Need Help Client requesting files

[ikarasu]

Most of our business is with the city, or huge corporations. Lots of our work is contract work for xx years... We don't win every single tenure, or every single term. Sometimes the customer will ask us to send over previous artwork... Whether it's to replace a panel on a vehicle wrap, or to produce a banner or.sign we've already done.

We always hand it over with a smile. Next year we have a chance of getting the contract again.. but if we refuse, odds are they're gone for good.

We don't have the cheapest prices. But we try to have the best customer support. And many, many times clients come back to us after trying a new vendor out, or accept our bid even though we're 10-20% higher than the next guy because they know our work and services.

What are we talking here... A couple hundred bucks to sell a few design files? If money is so tight you need a few hundred at the risk of alienating a customer.... You may be in the wrong business.

That doesn't mean you need to do design work for free. If Joe schmoe walks in and asks for a sign... Then asks for the file and doesn't even buy a sign, tell him to pound sand. But if it's a regular customer. Or even a customer who paid for a sign... Just give it up. You lose nothing and have the potential to gain everything.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

So, don't ask me in two years for this stuff, unless you wanna pay for them as you go.

What are we talking here... A couple hundred bucks to sell a few design files?

This is where things are different for me.

Bare in mind, all of this is known to the customer from the get go (why I've always stressed that everything be known up front, so all parties know where they stand).

I don't sell the files, offer to sell the files after the contract has been done.

If they don't want to stipulate from the beginning that the files go to them, that's fine, but they aren't going to be offered for sale at a later date. That's known up front, they agreed to it upfront before any work, any money has changed hands. If they don't remember that or want to see what they can get after bellyaching over it, that's another thing.

The main reason for that is that there are different SKUs for how the pricing on the files are handled (and that's explained beforehand as well).

But if it's a regular customer. Or even a customer who paid for a sign... Just give it up. You lose nothing and have the potential to gain everything.

Just my experience, the only ones that have every asked for the files are ones that don't qualify as a regular customer by any stretch, nor ones that I would even hold my breath for them coming back (which of course, they surely won't after that). I don't do government or school work as far as in final product goes, typically I'm only tasked with digitizing only (and those files do go out without question) and what my customers do with those files for their end customers (school, government) is their call as those are their files at that point.

I always weigh a C/B over everything. You don't get to have almost 25 yrs (will be this coming summer and I started when I was really young working for my mom) and not constantly evaluate ones decisions to see if they should be kept or go on to something else. And I've seen a lot of changes in customers attitudes over that small amount of time.

The amount of people that have asked for files (and not have been back) amount to around a very negligible lose in revenue (I keep copious notes, I'm wildly risk adverse, which is ironic coming from a business owner). So while there maybe a potential of getting the customer back by going against my policy, does that potential benefit outweigh the cost of having such a policy (that is known upfront)? That will need to be evaluated by each individual person/business. It's not going to be the same for everyone.

 

[DerbyCitySignGuy]

Most of our business is with the city, or huge corporations. Lots of our work is contract work for xx years... We don't win every single tenure, or every single term. Sometimes the customer will ask us to send over previous artwork... Whether it's to replace a panel on a vehicle wrap, or to produce a banner or.sign we've already done.

We always hand it over with a smile. Next year we have a chance of getting the contract again.. but if we refuse, odds are they're gone for good.

We don't have the cheapest prices. But we try to have the best customer support. And many, many times clients come back to us after trying a new vendor out, or accept our bid even though we're 10-20% higher than the next guy because they know our work and services.

What are we talking here... A couple hundred bucks to sell a few design files? If money is so tight you need a few hundred at the risk of alienating a customer.... You may be in the wrong business.

That doesn't mean you need to do design work for free. If Joe schmoe walks in and asks for a sign... Then asks for the file and doesn't even buy a sign, tell him to pound sand. But if it's a regular customer. Or even a customer who paid for a sign... Just give it up. You lose nothing and have the potential to gain everything.

What? This is like saying Coca Cola should hand over their recipe because someone might not buy soda from them again.

You can have good customer support without giving away files. You are devaluing your labor and your product by giving ANYTHING away for free. This is a bad business practice. If you explain to your customer that you don't work for free and they get huffy about it, good riddance to that customer.

Outside of replacing defective product (for whatever reason), you should never give anything away. That's not the way capitalism works and we live and function in a world based on capitalism, for better or worse.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

What? This is like saying Coca Cola should hand over their recipe because someone might not buy soda from them again.

Huh?

 

[DerbyCitySignGuy]

Huh?

Do you work for free? If you give away your production files without accounting for the cost, you're working for free.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

Can you explain your coca cola reference and how it applies?

 

[DerbyCitySignGuy]

Can you explain your coca cola reference and how it applies?

Coca Cola makes soda. You make signs. Your production files are basically your recipe. Does Coca Cola give away their recipe? No. Why would you give your recipe away to appease someone?

 

[Johnny Best]

Coke made a recipe, bottle their product and sell it to customers. No customer gave them files for the recipe and Coke did not produce any product for them.
Sorry, not a good analogy. Does not apply to this particular story.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

Coca Cola makes soda. You make signs. Your production files are basically your recipe. Does Coca Cola give away their recipe? No. Why would you give your recipe away to appease someone?

Yea, that's where I'm confused about your analogy.... That make no sense.

 

[MI Bearcat]

We charge for our design and don't create layouts without a customer approving the estimate. If they paid for the layout, I would send them files. If you created a "free" layout that you supplied with an estimate and didn't get the job, then of course your not giving that away. Makes no sense. We don't design for free so we would never be giving anything away for free.

 

[Gino]

C'mon derby.... what's the matter, slow day at work ??

You can look on any bottle or can of Coke and it has in plain writing what the entire recipe is, what the calorie count is and what all the sugars, sodium and so on counts are in each and every can. They aren't hiding a thing from the very start, but you want us to believe, if we do a layout for a sign, that there is some magical equation going on ?? Did you ever read Mike Stevens book(s) ?? Any of them ?? All layouts, designs, compositions all have the same elements within a good composition. Bad ones..... nobody cares about. Therefore, if we all basically follow the same fundamentals, there's nothing different, other than color combinations fonts and mediums.

So, if Mike Stevens and many others who have written good books on the subject can put it out there for the whole world to see, just like Coca-Cola does...... I guess we are the same, but not at all for the reason you made up.

Like I said earlier and what Coca-Cola and just about any other product on the market does...... they put it ALL out there up front, so the consumer can make an educated decision. Why waste time arguing with someone you don't wanna hand over files for a few bucks ?? That's ridiculous. Tell 'em up front and that's the end of the story.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Like I said earlier and what Coca-Cola and just about any other product on the market does...... they put it ALL out there up front, so the consumer can make an educated decision.

Only what they are legally obligated to put out there . Or if they can get acts repealed they will (COOL has been after all, at least for some products).

I don't think consumers are able to make quite the educated decision that you would like to think.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

When I buy a 12-pack of coke, I am not paying coca-cola for their time to come up with the recipe. When someone buys a sign, they are paying for my time to produce the design...so I'm confused about the analogy.

 

[DerbyCitySignGuy]

Well, I guess the American educational system has failed again. It's a pretty basic analogy. The fact that a company produces a product does not entitle the consumer to detailed knowledge of the process. Y'all are always on here hooting and hollering about how you don't want to share trade secrets WITH OTHER SIGN MAKERS, but you're more than willing to hand over your production files to any customer who requests them?

Anyway, I'm done with this asinine, contradictory conversation. Carry on, angry old guys.

 

[Gino]

Well, I guess the American educational system has failed again. It's a pretty basic analogy. The fact that a company produces a product does not entitle the consumer to detailed knowledge of the process. Y'all are always on here hooting and hollering about how you don't want to share trade secrets WITH OTHER SIGN MAKERS, but you're more than willing to hand over your production files to any customer who requests them?

Anyway, I'm done with this asinine, contradictory conversation. Carry on, angry old guys.

Hmmmm............ seems you are getting braver and braver by the day, calling people names. You really must be a pent-up person. Perhaps, looking for a more suiting job would make you feel better, instead of all this hostility you are always displaying.

The system only failed with the likes of you and your kind. No where my young and quite naive working person did I say, they don't hafta pay...... just let them know the facts up front. Something you seem to want to be hiding for some reason...... or at least defending. How is it, you always manage to turn things inside out and make yourself look like a chump ??

 

[ColorCrest]

Usually, but obviously not always, these types of policies are spelled out for the customer on the shop's forms such as quotes and proof templates. The customer is usually required to sign in agreement for the project to go ahead. Only takes a sentence or two.

 

[DerbyCitySignGuy]

Hmmmm............ seems you are getting braver and braver by the day, calling people names. You really must be a pent-up person. Perhaps, looking for a more suiting job would make you feel better, instead of all this hostility you are always displaying.

The system only failed with the likes of you and your kind. No where my young and quite naive working person did I say, they don't hafta pay...... just let them know the facts up front. Something you seem to want to be hiding for some reason...... or at least defending. How is it, you always manage to turn things inside out and make yourself look like a chump ??

I'd give this attempt a 4/10. Nice try though. Have a great weekend!

 

[Bobby H]

The issue is time and labor have value. If I spent a good amount of time and labor developing logos and other design elements for a sign job and some other sign company wants to produce work from those digital assets there has to be legitimate circumstances present for me to just hand over those files to a competitor. Otherwise I'm thinking that other sign company can go through the same effort I did and create their own friggin' art files like I had to do.

I mean all the time I get garbage "logo" ideas and other junk artwork to incorporate into sign projects and convert into useful, production-ready artwork. It's cheese grater on the forehead drudgery a lot of the time. I'd rather spend that kind of time coming up with my own original designs and art rather than having to deal with someone else's trash. But that's just a big part of how it goes in the sign business. Everyone thinks he/she can design, just like wannabe singers at a Karaoke bar.

Earlier today I had to email a logo and design elements to a sign company hundreds of miles away for a project. But that was one of those legit circumstances. The client is a repeat customer that has given us tons of business across 4 states. This location is one of those jobs where we can't do everything and have to job out part of the project. That is a totally different circumstance from a potential first time customer shopping around for the cheapest price. In that case I'm not giving out unlocked, vector-based files for someone to hand to another sign company when they have no established purchase history with us. We don't have a relationship with them yet.

The Coca-Cola analogy mentioned earlier doesn't quite wash, but I get the gist of it. Handing finished artwork over to a rival is a huge gift to that rival. It saves them a bunch of time and money on that job since they didn't have to spend hours reproducing the artwork from garbage source material. Now, if we're talking about original designs and the in-house capability of creating cool looking signs, then some of the Coca-Cola recipe starts to come into play. If you created a new logo concept or other design elements from scratch on a sign project proposal and the customer hasn't bought anything yet, well yeah the rival sign company trying to under-bid you should have the burden of developing their own original concepts and art files. They need to pull up their big boy pants and start acting like a real sign company and compete on the same level.

I've been through this very situation a few times, where a customer comes to us first, has me spend a bunch of time working out the concepts. Then out of the blue they want to shop the concept around and have multiple sign companies bid the job from my artwork before they even bought anything!. When they do that maneuver they get billed for all the design time and other administrative time spent bidding the job before any files are turned loose. If they don't like that they can give the other sign companies the very arrangement they gave us: create everything from scratch.

 

[ikarasu]

Coca Cola makes soda. You make signs. Your production files are basically your recipe. Does Coca Cola give away their recipe? No. Why would you give your recipe away to appease someone?

Cokes recipe is their own though.

If I paid coke to come up with a recipe for my own brand named soda, and got them to produce it for me... Then decided I wanted to make it a different way / with a different supplier... Whether it's because I wasn't happy with coke, or because I Wanted to sell it across the Country, and their distribution didn't make it feasible to do so... I'd expect them to give me the recipe I paid them to make.

Like Wildwest says, every shop is different. Maybe you do your design work for free... And thats why you feel differently about it. But for us at least, we charge the customer XX hours per design... So they paid for the design, it's now their design in our eyes. We're not a design firm, but if a customer came in and said Hey, I want you to design a sign for me so I can go across the street and get them to print it... We wouldn't tell them no. We'd charge our hourly rate... Maybe a bit more since we're not making anything off the final product, and design for them like if they were our Customer.

Even throwing out the whole you catch more bees with Honey phrase... Even if we knew we'd never get the Client back, we'd give them the files. Our company tries to focus on being the most customer friendly place - We may not have the best prices... we may even screw up once in awhile, but we do our best to make the client happy, and they appreciate it. So if someone pays us to design a project for them, We'd never hold it hostage to try and hold onto the client, or stick it to them for leaving us for any reason.

Some people think just because something is digital and not physical, the rules are different. If someone pays you to print a sign and install it... Then they send you an E-mail saying theyre going to move it to a new location and asks for advice... Would you feel like you're giving something away for free / refuse to help them and spend 1 minute to give advice / help them out? I'd hope not

 

[Bobby H]

The key is getting PAID for your work.

Way too many people out there think they can roll in to the shop, make you go through "revision hell" and then take the digital files you created while in "revision hell" and hand them off to another sign shop so they can get the work done for less money. They spend their evenings watching shows like CSI:Whatever with all sorts of stupid, fake, idiotic depictions of computer technology. Some actor rattles his fingers on a keyboard for 2 seconds and produces something on one or more monitors that took a team of motion graphics designers several hours for each person on the team to produce. But the customers only see that instant finger-rattling part of it. They have ZERO appreciation of what goes in to designing graphics using digital tools. They think you just click one or two buttons and the job is done. There's not even any creativity involved as far as they're concerned. The ideas, concepts, inspiration and anything else all comes bundled with whatever software we bought.

That's the reality of it. And that's why you, as a sign company, absolutely must stand up for yourself and your own interests. If you put no value on your designs and the time it took creating them then that will make your company an even easier mark for all the low-talent, bottom feeding, low-bid, scumbag rivals out there looking to put you out of business.