Why I Won’t Work Upfront Again

What’s up? I’ve been a bit busy with summer school work (as usual), but also a brand new project that I’ve recently decided to try out. Because it is still in its development stages, I won’t give out any details on it yet; however, in the coming weeks, when I see it start making some profit, I definitely will. It is a niche I have yet to try out, but it is a fun little niche that doesn’t take too long to manage, and… anyways, we’ll see.

However, today I just wanted to bring up this thing about working upfront. One of my biggest sources of income is actually consulting. I’ve been in the web industry for a long time and while I do make money blogging, marketing, designing, and the sorts, aside from marketing, consulting is probably the biggest source of income for me.

How and why? The secret is that I go and find people to help. Usually it isn’t so hard, and depending on the difficulty of the subject, I charge people from free to whatever they wish to pay me. Recently, I met a person looking to start-up their “money making life” on the web and promised a low-XXX fee for consultation, which would include everything from the moment you login to GoDaddy to coding support. Now in regards to the payment, I had three options that I usually propose:

• Pay After Work
• 50% Upfront Payment
• 100% Upfront Payment

As my client was a young, yet aspiring person, and he was still worried about all the Internet scams that go around, I proposed to him a pay after work option.

So I began the week about telling him on how to setup a domain, get a host, WordPress, and SEO and advertising tips to get his blog/site known to both search engines like Google, and normal visiting people. I ended off the week with telling him about coding the backends of WordPress and giving him an in-depth step-by-step tutorial on monetizing the blog with multiple companies.

At the end of the week, I have not only worked quite a decent amount of hours just for this client, but also for lost a lot of hours with the client now showing up on time. In addition, what happens at the end? Well, the title is hinting at you.

After being notified that he is gathering the funds, he then goes off to claim the useless-ness of my consultation. Okay, I’m alright with the last part as I really have nothing to say if I didn’t teach him anything, although our sessions and his plethora of questions seem to question his assertion. Then, all communication with him stops. I give up on trying to receive my due payment and send him a clear message that I have given up and will leave the payment up to him and his morales in business.

At the end of the day, I lose out money wise, but I feel that I gain morale wise. People, if you’re looking to do business, stick to your words. While money is important, there are a lot more things important than money; I personally feel social relationships tops green by far as I know I have received millions of dollars of worth information thanks to the people I have developed a business relationship with.

Anyways, rant for today, finished.

Were you ever in such a situation? Do you know ways to prevent such events? I’m sure my readers are interested and so am I, so please feel free to comment.