I’m not a fan of calling a client to tell them that their project is either going to take longer and/or cost them more money due to unforeseen circumstances. It’s only been on very rare occasions that the circumstances are a result of my ineptitude due to poor estimation of time or costs associated with the job. How you prevent making these types of calls comes from being as clear as possible with them and making sure that they’re as clear as possible with you. Even details that seem insignificant can end up being a bigger problem that you could have imagined and result in costing your client a lot more than you thought it would. Being able to prevent these problems before they ever emerge can make the difference between being known as a person or company that is open and honest with a client or one that constantly forces their clients to pay them additional money.

When I worked for a printing company over 10 years ago, it was company policy to speak to the client about problems with their jobs as little as possible. This included missing fonts, grammatical errors in copy, or even images using the wrong color space. It should have been an easy fix by just giving the client a list of all the things you’ve found that they could fix before the file goes to print. Instead, fixed as much as we could and then let the client know what remaining items they needed to address before we could go to print. It may seem that we were doing clients a huge favor by just fixing their files and then having them do a few minor things after the corrections, but the following information breaks down how much money this was costing one specific client each month we did their newsletter.

The issues we had for the client were:

• 1 missing font
• Images in the wrong color space
• Low quality photos
• Incorrect color separations for vector images and page layout
• Missing vector art

A fairly simple list of items, most of which are easily fixable, but each time the file came in it would take about two hours to fix all the problems in the file.

REFLOW AND THE MISSING FONT

We received hard copy from the client for how the final product should look. Even though we had a font named exactly the same as the font they didn’t send to us, our version was slightly different. This resulted in the text reflowing through the whole file. The final product has to match the client’s hard copy, you have to go through every single sentence of the file making adjustments to the text so every line ends on the same words. A process that always took around an hour.

COLOR SEPARATIONS

When a print job runs using spot colors, the file has to be setup so elements on each page come out using the correct color. Because you can have elements on screen that use one of the spot colors very faintly, it’s best to print the entire file to a laser printer with every color separation printing as its own page. Because you only get pages pertaining to a color pass that actually contains a printing element, you can quickly see what pages contain objects that need to be reassigned to the correct color pass. Unfortunately, this client’s files always had the exact same color separation problems which took a good another hour to fix. Correcting the problem isn’t difficult, it’s just time consuming.

WHAT’S LEFT AND THE TIME INVOLVED

The only two things that we could ever request the client provide us are higher quality photos and the missing vector art. The issue with the font could have been eliminated by simply letting the client know that we need their version of the font. The color separations was annoying from my perspective because had the client known that items in their template were assigned to the wrong colors, there would have been very little, if any, separations to correct.

We did their newsletter each month, so fixing the file was an additional $90 per hour over what we would quote them, and resulted in an extra $180 per month. Adding in that cost for 12 newsletters is $2160 per year. It may have been a good way to bring in additional money to the company, but it frustrated me to no end knowing that this client was giving us money that they could likely use somewhere else if only we would talk to them about how to prepare their files for us.