photo credit: {Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester}

In running a freelance business on your own, it can be tempting not to offer guarantees. After all, if a large percentage of clients followed up on your guarantee and asked for their money back, you could potentially be ruined.

On the other hand, a guarantee gives peace of mind and may actually encourage more buyers. But what if it encourages fraudsters, too?

Guarantees come in many shapes and sizes, although the most commonly thought-of guarantee is the 100% money-back offer in the case of dissatisfaction. So, should you offer a guarantee or is it a one-way ticket to freelance failure?

Here’s what I think: As long as you deliver good work and carefully make sure that you fulfill the promises you make when you first acquire a job, then your guarantee is a great peace-of-mind offer that will rarely (if ever) be used. If you do over-promise and under-deliver, you will have that dreaded large percentage asking for their money back and it could ruin you. However, fulfilling your promises will reduce your guarantee fulfillment.

Is it possible that you’ll get someone who asks for work, gets good work from you then demands that you fulfill your guarantee? Yes. In the decade and a half that I’ve done this, though, it’s never happened. (I’m sure it’s happened somewhere, but never to me, fortunately).

If you do want to offer a guarantee but you also want to mitigate the risks that it could have, consider revising your guarantee in a few different ways:

1. Create a tiered guarantee over time. If they want a full refund, it must be asked for in 1 week. After that, the payback drops 10% each week for ten weeks until.
2. Create a longer-timeline to fulfillment. For example, say that they may only request a guarantee not less than 30 days and not more than 60 days after purchase. This makes sure they get over buyer’s remorse and actually “live with” your deliverable for a while.
3. Require that they jump through a hoop or two, such as: if they are asking for their money back on an ill-performing sales page, they must deliver proof that the page is, in fact, not performing.

These are okay, and you might want to incorporate one or more of them. However, I’ll tell you the two guarantees I use for my business:

1. Performance guarantee. I guarantee an on-time delivery of work or it is free. (This is a good motivator to stick to my deadlines and it addresses a major issue in the freelancing world).
2. Satisfaction guarantee. I guarantee you will be completely satisfied with my work or I will work tirelessly to fix it.

These have worked well for me and I invite you to reword them to suit your needs and use them, too!