How to set up effective ‘terms of service’

 betteDo you have terms of service that help you manage client work?

One of the topics that came up at an Angel Investor and Entrepreneur breakfast was terms of service.

One of the people I was speaking to is in the website and marketing design and development space, and the challenge that they’ve got is clients who don’t give them material they’ve asked for, like images or written content.

The problem is they have no service contract that says “if you don’t give us material in 7 days, then we can continue as if there’s no changes or we can go on and get the work done“.

The challenge for the designer is that they have a workflow they’re trying to work with and a work stream and they have staff allocated to certain projects and if you can’t move forward in a project, it messes up the whole business. You end up with staff who have nothing to do and other staff who are overwhelmed because clients simply don’t respond with the required information.

One of the things you can use terms of service for is to manage the relationship with your clients and to get them to give you information that you need from them in order for you to complete the work you need to get the job done.

You might like to do business with a handshake, but written contracts aren’t a bad thing. The reason you put them in writing is to better manage expectations and manage relationships.