I met a couple a few days ago and they were requesting to renovation their new condo apartment, we had a very good chat and I thought we hit it off really well, but I was not interested in the project in the slightest because it is located all the way in Punggol and I have told myself I will never touch a Punggol project again.
I told the clients I will prepare a quotation and send it to them 3 days later, but I really didn't want to so I just left it alone and did not bother with it, that and also because I was pretty busy with my current on-going projects so I did not have time to really sit down and calculate all the cost for them.
So the third day comes and it was around evening when the wife messaged me asking if I had already send the quotation her way, I didn't even prepare one so I told her I will send it to her the next day as I had been pretty busy, which was the truth, so she was agreeable to it and I got down to preparing the quote the very next day and send it her way, which probably only took me 20 minutes to prepare. It's not about the quotation taking a long time to do, it's about getting in the mood to actually do the math for it.
She responded back very quickly, informing me that she had gotten the quote, asking me if I could send her some designs because she wanted to know what I was proposing, I never ever send out my proposals to non-paying clients, especially not to clients I have only met once because it's my design proposal, I am not about to let you take my proposal and pass it off to someone else to do. I do get this request a lot and it is just really frustrating to have to constantly repeat myself to different people.
I told her I won't be giving her a design proposal but I can prepare one for her to see in person if she was interested, then I told her I could prepare a 3D draft and she was agreeable to it, soon after that, she starts to ask me about the quote and goes....
"I notice that the cabinets are quite expensive."
.... and I will admit, I did charge her a little higher than normal because her project is located all the way in Punggol, if I am not earning a decent amount of profit from it to cover the inconvenience of me having to travel all the way there on an almost daily basis once the renovation starts, there is no way I am going to be taking this project, but the particular item that she pointed out was not something that I had charged an exuberant amount of money for. I tried to explain to her why it was priced the way it was, wrote out this entire chunk of text, send it her way and she just stops responding after that.
Now I am not sure if she still wants to meet up or not and this is what is really irritating about being placed in a situation like this by the customers.
I propose to prepare a proposal for us to run through in person.
You express your interest in such an arrangement
I take that interest as confirmation to prepare said proposal
You bring up an issue with the price and suddenly stop responding
I take that unresponsiveness as a lost in interest
So does this lost in interest overwrite the confirmation to meet again to run through the design proposal?
I will still do the SketchUp because I like doing SketchUp, it keeps me distracted from my ongoing projects and also gives me something to do at the office, if she and her husband decides to confirm the appointment with me later in the week to meet up then great, if not, then I will just add her to the list of time-wasting clients I have met.
Speaking of time wasting client, I also had another one a few weeks back, writing in to request for a quotation, sharing with me that they are on a budget and needed to stick to that budget, but then requesting a plethora of works that were clearly out of their budget. Even after advising them that it was impossible, they still insisted to keep to their budget and requested a quotation, asking me to list out different options for them,
It is extremely frustrating when a client who cannot afford the my services request for me to list out options for them in the quotation because that means more calculations for me to do, more time for me to have to put into preparing their quotation, all for what? So that once they see the quote, they will stop replying, because that is exactly what this time waster did.
You don't give us your unrealistic requirements and expect us to work your requirements around your unrealistic budget, you either do less to stick to the budget, or you pay more to stick to the requirements, you don't pay less and expect to do more, it makes no fucking sense because the last time I check in the mirror, all I saw was a face full of zits, not a pink fucking elephant who goes by the name of Sharity.
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