We at GetVirtual have been iterating and agile developing the freelancing process that I'm about to deliver to you. This has been done in collaboration with the student co-founders of GetVirtual and as I said, we've been iterating this process as we've been working through the 120-plus projects that we've delivered since March of 2020. Here's the process flow diagram that we here at GetVirtual have come up with. The first thing you start with, of course, is the client. However, the client has gotten to you, whether it's through word of mouth, whether it's them signing or filling out a form on your website, in whatever case you have the client, and you need to set up a meeting with them and we call this the intake interview. This is when you're going to ascertain if what your client needs is something that you can deliver. This is the product market fit that we talked about in the glossary. Do you have the capacity, the time, the resources, and do you have the skills needed that your client needs? This might be when you decide if you need to take on other team members. But in any case, you're doing the intake interview and you're discovering if this is a client that you want to take on. There's three different ways that you can think about that. You can say, I've met with this client, the intake interview went really well, we have a good fit and they're a go, they're a green flag. You may discover that there are some questions that come up in your intake interview that you need to follow up with and you have some yellow flags. If you have some red flags, that is, finding out that there are some expectations that your client has that they're not going to be able to cover through a reasonable budget, or maybe they're looking for a fast-track project, or there's something that you realize isn't congruent with what they're expecting and what you're going to be able to deliver, in that case, you will have to reject them. After your client intake, you're going to think about whether you're going to take on this client, and then you're going to communicate with them and let them know. If it's a client that you want to continue working with, then we set up what we call the diagnostic interview. The diagnostic interview is when you ask quite a few very direct questions about what their needs are of their projects. Usually, it takes an hour because you're really diving deeply into what the customer wants. The scope of work is what emerges from this diagnostic interview. After you have the diagnostic interview, you will put together a proposal. The proposal will have the budget, that is how much it will cost to do the work. It will have the scope of work broken down by tasks and milestones that can then be applied to the budget and when you will be receiving payment on the various milestones. It will also give you the schedule which goes back to the milestones. From the scope of work, you will be creating the proposal, you'll be creating the budget, and the schedule from that. You will then go and send that to your client or sit down with a meeting. If you do send them through an e-mail, make sure that you have a meeting set up immediately afterwards so that you can go through the proposal and make sure that you understood what they needed, you understood the full scope of work. That your proposal is articulating that scope of work, that your potential client is in agreement with the scope of work and in agreement with the milestones. Our next meeting is when you're negotiating and seeing if the proposal needs to be changed and reworked and then resubmit it to the client, or if the client is very happy and in agreement and is clear with the expectations that you are going to be delivering with them, then they sign that proposal and it becomes an agreement, it becomes an agreement between yourself and your client. After you have the business proposal approved, then you start executing on that work, you start gathering the team if you need outside help for the project, and you are communicating along the way with each milestone, each time a deliverable is supposed to be submitted and if there's any changes that you're finding that need to happen with the proposal, as soon as you have that information you're communicating that to the client, you might need to be making a change order or changing the proposal so that as you move through the project, the client is along with you step-by-step. They know what is being done, they know what needs to be done next and they know if there's any changes that need to happen. You need to let them know before a change happens so that they can approve if there's a cost involved with that change. After you've executed on all of the deliverables, you've delivered on your milestones, you're getting payment that's being with each one of those milestones. At the end of it, you'll have the final project and what we call the closeout. The closeout is very important because it allows you to be fully completed with your project, the client understands that you are done and that there are no more expectations.
