If you offer one-on-one services, if you're a coach or a service provider or consultant and you work with clients one-on-one, even if you work with clients in groups, that client relationship is so important. We want our clients to be happy, but our business is a thing that sustains us. And you know, as a service provider, you have to take care of yourself too. So today I want to talk about the ways that contracts can actually support you and how you can use contracts to manage your client expectations and create a better experience for both your client and for yourself as the pre- person providing the services. Hey, I'm Amy Nessheim, licensed attorney for online business owners and founder of my own business, Artful Contracts. You're listening to Legal Made Easy, the show that makes the legal aspects of online business easy to understand and implement so you can grow your business with confidence knowing you've got it all covered. Let's dive in. This is coming up because I have a student inside my signature program Cover Your Assets, and we had our coaching call last week, and she was wondering her question that she brought to the call was around, you know, she has certain expectations for her clients. She has a way that she likes to run her business, and she wants to make sure that her clients respect her choices and understand from the outset what her expectations are. One, to make sure that they're a good fit before they even start the relationship, but two, to make sure that they can m work together well going forward, and that her boundaries and her methods of doing things are respected by the client, and that she has a way to enforce that as well. So this included things like, you know, the way that the client, she and the clients would communicate, expectations for like the number of calls that could be expected, or you know, calls that weren't necessarily scheduled are going to have to be an additional fee. You know, it's not that you can get on and call me up on the phone anytime you want, like you're not gonna have my cell phone number, right? And then things like how reviews or client work that you know is gonna be part of the project, how that's being submitted and then reviewed, and expectations around that. So the first question then is all of that stuff that you can put in your contract? Yes, absolutely. All of that, any kind of expectations that you have of the client or any anything that you want to do to set expectations, any rules, ground rules around how you work with a client, all of that can and should go in your contract. And here's why a contract is just a formal piece of paper, it's a formal written explanation of the agreement that you and a client have. It's nothing any more complicated than that. So it's all of the promises that each of you are making to each other written up in one document. So if there are any promises that you're making or anything that you explicitly want to say that you are not promising, all of that should be in the contract. So yes, that's going to include things like I don't take phone calls and it's going to be an extra charge for a Zoom meeting, or all communication should be over email, or you know, I don't respond to emails after 7 p.m. or even like an average turnaround time for email responses is 48 business hours, things like that. Now it's not required, you don't have to be that detailed in your contract, but it's important if you want to make sure that the client understands what expectations to have of you and what expectations you have of them. If there's a certain way that you want them to submit things, if you have expectations around time frames for when they need to get materials back to you, that kind of thing, yes, that should go in the contract. You don't have to get as detailed as your business hours or the time frame that you want to get back to clients unless you want to be held to it and want to be able to point to it so that your clients can look back at it and have it for reference. So the purpose of your contract is to make sure that you and your client are literally on the same page about what each of you is promising to bring to the table and the way that you work together. If you have a lot of trust with this client, if it's somebody you already know, that might not be very detailed. If it's someone who you do not trust, more detail might be better. Or if it's just a general stranger, you put all of your non-negotiables in that contract. Now that is not going to be the end of managing client expectations, that's kind of the beginning, it's the first step. So if you've been working with clients for a while, you probably have an idea already of the types of things that clients try to push you on, on the types of things that clients don't necessarily want to do that you need from them. So you put all of that in the contract. If you haven't done this before, if you're new at working with clients, it might take a little bit of trial and error for you to realize, okay, I have this problem where people aren't filling out my welcome information survey in a timely manner. So we're gonna put a five-day timeline on that in the contract. So it might take a little bit of time and tweaking and processing to figure out here are the things that in my business, in my systems, these are my non-negotiables, and this is what I really need from the client, and these are the boundaries that I don't want to be pushed that might take some time to figure out. And as you do, you add them into your contract. But again, that is just gonna be the first layer here because as I'm sure you have experienced, clients don't always read contracts. They might look at the price, they might look at the deadlines, they might not look at any of it, and they just sign it. So contracts are there to create that mutual understanding, but if the client doesn't read it, then you have a legal mutual understanding where they are presumed to know all of it, but they don't actually know it. They're not actually gonna act on it if they haven't read it because they don't actually know it. So we have that contract in place so that you have that kind of legal backup plan where if things really go south, it's all in writing, exactly what both of you agreed to, and they can't use legally speaking, they can't use the excuse of I didn't read it. That's not an excuse. Practically speaking, yes, they might not do the things because they didn't read it. So the contract is the first step. I also recommend so if you are trying to enforce boundaries and create client expectations, there needs to be more layers to it than just the contract itself. The contract is the legal piece of it, it is the final rule, the buck stops here, this is the end point, the way to enforce those expectations. But you might need another piece to it. So, how do you do that? If you have certain ways that you want your client to behave or certain things you want them to understand, have it in your contract. But I recommend also setting expectations throughout the process of beginning to work with that client. So that means in your services pricing guide, if you have a download that talks about your services, include a list of your policies inside that pricing guide or the major expectations that you want that client to have, like deliverable timelines or boundaries around communication. So that before the client even decides to work with you, for sure, even when they're just in the beginning information gathering stages, they can have this expectation of okay, so if I work with this person, I'm not going to get one-on-one calls, it's just gonna be email. So they can do that shopping process and understand the differences if they're doing comparison shopping with service providers and coaches. A lot of times people don't. It's more of a personality thing or has to do with the style of your work or something like that. So they might not even compare you to anyone else, but they still have that expectation up front if they're looking at your services guide or you know your services page on your website. If you have an explanation of your expectations of working with them and your policies around communication, submissions, anything that is unique to the process of working with you that you want them to understand and respect, it's good that they know it ahead of time. So put it in your pricing guide. Or if you don't have any of that written up anywhere, or if it just turns into too many words, you can also have that conversation in your sales call. When you're explaining what it's gonna look like to work together, you can literally explain what it's gonna look like to work together and the boundaries around it. So what I'm getting at is creating that expectation from the very beginning so that anything that they have to do, they know ahead of time that they're gonna have to do it. Anything that they could have an idea in their head of the way that you might do things, they understand what it actually is, and they don't get too caught up in the way they think it's gonna go before they even get your contract. So that's the first step, and then they get the contract, it has all that same information in it, and then probably they're not gonna read that. So I would also recommend a if you do a welcome guide, that is a perfect place to put all of this to a welcome guide or a client expectations guide or something that you give to them that is the initiation, it's like a PDF or a video or something that starts the relationship. You know, after the invoice is paid and the contract is signed, what's that first interaction? Because in this moment, clients are gonna be excited to work with you, they're gonna be ready to get started, and they're probably going to devour that welcome guide. They're gonna read it and they're gonna be receptive in that moment to the way of working with you. So you put it all in there. You don't have to correct them after the behavior has already started. You know, if they're emailing you twice in two hours and wondering why you hadn't responded yet, it's a lot harder to fix that, especially if you started out responding to the behavior and then decided to enforce boundaries later on. It's so much easier to just create the expectation up front. So put it in the welcome guide because they're excited, they're ready to go, and they're probably gonna read that. They're a lot more likely to read that than they are to read the contract. And then, of course, you're always gonna have clients who don't pay attention to any of that, and you're gonna have to enforce your boundaries. And at that point, because it was in the contract, you can say, as we discussed and as we agreed to in our contract, here's my policy relating to this thing, and that's how we're gonna do it moving forward. So you've created the expectation up front in the sales process, in your services pricing guide on your sales page, or in your discovery call, or in your DMs when you were selling them on whatever it is on your service. Somewhere in there, the expectation was created. It was legally committed to in your contract, it was reinforced in your welcome guide or onboarding documentation in some way, and then enforcing it going forward, it's it's just a little nudge of a reminder instead of a surprise, instead of a new thing that is that the client didn't know about. And yes, creating all of this and putting this into your systems, it might be a little bit more work up front, but it saves you a lot of hassle, especially if it has to do with boundaries, or if especially if it has to do with rules for things that you need from a client in order to do your job well. It's a lot easier to put it in place up front, even if it takes a little more work to put it in your services to guide download or to put it into your onboarding documentation to build it into your contract. Those are extra steps, but they save you hassle, headaches, time, emails, all of that later on. So here's your homework. Think about your client experience, think about your unique process for providing your client service. Are there any areas that have caused tension for you in the past with clients where they didn't realize that you worked in a certain way or you have boundaries that have been pushed, clients not meeting deadlines, clients asking for quicker deadlines, clients asking for more deliverables, boundaries around your communication styles. Think through your most five most recent clients and your experiences there, or anything that's standing out to you from the last year or so. Make sure it's in your contract, and then find at least one other place you can put it in the sales and onboarding process. Because your contract is the legal way that you enforce these expectations, but realistically, the client may not read it. So you also need it somewhere else. And just as you're doing this, make sure it always matches. Your contract should be the ultimate rule for this. So if it doesn't match what's in your welcome documentation or it doesn't match what you actually do, your contract should match what you actually do and what you actually expect and be the final rule on all of this. So just make sure that's the case and then make everything else match your contract. If this is something that you've dealt with before, if you've had clients who ghost you or clients who push your boundaries, I am hosting a free live training in just two weeks on March 14th. And I'm gonna go over a few more ways that you can use contracts to help support your boundaries and improve your client relationships, as well as a couple other steps that you can take to get your business legally legit. Head on over to artfulcontracts.comslash live class to save your seat at this live training.