Ben Maden
A prospective client calls us wanting work – Yay! They get into complaining about their existing web developer. They’re a good dev, we know them. Where did it go wrong? Is the client crazy? This is a classic problem that happens the world over to web designers/developers. It causes us (and the clients) pain and stress.
Ben will talk about this common problem and address some questions such as:
- How can we get it right?
- Why do clients cause us pain?
- How bad can this pain get? (Including a confession or two from Ben).
- How can we take control of our lives?
Ben can teach you how to create a plan and compare our industries business model agains other professional services that handle client service relationships, instructions, variations and billing such as builders, lawyers, accountants and plumbers. There’s a lot we can learn from this!
At the end of Ben’s presentation you’ll leave with the following take aways:
- An action plan to solve your issues.
- You’ll make sure you’re never the designer or developer that clients whine about!
- Make sure you have your docs and contracts in order.
- You’ll learn how to reach out for help from your peers!
Ben Maden founded Matter Solutions in April 2000 and remains the lead web consultant today. While Matter Solutions originated in London, UK, the company took on Australian clients when Ben emigrated to Brisbane in November 2006.
Ben does lots of different things… roughly in order of frequency the tasks he performs include…
- Working with clients and prospective clients to plan projects.
- Communicating plans with team members and project managing progress.
- Coaching team members.
- Coding – Headphones on and coding funky (mostly back-end) stuff.
- SysAdmin – Keeping the infrastructure humming along.
- Blogging – Writing about stuff that happens and how to do things.
You can follow Ben on Twitter.