Ed Gandia breaks down how to structure a roadmapping engagement for complex client projects. He gives a framework for scoping and pricing the work upfront, so you know what you're actually selling before you commit to the full project.
Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.
Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love or better Client this episode is a little different and much shorter than usual rather than my typical 45 minute format. Today I'm sharing a quick tip with you and this is part of the regular audio insights that I publish for my private coaching clients. I just thought you'd find it helpful. So here we go. I hope you enjoy it. Sometimes you run into a situation where the client or prospect is not really sure what they need, or they know what they need, but they're not really sure what to include in their scope or how to go about solving the problem. This often happens in complex projects such as white papers, website overhauls, book projects, book co writing projects, maybe a blog relaunch, launching a new social media effort, overhauling a content marketing strategy, those sorts of things. But it also happens when you're working with a client that's not very sophisticated in terms of marketing or content marketing, or maybe the specific area that they're looking for help with. They might be a very good client in every other way, but they're more dependent on you to help them figure out the full extent of the problem and the right solution for the job. The stressful part of these situations is that if you're only used to working with clients that have everything scoped out and just need you to do the execution of their idea. So in other words, the writing. In many cases you're not going to be sure how to scope or price the opportunity. And typically what happens at this point is that writers will just resort to an hourly fee arrangement in order to limit their risk. They'll just say, well, you know, let's just do it this way, it's easy, easy. And then you could just kind of pay as you go. That's a big, big mistake. A much better solution is to break up the project into two phases, the planning phase and the execution phase. That first phase is often referred to as a road mapping engagement. And this is a standalone engagement, a preliminary offering, if you will, where you get paid for doing the discovery, the research, the planning and scoping out. It's completely separate from the main project the client is coming to you for, and it's something most of us automatically include in many Projects. When you think about it, you know, it's, it's like we get hired for this and then automatically you just realize, well, wait a minute, some stuff is missing, we need to dig a little deeper. And then you end up including this as part of the execution work when this is really kind of its own thing. So with roadmaping engagement, the difference is now you're kind of decoupling that element from it and just charging for it separately. I've talked about this concept many times before and this time what I wanted to do is just give you a very basic structure of what you might want to include in your roadmapping engagement. Every road mapping opportunity is going to be different depending on the scope of the challenge you're scoping out, depending on what needs to be done. But what I'm going to share with you here is a very basic skeleton to use as a guide, the bones, if you will. And from here you can use a skeleton or this framework to, to then figure out which components of this will apply to your situation. So I want you to think about it as having two components. There's the audit phase and the recommendations phase. Okay. They're kind of self explanatory, but let's go through the audit phase first. The audit phase you want to be able to present, hey, here is your situation, Mrs. Klein, as I see it. And then here are the challenges you're facing in this situation. Here's the impact of these challenges, right? So let's talk about where this impacts the business, where this impacts this, that or the other. And then optionally you can provide some proof to support your assertions. So that's the audit phase, okay, and again, you can imagine I'm here talking about the presentation of that, but you can automatically extrapolate what I'm saying and figure out, okay, well that means that I'm going to have to dig into this area, I'm going to have to look into this, I'm going to have to look into that. But when you're presenting those are the elements that you want to consider presenting, which means those are the items you're going to want to dive into. The recommendation phase has a few more components. That's going to be the meat of it. Right? So you've, the audit phase has been your research, your thinking, strategizing and processing and then recommendations is okay, so here's what I'm recommending. First, here's what you need. And this should be big picture. You should start big picture and then get more granular. As you go. This is why you need it. Okay, so that's the second thing. This is how I recommend you do this. So the recommended strategy or approach, then from there, these are the deliverables or the assets you're going to need to create in order to execute this. In order to solve this problem. Here are the people and the resources that are going to be required to make this happen. Here is the proposed timeline, just to kind of give you an idea of what it's going to take. And by the way, I can help you with this. Here's my proposal or quote for helping you with this, for doing this work, for creating these assets or whatever it might be. Now, again, different types of roadmapping engagements will require different components. Sometimes you may not need each one of these. But my hope is that this skeleton or this framework will at least give you a starting place for putting together the right structure for each road mapping opportunity you encounter.
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