Create Your Social Media Invoice Template for Legal with Ease

Social media invoice template for Legal

if you are running a social media marketing agency in 2020 or well if you're going to be running a social media marketing agency in 2020 there are two main contracts that you need to have today I'm going to share with you what those contracts are and why they're important for your business [Music] [Applause] hey gang Jim Hart back yet you hear from Hawthorne law and the founding attorney here at Hawthorne long we helped online businesses to get their businesses started to create something that matters and build something that is truly wonderful in the world today I'm going to explain to you the two main contracts that you need for your social media marketing business or any type of consulting business if you're if you're any type of consultant or coach or doing anything online that that involves clients these are contracts that you're absolutely positively going to need in your business we're going to talk about them we're going to talk about why they're important we're going to talk about what are some important closet that you need to include in them and then finally we're gonna talk about why having these contracts in place will actually make you more money in your business in the coming year so let's jump to it all right before you go any further I want to take a minute just ask you to make sure you click the button down below to subscribe click the little Bell thingy if you want to get notified when I post new videos and don't forget to give us a thumbs up and comment below if you've got questions alright the first contract that you absolutely positively must have in place if you're doing any type of business with clients is a client services agreement and the reason this is important is because this is a contract that is going to define the scope of the work that you're doing for the client how much you're going to get paid on a monthly basis for doing that work for the client or if it's a project how much you're going to get paid for that project when you're gonna get paid how are you gonna get paid and basically it's gonna protect you from situations that I've seen many times in my business a lawyer and with clients as well the situations where let's say you sign up a client and you agree to a certain amount of money that you're gonna get paid on a monthly basis for working with that client and then a couple months down the road they start asking you for you know a little bit more than what you initially agreed to and then before you know it's you're six months into this contract and you're doing twice the amount of work that you originally agreed to with that client how many people can relate to that yeah just go ahead and comment below it if you're with on that or the alternative is true let's say you start working for somebody and you're doing the work that is defined under the the agreement and then a couple months in they decide you know what I don't need you anymore I'm just gonna we're just gonna part ways and they're just gonna stop paying you normally this happens when a credit card gets declined and then all of a sudden the client goes you and you can't reach them and and then you're stuck you've just done a bunch of work so that's the second way that this can become a problem if you don't have a contract in place so a contract helps in both those situations because it's something that you can point to when you're dealing with a client and explain to them hey you know I would love to do that additional work for you but unfortunately here's what we agreed to in the contract and here's the price now if you want me to do this additional work that's fine but that's gonna cost you an additional amount of money each month I'm dealing with this with a client right now who every month I send him an invoice and I have to remind him that he is an hourly billing client most of my clients now charge a flat fee but this is one client that has a holdover from before that I was doing our billing work and it's one of the reasons I switched from doing hourly billing to flat fees in my firm is because I don't like sending that invoice any more than the client likes getting that invoice and every single time I send that invoice it's a problem with the client and getting them to try and pay or getting them understand why they're receiving that invoice in the first place so that's that's really important the contract is something that you can point to and say listen here's what we agreed to do this is the scope of the work this is what I'm doing for you here's the report that shows that I'm doing exactly what I said I would do for you under the terms of the contract and this is why you owe me this money that's a great thing now under a scenario number two where you've got a client that just decides they're not going to pay you anymore a contract is something that you can then enforce it can be legally enforceable so so the contract is the document that's going to protect you so what you can put in the contract is a cancellation provision that says the client can cancel but they need they're gonna owe you for two or three months payments even after they cancel the contract so there needs to be a notice provision and the reason why that isn't important especially for businesses like coaches or or consulting businesses or social media marketing companies is because chances are you've got independent contractors that are working for you and those independent contractors have already done work for the client that that they billed you for that you have to pay them for and then at the end of the month when it comes time for you to receive payment from the client to pay those independent contractors but the client decides they don't want to pay then not only are you out the money that you should have gotten from the client but you're also on the hook for paying you're independent contractors if you want them to continue doing work for you so this is why it's so important to have a good client services contract for your coaching or consulting business that you might be running so this video is making sense for you so far just go ahead and and type I love contracts or something down in the comment below and let me know that this is that you're getting what I'm saying so and this dovetails nicely into the second contract that you're going to need for your business and that is an independent contractor agreement sorry I just feel a little parched there so just like the client services agreement protects you when you're dealing with clients who are paying you money the independent contractor agreement is going to protect you for the people that are doing work for you that you need to pay money to and so the independent contractor agreement just like a client service agreement should spell out exactly what the independent contractor is going to be doing for you and exactly how they're going to be paid so a great example of this is let's say you are a social media ad agency and you've hired a social media manager to manage the social media profile for one of your clients you might pay them online an hourly on a flat fee basis per month to manage those social feed social media profiles for your clients and then you bill out the clients for for the ability to work with your your agency so let's say this person does a lot of work for you they post the social media profiles they're running ad campaigns they're they're doing graphic design they're they're building landing pages to drink all sorts of these things that a social media manager might do and they do all this work and then the contract would dictate these actly how much you're going to pay to them at the end of the month for the work that they did and making sure they do work that's within the guidelines of what you find acceptable for your clients that's important as well and so that's that that's the number one reason why it's important to have an independent contractor agreement is to spell exactly what work this person is going to do for you and how much they're going to get paid some other main benefits that can come from an independent contractor agreement is you include a privacy provision in there that says they're not going to divulge client information you can include things in there that protect your intellectual property in the event they would ever decide they don't want to work with you directly they're gonna leave or maybe they want to leave and take your clients with them you can prevent them from doing that you can have non-compete provisions in there there so there's all sorts of things that you can put into this this contract that is going to protect you with the people you're working for and in addition another main benefit of using an independent contractor agreement is to make sure you're protected from government agencies such as the IRS for example one of the things that the IRS has done a lot of in recent years is they've cracked down on businesses who are saying that employees are actual independent contractors and the reason that businesses would do this is because if you hire somebody as an independent contractor versus hiring them as an employee you don't have to pay all the payroll taxes and benefits and things that come with someone being an employee of your company but on the other hand if you have an independent contractor they pay you a charge you an hourly rate for the work or a flat fee for the work they do and you just cut them a check for that amount you don't need to worry about payroll taxes and things like that so you can see why it'd be a big benefit to you to classify as many people as possible as independent contractors versus employees but the IRS is looks carefully at that and so you need to make sure one of the things that can help you in that situation is if you have an independent contractor agreement among the many other thing reasons why somebody would be classified as an independent contractor versus an employee but the fact that you have a contract with them is going to be something that would help you in that regard should that ever come up alright so if you can't what I'm saying make sure you like hit a comment below if you got a question and don't forget to subscribe and click little Bell thing so you get notified when we post new videos so are you a business owner that works with contractors that works with clients that you know might be in social media marketing or might be a consulting agency or a marketing agency or something like that so you may want to check out my small business toolkit that I'm working on that's going to contain everything you need to protect your business from the ground up from all these legal type of issues that you might run into at a fraction of the cost of hiring a lawyer to help you for these situations so just click the link down below to get more details about the small business toolkit and if you found this video helpful you might want to check out the other video I posted right here that talks about two more contracts that you're gonna need for your online business and don't forget to subscribe of course [Music]