Terms of Service

Summary

We will always do our best to fulfil your needs and meet your goals, but sometimes it’s best to have a few things written down so that we both know what’s what, who should do what and what happens if stuff goes wrong. In this contract you won’t find complicated legal terms or long passages of unreadable text. We have no desire to trick you into signing something that you might later regret. We do want what’s best for the safety of both parties, now and in the future.

You are hiring us to provide advisory and/or consulting services for the estimated total price as outlined in our proposal. Of course it’s a little more complicated, but we’ll get to that.

What Do Both Parties Agree To Do?

As our customer, you have the power and ability to enter into this contract on behalf of your company or organisation. You agree to provide us with everything that we’ll need to complete the project – including text, images and other information – as and when we need it and in the format we ask for. You agree to review our work, provide feedback and approval in a timely manner too. Deadlines work two ways and you’ll also be bound by any dates that we set together. You also agree to stick to the payment schedule set out at the end of this contract.

We have the experience and ability to perform the services you need from us and we will carry them out in a professional and timely manner. Along the way we will endeavour to meet all the deadlines set but we can’t be responsible for a missed launch date or a deadline if you have been late in supplying materials or have not approved or signed off our work on-time at any stage. On top of this we’ll also maintain the confidentiality of any information that you give us.

Getting Down to the Nitty Gritty

Advice

We provide advice and guidance based on our domain knowledge and professional experience over many years in multiple business and industry sectors and in the public sector. We do not make decisions for you. If asked to do so we will make recommendations as to appropriate courses of action and rely on you to provide all of the information we may need so that we can give you the best possible advice. This. includes introductions to other stakeholders to get their input when appropriate and/or required.

Statements of Work

If you have engaged us to complete one or more tasks on your behalf we will ask you to document the task, the deliverables and the desired outcome in a Statement of Work (SoW). The SoW will also include the pricing mechanism and payment terms. Once the SoW has been agreed between us it becomes legally binding so we will expect that any adjustments that may be required will also be mutually agreed in a formal update to the agreed document, to create a new baseline so that there are no surprises for anyone.

As we do when providing advice, we expect you to provide not only the necessary information and introductions to enable us to complete the agreed work but to not impose unreasonable conditions and to provide reasonable support to us in delivering the work. This includes, but is not limited to providing timely reviews of draft documents, active and positive participation in meetings and workshops and in communications activities in support of the work.

Legal stuff

We would like to be able to, but cannot guarantee that everything we do will always be error-free and so we can’t be liable to you or any third party for damages, including lost profits, lost savings or other incidental, consequential or special damages arising out of your actions following our advice or using the deliverables we provide, even if you have advised us of the possibilities of such damages.

If any provision of this agreement shall be unlawful, void, or for any reason unenforceable, then that provision shall be deemed severable from this agreement and shall not affect the validity and enforceability of any remaining provisions.

Copyrights

You guarantee to us that any elements of text, graphics, photos, designs, trademarks, or other intellectual property that you provide us for any reason are either owned by your good selves, or that you have permission to use them.

When we receive your final payment, you will have a perpetual licence to use any and all materials we provide to you for your own purposes. This explicitly excludes permission to sell such materials to your customers without attribution and licence fee of 25% of the original cost.

You also own text content, photographs and other data you provided, unless someone else owns them. We own the deliverables we provide and we license them to you for use in perpetuity. We reserve the right to use anonymised versions of your deliverables to demonstrate our capabilities and the quality of our output to other prospective clients.

Payments

We are sure you understand how important it is as a small business that you pay the invoices that we send you promptly. As we’re also sure you’ll want to stay friends, you agree to stick tight to the payment schedule specified in the SoW.

But where’s all the horrible small print?

Just like a parking ticket, you can’t transfer this contract to anyone else without our permission. This contract stays in place and need not be renewed. If for some reason one part of this contract becomes invalid or unenforceable, the remaining parts of it remain in place. Although the language is simple, the intentions are serious and this contract is a legal document under exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of the England and Wales.