you’re obviously insane. If you answered “no”, then kudos to you for living in the real world.
- But then tell me – why would you think it is okay to live out the same, delusional, ridiculous fantasy when seeking someone whose abilities are even less in supply than these folks?
Read the full post on Motionographer
Ruthless Con-men
They let you work and then just don’t pay. Yes, even if you have a contract. Never work without contract but don’t put too much trust in the contract. Because a couple of days before you finish the work, a dodgy client might stop the project and never pay any bills – no matter what the contract says. Then they hire an intern programer to redo your work. Really. This happened to us last year.
According to my more experienced friend J. this is a known practice among mid sized companies here in Japan. The rationale is: Suing them will lead to an expensive one year case – that even though they know that you will win – they hope you will back off, especially if you are a small company, as you won’t get the full refund and you will have to invest money for the trial. Believe me. There are companies that are that ruthless.
It is hard to recuperate from such experiences. As a result you do not only not get the money, your portfolio has holes, the climate is suffering, you get paranoid and your cash flow is done. Due to the resulting cash flow shortage, iA had to fire one very talented freshly hired employee - which is really a terrible loss, given how difficult it is to find good staff. Now, after six months, that we have financially recuperated and rehired for the position we can finally write about it without swearing or chain smoking.
Remedy: Always ask for prepayment. Get written sign-offs at every project stage. You should google your client before you sign anything. If we googled this particular client we would not have engaged in business with them. Of course we will take them to court this year and then you will hear more details about this horrendous story.
Freebies for insolvent clients
Freebies are totally your fault. Yes it’s nice to give the client a little extra for his money, and make them especially happy. But only if your budget allows extra time effort. If you work outside your budget you’re making a mistake. Unless it is a really good long time client, you are not supposed to give out freebies. If you do a good job, there is no need for freebies. Remember: the extra time you invest in a project is not just a present, it is taking away from further acquisitions. So you do not just not get paid for that, you waste time for and money from upcoming projects. Freebies are a mistake as they make the client think that you were overpriced from the start, thus it devaluates your actual work. Freebies are a big mistake with a new client, as he will expect freebies from now on.
There are many other ways to waste time and talents, and if you thing we left out some major ones, please tell us.
Valuable words to an art-student trying to run a one-man web biz! Cheers.
Everyone involved in the creative industry should post at least one article on their blog / website that reads in a similar way to this one.
I’ve done it. It’s important.
hi there. thanks for the insight and experience from the front lines. hope u guys will be doing well for the trial.
anyways, about con men, can’t you just demand a xx% upfront before starting any sort of work.
and for tire kickers, i think a good idea would be to ask them to write an elaborate report about their brand, their product and service. the sort of report that would take them a significant amount of time and personal investment. Tire kickers would shy away and what you are left with are serious professionals who also think you are taking them seriously.
For con men who cancel the project, you can put a stipulation in the contract that if the project is canceled they still have to pay you XX%. Maybe even ask for half the money after the project is half done or something.
Tyler,
Project cancellation clause is a given. We had that all in there. But the hard core con-men just ignore contracts.
We had sign-offs as well, but somehow they managed to get around. After the weekly presentations they took the sign-off sheets with them promising to send them back. Then they’d call us and tell us that “it’s all fine, sign off is granted”. But we’d never get the actual paper.
So after that happened a couple of times we asked for the paper to be signed right away. Now check this out: I remember having that sign off sheet on the table, getting it signed just after the meeting. Then I have a chat with one of these guys and when turn around the paper is gone. I thought that I must have put it in my bag or something. Wrong. They took it back. So that means hey planned it all from the start.
We now ask for 50% upfront, which, from what I hear, is actually common practice for bigger companies.
Contracts are holy where I come from, so apart from being extremely angry, I was extremely shocked by the kind of behavior. It seemed unthinkable.
Yet it happens more often than you think - at least in Japan: Japanese usually avoid court and try to find an agreement on the table. But this system only works if you deal with someone that has good will. If you deal with a con-man, you are screwed, as the court often tries to find that 50/50-agreement that you couldn’t find on the table. So even though in reality you are 100% right, in practice you might end up getting paid 50% of the work you delivered, because the judge assumes that the mistake must be on both sides.
If you are a really scruple-less guy, you can get a lot of work for half the price plus court costs.
Japan is generally a very secure and polite place, but because in usually people have high ethical standards (you could leave your wallet on the bar when you need to go to the toilet without worrying), there are also social engineers that cold-bloodedly use that high ethical standard to their advantage. So you actually live shoulder to shoulder with the nicest people and the harshest people.
Asking how they could just ignore the contract we have that particular company didn’t have any shame telling us to our face they “feel no obligation whatsoever to pay you any money for whatever service you delivered”. They said so after pushing us for 2 months, producing 4 bilingual websites with a wonderful CMS backbone that allowed them to centrally manage all of those websites. They said so with a lawyer sitting at the table.
The phony reason was that we used an old programming language and a CMS that was not suitable for them. This judgement and statement came from some obnoxious 60 year old housewife.
The programming environment was Ruby on Rails. Top notch. The CMS Radiant that we configured for their purpose (we did some pretty sweet stuff with it, so sweet that our programmer was asked to join the Radiant development team). Very simple, easy to use. Before we came on board they have not even heard about CMSs. The CMS-configuration was actually a freebie that we offered them to make them happy.
But like I said, this was all just a pretext and it seems like it was a plot from the start. So always ask for prepayment. And always google your client. And no freebies.
In retrospect I am actually quite happy that they didn’t get our product, because a company that cheats and tricks us cheats that scruple-lessly must be involved in a scruple-less business.
And our products would have helped them a great deal expanding their shady business. The rip-off of our work is not really working. They obviously hired a student to copy our work. Con-men and Vampires can change clothes.
Unfortunately the corporate crooks around here are all too often foreigners. So companies like these, being foreign owned and scruple-less, give us all a bad name.
Being Swiss I come from a culture with extremely high professional ethics. Yet I am often confronted with the initial Japanese suspicion just because I am a foreign business man - and because companies like these exist.
Usually people keep these things quite, because it makes you look bad when something like that happens to you. But after all the insults and the pressure that were aimed at letting us loose our nerves (I left that part out) and the financial hit iA took, I finally needed to get this off my chest. I believe that it has some valuable information for young entrepreneurs (especially if they start in Japan).
For professional reasons I avoided stating the name of that company. Once the court case starts you will learn who it is.
+++++++++ Update: I actually just googled them and again: If I only googled them before! It is amazing what one can find out with a simple click on a search button.
This is so true… I have come across several conmen in my 3 years as an Entrpreneur.. oddly enough in the graphics design space… we even had a “tire kicker” wanting to acquire us :-)
Another variation is people who say they have business and want an “up-front” payment… we’ve been aproached by those types as well…
Vijay,
You mean they want you to do work for them, but then YOU have to pay them first? That doesn’t make any sense.
Oliver, it certainly doesn’t but for a while there was this going around here (in India).
Typically these are brokers who say they have a customer waiting who has business but wan’t their “cut” up-front… of course the sensible business guy would say “I’ll pay you AFTER I get paid”and they’d disappear.. but yes a lot of people desparate for business got conned by these types.. so much so that the local affiliate of CNBC even carried out a sting operation on one of these brokers.
Oliver..heres a blog entry I wrote on my other blog along similar lines last November…
http://startupreneur.wordpress.com/2006/11/16/of-business-and-businessmen/
Thanks for the explanation. I’m still studying design so I’m not that familiar with the business side of it.
Don’t hold any punches! Great blog entry. Can’t wait to read more in the future.
Your humble fan, D
The statistics you stated, where are they from? I’m just curious. That’s in Japan right?
I need statistics like that to help convince my dad to let me shift into Fine Arts :D
What statistics?
Recently we had the same experience. Since we are a start-up which works on innovative ideas to help customer solve problems, customer said he will pay after the prototype. We delivered the prototype free of cost.He signed a contract.
we developed a fantastic CRM solution which was driven by the customer. We gave more than the customer asked for. The point of contact from the customer side left the job due to some political issues within that company.
But last leg into the development phase customer got another independent consultant as he didnt want to pay the rest of the money which is about 50% payment due. Very difficult for start ups like us. But we will fight it out in the court. Even though we had the Payment terms defined (50% upfront) customer never followed the schedule.As we wanted to do ethical business, we never hampered the customer’s delivery schedule. So much for Honesty.. Learning to run the business the hard way :)