Hey! This is The Daily Overpass. My name is Eric, and I make Apps. Now today I want
to talk about: " If You're Going to be a Business Owner, You Have to Get Used to
Saying NO."
Okay, so let me start by saying I hope you guys can hear me okay, there's some
construction equipment that just started a minute ago, and it always starts as
soon as I start the video. So I hope you guys can hear me okay. So one of the
things I had to get used to when working with clients, and running my own company
was, I had to get used to the idea of saying no, right. This is something I
still struggle with now. I was just working on a piece of work, that I should
not have been working on, because the client persuaded me to work on it.
Because I really wanted to keep the client. I didn't want to say no to them.
It was a very inconvenient to me. I wasn't being paid for it, but I just had
to get it done. And like a lot of times, I will succumb when I shouldn't, I can beat
myself up over it. But, when I was a software developer working for other
people, I almost never had to say no. Like, a client will come up to me, or a user
will come up to me, say Eric could we add this? And I'd be like yeah, I suppose we
can add that, yeah we could do that, and then my manager would find out, or
the owner of the company I was working for would find out. And they would come
down, and say no, we're not doing that. We don't have the scope for it. We don't
have the budget, and it was almost nice, because I never had to be bad cop. I
could always just be good cop, and I always had an accompanying bad cop. Now
when you're running things on your own, or when you're like when you don't have
a bad cop, you have to be the bad cop and the good cop. And sometimes, I find that
very difficult to do, and I struggle with it all the time, right. You have this,
have this bi-polarism when you're when you're working with clients. Where you
you spend time bringing on the client, before the project starts, before any
prices have been laid down, before you've agreed to the scope. At that point,
everything is a yes. Yeah we could do that. Yeah we could do that. Yeah that
would be possible. Yes. But once the price has been laid down. Once you know, if
you're working for fixed price stuff, once that's happened, you have to get
used to saying no. Or, saying yes to only small things. Or, things that will not add
a lot of time to the project. Or, you have to say yes, but it's gonna cost this
amount. And even if it's going to add to the scope, and it's gonna make a little
bit more money from it, sometimes it is very disruptive to the developers. One of the
companies I was working for, I was just a developer, so I was a developer,
and I didn't have to work out the scope or anything. Everything was given to me,
but the owner of the company would we say yes to things, right. And it was
infuriating to me as a developer, because the scope was always changing. So you
think that you're nearly finished with the project. I mean, I was being paid
regardless, right. I didn't have to worry about losing money on this or anything,
because I'm going to work, I'm getting paid. It shouldn't have mattered, but it
did. Because there's still that inner part of you that wants to complete
something. If you keep adding something to the project, then it's almost like
everything keeps moving. This is why frameworks like scrum, are really good.
Because it takes the developers out of that: "Hey could we do this? Can we do
this?" You know it's switching back and forth, and just add another
sprint on to it, add another sprint, we never break a sprint.
Developers continue what they're working on, and then later on, we'll tell them
about that, right. But I just wanted to bring this up, because this is something
that I really struggle with. Just saying no to clients. Everything is yes.
You work so hard to acquire them, and then you get to the point where you have
to say: " Yeah, that's gonna be really difficult. No we can't do that, that's
gonna be, you know, too disruptive to the developers. Because you have to serve the
clients, and you have to serve the developers, to make sure everybody's
happy. Because if the develop, I mean the
developers are working for you, you're paying the developers, but, if they stop
believing in the project, then they're not going to do as well as they should.
And if they feel like things are just all over the place, and they
can't even structure it well, then they're just going to give up on it
internally too. So it's always protecting the project at all costs. And sometimes
you have to protect the project from the client, and you have to do that by saying
no. So let me know what you guys think. Do you struggle with it too? Anyway that's
it for today. I'll talk to you guys again tomorrow.