It’s all in the contract!
Recently I found myself saying yes to freelance work. The tension between getting paid now and possibly getting paid later tipped toward getting paid now.
I began chatting with a poker pro I met online, and checked out his Kick channel. I wrote up an article on how he could build his Kick channel, and that led to discussions on creating and managing a website for him.
Around a week ago, he was ready to pull the trigger, and he wanted to have a contract for the work. He didn’t really say why, but it’s a completely reasonable thing to do.
That put the ball in my court to produce a contract and figure out how to get us both to sign it, because he’s not local to me.
These two services greased the skids for getting things in writing.
1. A Self Guru Legal Bundle
Setting up a website correctly is more than just getting hosting and firing up WordPress. It used to be about this easy, but not anymore.
Websites can potentially open up their owners up to a lot of liability. Legal protection on the website is a must in order to sleep better at night and to stay on the good side of the search engines, which have quality standards that affect search engine results placement.
I had been pilfering legal boilerplate from wherever (with permission) but got a bit spooked when the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came out.
At this point I searched for legal documents that addressed the GDPR, and eventually purchased the comprehensive legal bundle from A Self Guru here.
What made me pull the trigger on the ultimate bundle is that I could deploy the documents on as many of my websites as I wanted to with a single license. Other bundles were cheaper, but they only were licensed for one site. Since I had several sites, this was a good choice. And since I am managing the website, I can use the legal docs on that site.
And, as I found out recently, included in the comprehensive bundle was a Website Design Agreement, which I gladly used.
2. eSignatures.io
I asked my client if he had a scanner since the contracts from my bundle are in Word format. I’d print the contract, sign it, and scan it, and he’d do the same.
Well, it turned out that his scanner didn’t work, so I began investigating e-signature options. A lot of the options came with a monthly or annual fee, and I didn’t really need another subscription on top of what I have already.
Eventually I found eSignatures.io, which has a pay-as-you-go model and no subscription. For someone who doesn’t do a lot of contracts at the moment, this is great.
I paid in the minimum $50 which gets me 50 contracts (no expiration), and sent the contracts out to my client. I was able to paste in my contract from the bundle. It was really quite easy!
And I’m all paid up for the next contracts, whenever they come.
How do you streamline your signing process?
Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
Hi, I’m John and I encourage entrepreneurship in people, including myself.
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