Warning: pre-cereal ranting dead ahead...

<rant>

Okay, this is getting on my nerves.

What, you may ask? Why, the apparent lack of foresight and/or common courtesy given to business deals for services.

In the last two weeks, I have had no less than 6 building contracts fall through, for a variety of reasons.

Two were for apartment buildings that I've yet to receive more information on (after being tenatively hired for building on the site, the owners stopped communication), one was for a home that I'm never on for when the land owner is on, another one was for a job that literally was sold underneath my feet ("here, have a large piece of land that me and my girlfriend own to build MY DREAM HOME ON -- oh wait, I sold the land, sorry kthxbye), and yet another one was actually contracted, started, fawned over (huzzah this is amazing work! I LOVE IT), and then mysteriously cancelled as the house was 80% complete (sorry, not my style).

Grr.

If you recognize yourself in that rambling paragraph, understand that I don't hate you, I don't despise you, I just think that it's a bit rude to contact a builder for their workmanship, give them details on what you want, and then either vanish from the face of SL for random indeterminate amounts of time, stop responding to inquiries, or even let me get tenative building plans together and then cancel the job entirely the next day.

Is it me? Is it because I'm not on SL much (less than 8 hours a day), and when I am, I'm usually busy?

I do jobs when I can; I tell all my clients that. My RL schedule is completely random due to social situations, work, and school load. I log in to SL every day, for a couple hours each day. When I have a building job, I'm at the site building; friends come by, you get dwell, I have fun, we all win.

But lately it seems that I've got a bad case of Service Plague or something, with people being so non-commital to my workmanship that it's apparently a wonder I'm still being contacted for jobs.

I feel absolutely horrible when these jobs fall through, because it starts a whole series of self-doubt questions: was it me? Was I too mean? Not flexible enough? Did I charge too much? Was I not on enough?

Look, it's quite simple; when you contact someone for a service of theirs, be it scripting, building, event hosting, wedding planning, whatever, when they agree to the job, DONT PULL OUT OR VANISH FROM THE PROCEDURE. They will ask you questions; answer them. They will give you information on how they do things; listen to them. They will be on your land, building/scripting; do not sell it out from underneath them.

This almost makes me wish for a more concrete contract system.

I understand that Im probably a bastard to work with. I grasp the concept that my building style might not be for everyone. I understand that you might need a place built in 24 hours. But I tell you my stipulations for all those things up front. Usually it's met with fervent nodding and smiley faces, and then blatantly ignored.

No, I TOLD you I can't build it in 4 hours. It takes time.

No, I ASKED you to give me a better building style suggestion other than "well, do what you want".

No, I ASKED for constant, honest criticism. It's YOUR house, TELL ME HOW TO BUILD IT.

ANd that leads me to another point: brutal honesty.

I WANT my clients to be honest with me. Don't yank me around. I've had many building jobs start and sputter, shimmy and crash, and then start over, with many hours lost, because the client honestly had no idea what they wanted. Build me a cabin castle hybrid with glass and steel windows, and 5 bedrooms! No wait, now I want a treehouse dungeon combo, with a root beer moat and wooden planks leading down to the shoreline. No, I know, it's...

Argh.

TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT. You are not going to offend me by telling me my building style sucks; most likely it does for what you had in mind. You are not going to have me storm off in a huff because you don't like my window choices. Sadly, I do not read minds, so you have to let me know what the fuck is going on.

Argh.

In conclusion: treat your contracted servicepeople with respect, don't yank them around, and above all, be honest.

</rant>

LF

Take a tip from rl contractors: get some money up front for major projects.

Nice Ranting

I agree.. Especially about the tell me what you want part.. Gets very annoying.. Like they're scared we're gonna turn round and tell them it'll look awful hahahaha..

Hope you get some better luck soon!

Welcome to the world of architecture! In my business the majority of the projects we do are cancelled at some point along the line, due to all sorts of things. In the past year, we've lost due to strikes, defaults on bank loans, even a suicide. In the majority of those cases it was pure flakiness, though. And even when the projects did go through, we were treated with rudeness, lack of communication, and even contempt. In our biggest project we didn't get paid a dime for nearly a year despite having completed over a quarter million dollars' worth of work and having a seemingly ironclad contract.

It does not surprise me that people here are even more flaky. After all, there's no consequence, right?

OK, now that you're done fooling around with all these other go-nowhere projects would you like to come and do Ravenglass East? I'm thinking it's about 4-6 houses or so, I'm getting the proposal ready now, I'll IM you.

I don't think this type of nonchalant and irresponsible behaviour on the part of clients is related to your workmanship, Lordfly. I don't see how it could be! I think that there are a variety of explanations. For one, it can be just different time zones, 8-14 hours apart, and you can forget that when you're just cruising around talking to everybody until you really try to sit down and do a job with them and find that they need to sleep when you are just getting past your cereal LOL. Second, like everything else in SL, there is this fantasy atmosphere where people go wild. Oh, a portable prim dick! Let me fly around wearing it and impress girls! Weee! etc.

Of course, you wouldn't do that in RL, and not only because you can't fly. But some people go, oh, I can contract a builder and build something! Weee! It's fun until they have to think of a plan, bills to pay, etc. as you would have to in RL. Then it can all break down. Don't let them play out their fantasy on you. Make them write down their plan for the root-beer floating dungeon.

I think you should charge a 20 percent up front deposit and get a notecard about the plans in writing, in lieu of a contract system.

I would say your rates are more than reasonable -- given that some high-end pre-fabs are now up to $1000 and $1500 on SLExchange, to charge only, say, $2000 or $2500 for your homes seems like exploitation of you. So you might reduce the nonchalant clients by upping the prices and that would screen out some of the fluff but I would say on the apartment buildings job, from what I know, just be patient, could be a time zone or connection thing.

Another point -- if you've already finished your Cheerios and had your caffeine delivery system and are in a better frame of mind -- you yourself need to commit to a deadline. That is, don't say "well I'm busy, and sure, I'll get to it whenever". On the one hand, you're being honest with people and saying "hey, this is a game, and I'm in college with RL jobs etc so don't expect too much from me". On the other hand, it does all translate into RL money, so maybe a bit more of a RL time-table approach would be in order.

Now a rant on my end in general about the other side of this equation:

-- builders who disappear AFTER you've paid them a deposit, and keep telling you stories about when they might finish, someday.
-- builders who KEEP their deposit after doing nothing more than laying down a floorboard, when the agreement is that they can only keep half
-- builders who disappear on to more sexy projects after they committed to your mundane one.
-- builders who leave you houses with fancy scripted doors that no one can open
-- builders who have never LIVED in their houses so have no clue how the camera angles, placement, head room, etc. works out
--builders who don't consider you or your neighbours and don't take away the unsightly plywood from your lot back to their sandbox or workshop
--builders who don't instantly arrange the turnover of their object and the setting of the group so that their 199-prim chef d'oevre sits on your lot not set to group nor able to be given to you while they disappear offline
--builders who do not make house calls to deal with their house problems
--builders who do not count their prims and give you a prim count at the end of the job
--and finally, a special place in hell should be reserved for these builders: builders who do not NAME THEIR OBJECTS WITH A SYSTEM AND LINK UP their final product in such a way that when you rez it, it can easily be assembled, and not just the first time, but always. That means 2-3 big chunks of properly linked prims that can withstand a push off world, a "kabloom" on the edge of a sim, or other mishaps so that they do not arrive back into inventory in a zillion pieces. At least name the objects something other than OBJECT so they can be reassembled!

Indeed, the distinction between a builder and an architect can be found in the way in which an individual handles these types of issues.

And I am happy to say that the builders/architects who have worked on Ravenglass have been more than cooperative on all these issues, taking time to do house calls, adjustments, prim counts, fixes, walk-through, etc.

LF, i agree with solitaire's advice. it is very appropriate for you to take a 10-20% retainer as a commitment. i take these for all RL design contracts and would similarly do so if i was contracted inworld. it's just not good business not to.

a substantial retainer will mean your clients will get their shit together before giving you a commission. i don't think anybody would be hesitant to pay it either. you have a long "professional" history in SL.

While I sympathize with you, I have the opposite problem. I always give builders some money up front and then they stop working and aren't on and then when I find someone else to do the work, they pop up.

Or even when I don't give money up front, I get stuck with half finished builds that I feel are unsightly. I have a partial waterfall on my lawn right now that has been waiting for completion.

Oh I second Prok's offer. Come build for me. When you are done with Prok, of course.

Yes, cash up front.

I think at this point you could ask for that LF.

Can't say that I have these problems myself.

Some issues I do have is customers that say, "I'll get you this and that texture" and never do, and then wonder why their house stands unfinished.

Customers that can't decide if they like it this way or that and have things moved back and forth, only to announce, "Go ahead and put it where you like it"

People IM'ing me and getting upset when I tell them I'm working on something else at the moment, yet I don't even know the people IM'ing me.

Customers that give little or no direction, then announce, "This isn't what I had in mind at all".

Overall, I've had good experiences with my customers, that mostly comes from me not taking payments I'm sure, but there have been times when some customers just aren't worth it. I've yet to just pick up my tools and leave a project, although there have been one or two that got dangerously close to that.

The one thing I absolutely hate are customers that are building just for the sake of building. They aren't sure if they will ever use X, but it would be nice to have. Yet, fly by three weeks later and X is gone. I enjoy working, but I must say, I really don't like the idea that people are having me build something merely because I'm available to do so. IF you really don't want X built, or you aren't sure you will use X, then why waste your time and mine and have me build it?

Heh, thanks for the calm and reasoned responses (even Bob ). I've come home from work, and have been properly propped up with cheerios to function.

Your suggestions, while perhaps being the reasonable business type thing to do, is something I cannot in good conscience do, mainly because I honestly CAN'T guarantee a start/finish time for projects. If I took my "consultation commission" up-front, I would wring my hands for days to start work on the build, even if I knew I couldn't get to it.

Perhaps upping my rates is the answer, but I don't want to a) price myself out of the market, and/or b) gouge people's eyes out with my rates.

Blah. Virtual business is bad enough, I can't even fathom a real business

LF

We have a store in Grignano. LF did a great job building it. I could leave this right there but I will continue...

We asked LF to build us a store to fit in with the rest of Grignano. His only real brief was 'We want it there and something showroom like'. He started building, we loved what we saw but needed a few changes so we IM LF. He had no problem at all in seeing the changes or carring them out.

I really can't see how anyone could have a problem with his work or service. He was up front about having limited time and that it could take a while. But we got a great build in a reasonable timescale.

Thanks Lordfly. We still love it

Garth & Pituca 'FairChang'