This article is a work in progress. It will cover everything from how to pick a painting service, how to work with them to make sure you get a good result, and danger signals to watch out for.
My name is Navin Weeraratne, and I’ve run the Paintedfigs miniature painting service for the past 15 years. I want to share with you what I’ve learned about how to:
1 - Find the right miniature painter or miniature painting service
2 - communicate your needs well, so you get what you want
3 - build a long relationship of trust and excellent service so you don’t have to worry about your minis
A - Three Things Before you Start
1 - Trust, Relationships, and Miniature Painting Services
Are your miniatures going to be painted the way your painter said they would be?
Will they tell you if there’s a problem?
Do you have any idea what’s going on right now with your minis?
When you order a book on Amazon, you don’t worry about not getting it, or it not being the book you want. You trust that Amazon won’t fail you. Amazon earned that trust the same way your barber does, and your miniature painting service will.
Your service needs to be contactable, keep their promises, and give you a good product. That’s their whole job and I’ll show you how to find those people. However, the client has a part as well:
- being clear about what’s needed
- not moving the goalpost (or changing the sport) after the agreement has been made
- helping with the questions the miniature painting service might have.
If you’re up for doing that, you become the sort of dream client that miniature painting services go the extra mile for. Both parties will trust each other, and your customer satisfaction becomes consistent and strong.
2 - The Myth of the ‘Right’ Miniature Painter or Miniature Painting Service
First up: there isn’t a ‘right’ miniature painting service: it’s just not that simple. Just because you’ve found a Golden Daemon winner doesn’t mean you’re going to have a good experience working with them. The guy at the game store may not have a website, but could end up being the person who paints all your armies, on time, and without surprises. Try to reframe the problem as trying to get the right relationship between you and your painter.
The right relationship is one where:
1 - you communicate well with each other
2 - There are successful transactions, where success is defined as your expectations being met or exceeded
3 - There is good crisis handling by the miniature painting service, and the client is protected from cost, loss, or drama.
I’m going to tell you how to get this.
3 - The Secret to Client-Painter Communication
Words are not a good medium for discussing art. One of the biggest problems clients and painters have is that clients want to write out lots of words, and painters want to work with pictures and color. Here’s an example from one commission we did:
Ash grey horses. Light, ‘elven’ blue and white barding. Silver metal areas and blue gems. Wood painted in off-white. Elves with silver armor with white and elven blue clothing.
The client was just describing the picture he’d supplied, and did this for all his miniatures:
There’s nothing weird about this - we describe stuff with words every day, and it’s been quite the winning strategy for the past million years. The problem is that words, in any languages, are just not rich enough to describe a picture. Hence the phrase a picture is worth a thousand words. Try to describe this:
Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch (1505)
If you did, do you feel someone working off that description could reproduce it, even in a rough sketch?
How about this color. Can you describe it with just words?
If you answered ‘crimson,’ here is what Google kicks up for ‘crimson’. Can you make sure a painter picks the shade you want, and not any of the others, while only using only words?
Trust in Eyes
Our eyes are some of the most advanced devices for inputing image and color data in the known universe, and we’re so lucky, we come preloaded with two of them.
By sending your miniature painter pictures of what you had in mind:
1 - You get on the same page as to what the finished product should look like
Taken from actual work instructions we’ve received.
2 - You communicate effects perfectly, even if you don’t know what they’re called
Picture credits: Heirsaquatch, Light Miniatures, the Unrealistic Artist
- You can convey custom instructions the painter would have otherwise declined to accept because it would be too complicated:
Taken from actual work instructions we’ve received.
Don’t hit the painter with a wall of text - cause a wall is what you’re painting project will hit. When a painter wants clarification because the instructions are too wordy, often the reaction is to give them an even bigger, wordier breakdown. Don’t do this - this is where painting projects go to die, and where painting relationships end. There is nothing anyone can do but shake hands and walk if they can’t communicate.
Well, How Do I Find these ‘Pictures’ you Art Fascist?!
Fortunately, it is the cyberpunk future, and we have machine learning on our side.
1 - Get on Google and/or Pinterest and start typing in what you want, in Image Search.
2 - Profit.
That’s really all there is to it. Follow your searches and whatever strikes your fancy - it doesn’t feel like it, but your processing huge amounts of data. Even a search to pick up some stock box art images might take you down a rabbit hole that finds you a color scheme you much prefer. And you will have the picture to show your painter, and you will both instantly be on the same page.
If you switch to pictures rather than words, that’s more than half the battle won for making sure you will have good experiences and build a strong relationship with your miniature painting service.
And now, we can start.
B - How to Find a miniature painting service
Finding services is easy - the real work is in filtering out which ones can actually help you, and know what they’re doing. Remember, you’re not just looking for someone who knows how to paint. You’re also looking for someone who:
Gets that they have to deal with clients
Takes offering a professional painting service, seriously
1 - Word of Mouth
This is the best method - Ask your friends and at your FLGS. If people have good experiences with a miniature painting service, they will say so. Someone recommended by a friend, or a friend of a friend, is a good bet. You are more than just another client to them - you’re someone they have some common ground with.
2 - Ask Google
If your friends can’t recommend a service they’ve used and been consistently happy with, it’s time to go ask Google. Just plug in your query:
miniature painting service
warhammer painting service
warhammer 40k painting service
miniature painting services
miniature painting commission
Google will figure it out, and show you the services most users were interested in and which Google decided had the best ranking.
The problem with this though is that while Google will kick up some miniature painting services for you, it won’t tell you how good or bad they are, or how well they would work with you. Instead, you have their websites to look at - websites awfully keen to convince you to give them your business (websites like this one). I’m going to tell you how to triage their websites so you have a better idea of who might be able to help you and knows what they’re doing.
3 - Ask Strangers
Asking on social media or forums is the weakest of the methods. It’s weak because there are a lot of people on the Internet who have nothing worthwhile to say, but that doesn’t seem to stop them. Unless you are on a strong and polite forum that isn’t conducive to these sorts, they will pollute any inquiries with their uninformed opinions - or memes. Then, there’s trolls. “You should be painting them yourself, mya mya mya!” Sure buddy, if we had as much free time as you, we would be.
But some people who have had good experiences will see your post, and be happy to share who they went to. If asking strangers goes well, they will give you information about miniature painting services you otherwise would not know about, and use proof that Google can’t give you.
C - what to look for on their sites
Now that you’ve found some websites, you want to dig deeper and see what you can learn from what they put - and don’t put up.
1 - Pictures
Take a good look at their galleries - and I mean a good look. If instead you see just enough that you’re happy and rush forward, you run the risk of not properly understanding their capabilities - which will be a problem if they don’t do work to the standard you thought you were getting.
In addition to getting a sense of how they paint, you need to find answers to these two questions:
1 - Do you like their work, and would you like your minis to look the same?
2 – Have they painted your army and even your color scheme, before?
If you don’t like what you’re seeing, then close that tab and move on. Sometimes Paintedfigs will get an email from a prospect who asks if we can do better than the sort of work we’re showing on our site. If a painting service is able to consistently produce a better product, then they will offer it.
If you do ask them, they will try to offer it to you - and they probably can. But they won’t be able to do so consistently. Consistency is what you want; you don’t want to be sometimes happy with what you get. That’ll be what happens if a miniature painting service is asked to do something it doesn’t normally offer.
If they have painted your army or color scheme before, then you are in luck. You are seeing hard evidence that they can do what’s needed, and have experience with the minis.
No galleries of your army doesn’t mean they can’t paint it - a good painter can paint anything (if they can’t, they’re not good painters). However, a gallery is the only way to know if their execution is how you like it, and if they understand the product (I know of one miniature painting service that will remain unnamed, that once attached Space Marine helmets upside down).
A Word on Experience
The photos a less experienced miniature painting service puts up, are a dead giveaway:
They won’t be great
You won’t see a wide range of miniatures
Their portfolio won’t be large
This does NOT mean that they can’t do the job. A friend of mine who used to sell enterprise systems for Microsoft, decided one day to start a fancy bakery. A year later, and all the fancy bakeries in our town are going out business, and desperately trying to figure out why his bread is so much better than theirs. Experience is nice, but it doesn’t mean much against a truly dedicated and clever competitor.
Also, it doesn’t matter a whole lot if the miniature painting service doesn’t have a website as such, and uses an image sharing service to host their portfolio. Many excellent artists use these. The most professional 2d artist I know in Sri Lanka, just uses Flickr and Behance. He gets all my business and he’s never let me down.
What a less experienced miniature painting service is more likely to have problems with, are good practices for guaranteeing consistency, and good client communications. They can go learn it if they want to be serious business people, and they’re going to have to. Poor service, not painting, is the most likely reason a client will walk.
2 - Prices
Do they list any?
A good service will list its prices, or at least give you SOME idea of what they charge. Paintedfigs used to have Excel pricelists you could download for every brand we paint. We had to take them down in the end, because they had become too complicated for first-timers to use and we worried people were getting a false idea of our pricing. Instead, we set aside some pages and listed general price info, for example, this is what we did for basic infantry at our lowest quality:
STANDARD INFANTRY FROM $5.04 PER FIGURE
Try Standard quality. Standard is basecoating, washing, and drybrushing (and basing is free). It is everything you need to get minis that look like their box art, on your gaming table.
Infantry miniatures are (generally) painted from as $5.04 per figure. Simpler infantry (Night Goblins, Skeletons), are lower at $3.78 per figure. More advanced infantry start at $6.30 (going as high as $8.82, depending on complexity), at standard quality.
Space Orks Grot, $3.78
First Born Space Marine Tactical Marine, $5.04
Necron Lychguard, $5
Space Marine Primaris Intercessor, $7.56
Astra Militarum Ogryn, $10.08
It’s not comprehensive pricing by any means. However, it tries to give a prospect an idea of our rates, as quickly as possible. We sacrificed pricing detail, to instead make it easier for people to understand.
Blanket pricing, or rates popping up for similar figures, are a good sign. They mean the miniature painting service is going for consistency. Blanket rates also make it easier to spot inconsistency (“why is the orc boy not the same price as an ork boy?”). If you see a disparity between rates, ask them why its there. They will either be able to explain it, or be grateful that you caught an error.
No prices listed at all, is a concern. This means the service doesn’t know how to price. You will get different rates depending on their mood, and it means they are inexperienced at offering miniature painting services for money.
3 - Use Proof
The best sign an outfit can take money and give clients their miniature painting services, is evidence that they’ve been taking money and giving clients miniature painting services.
Look for:
Completed work. Are they showing off lots of minis that are just from three or four armies, or are they showing off lots of armies? You want to see evidence of jobs done for clients, not someone’s personal collection. If there are less than 10 complete armies on their site, you might just be looking at their own minis. It doesn’t matter if they can paint. It matters if they can paint to hire.
Testimonials. Testimonials aren’t great because they can be faked. We put up testimonials, but we also link to a gallery showing the project that lead to that testimonial (I leave it to site visitors to decide for themselves if the link is actually showing that client’s project).
Testimonials are use proof, and use proof trumps everything. It shows the miniature painting service succeeded at getting someone to give them a job; that that someone got the finished minis back; and that their expectations were met or exceeded.
The more use proof you see, the better.
D - Getting a Quote: What to Ask
You’ve found a promising-looking studio, and have a general guess for what they might charge. Now it’s time go beyond the guesstimate, and ask for a real quote - among other things.
This next step is is important: it is your first chance to work with them, and see what they’re like. It is your first chance to protect yourself from working with the wrong person. And it won’t cost you a dime.
Note on Guesstimates: Don’t get too attached to what you think is the rate. (You’ll be pissed when you find that its not the real rate, and the painter will wonder why you got angry at them for deciding, in your mind, what their pricing should be).
Before you email them, you need to know 2 things. What needs painting, and what you what them to be painted to look like. If you do not have these 2, you are wasting everyone’s time.
1 – Know What Needs Painting
- Do you know minis you need painted?
- Corollary: Do you know how many of each type, you need painted?
This is the minimum information you need to approach a miniature painting service. Lead with these because if they can’t do what’s needed for a price you’ll accept, then every other question is a waste of time - yours, and theirs. At Paintedfigs, when we get an inquiry get people a quote within one business day - we have a duty to be considerate of people’s time.
2 - Know how you want them to look
Know what you want. Don’t prepare a giant breakdown on how you want your minis painted - just need to know what you want. If you are not sure, don’t contact them till you are. An architect can do you a building, but he needs to know if you want a bungalow or a warehouse.
It can be simple as knowing what chapter or craftworld, or even that they should be painted like the box art (GW’s stock art scheme are fantastic).
A Sample Letter you can use
Now that you know what you want (and how many of those miniatures), and how they ought to look, you’re ready to pop them an email. Here is a sample:
Hi,
I’m looking to get some Ultramarines done.
I have:
- 5 scouts
- Marneus Calgar
- 5 veterans
Could you let me know how much that would cost? Thanks!
This email gives a miniature painting service everything they need to give you a quote.
3 - Wait for the Reply
This is the first evaluation of how a miniature painting service treats their client. If they don’t pass, please move on: it won’t get any better from here.
No Answer At All
Some may not even bother to reply at all, leaving you hanging because they can’t be bothered answering you.
A Late Answer
Any serious business will get back to you within a business day. If they do not, know that any one of these is true:
- they are not serious about your business
- they are not serious about their business
- they are too busy to get back to you right now / something has gone wrong
You’ll know if it is the 3rd because they will apologize when do they contact you, or at least have some sort of autoresponder up to give you an idea of when they’ll be able to get back to you.
We do replies within one business day, and use an auto-responder over weekends. Monday is the big day; myself, the studio manager, and the salesman are all on email.
If they do not apologize for being later than a day, then guess what, that’s how they do business. You’ll drop them an email, and it could be days before you hear from them. If you get in their face about it, they will act like you’re being unreasonable, and say that you’re paying them to paint, not take your call or email.
That’s bullshit. Don’t take it. If they’re going to offer a service for money, they need to take communicating with their client seriously. If they don’t take you seriously, what makes you think they’ll take your commission seriously? Miniature painting is really about relationships, not transactions. Don’t be in relationship with someone who won’t give you a simple level of courtesy.
An On Time Answer
Write back to these guys. they’re taking your business seriously - and their business seriously. It is not guaranteed you’ll get a great experience from them. However, it is guaranteed you won’t get a good experience from the others.
E - Now that your Emailing… What to Discuss, and be Ready With
1 - Set Expectations / Quality
If they’ve put enough pictures up of their work, and it’s clear what their standard looks like what, then they’ve already done this.
However, feel free to check that they can paint to the quality you want. To do this, just send them pictures that match the standard you want, and ask them if they can match it within the pricing they’ve budgeted for. If they can’t, or it would cost extra to get to that level, they will tell you.
Don’t be afraid to ask: miniature painters like getting intelligent questions. Remember, they’re also assessing you. It’s reassuring working for someone who is taking the trouble to make sure their expectations can be met.
Note on sending pictures of your already painted figures: photos lie, especially if they’re taken under artificial light on your kitchen table. You don’t have to be an expert - just do the best you can with ideally natural, diffuse light - no direct sunlight. Also, do your best NOT to use a flash. Flash saturates the image, and can give the miniature painting service a very different idea of what the painting looks like.
2 - Assembly, Cleaning, Priming, Basing
Do they expect it done in advance? Will they do it for you?
If they’ll do it, what do they charge for it?
Some painting services will refuse to work with unbuilt figures, and others will offer a discount if you sent them in built - or even offer free assembly.
We offer free assembly - the Paintedfigs thinking is that if a client doesn’t have time to paint, they don’t have time to clean flash and build, either. There’s also the problem of faulty builds - we’re liable for what’s being sent back, and if a piece is tricky to assemble we’re much happier knowing our own builders will be putting it together. We have two, dedicated builder-packers with about 20 years experience between them.
Basing is stuff like this:
It needs simple supplies, like grass and diorama snow. It costs, but not a whole lot. Most of our basing is just painted dirt flock and some grass added.
If you have something in mind for basing, bring it up with them. It could be trivial. It could be expensive. You want to ask about it and not be suprised, later.
We try to do most basing for free; its a little step that costs very little, and adds a lot of punch.
3 - Will they Purchase the Minis for You?
The last thing anyone wants to do is get miniatures, put them in a box, and mail them somewhere. For new releases, pre-orders, or a new army being considered, this is the obvious question - will you purchase them for me?
It is nice if they do, but it depends what they charge. For about 12 years our distributor gave us a retailer discount on everything - Games Workshop, Privateer Press, you name it (good times…). We sold miniatures to clients at cost, on top of the miniature painting rates. It was a good deal, it was in Paintedfigs interest to lower what was a competing cost with the painting.
But… Then supply problems set in. Miniatures began arriving later and later - if they arrived at all. Purchases got canceled and we lost clients to the bad service experience. So, we got out of purchasing - there was no point in offering clients a deal on something if it meant 3rd party problems were ruining our relationship with our customers.
It was a good call - about a year or so later, our distributor went out of business. Had we still been purchasing through them, we would have gone out of business as well.
If a miniature painting service will purchase minis for you, they should be charging you above retail. The cost to them would be:
- the cost of minis (whether they pay retail or less)
- the transaction fees they get charged taking your money
They may just charge you retail, to make things easier. The reason they should charge that, is because they are accepting responsibility to get the miniatures. If there are problems in distribution and they have to purchase directly from GW at full retail, they can’t be going back to you to ask for more money.
If they charge less than retail, then unless:
- they are taking a hit on the painting to present a ‘deal’ to the customer
- or they have a direct relationship with the manufacturer (not likely; the most useless emails of my life have been to the people who decide if a miniature painting service counts as brick and mortar retailer)
They are trusting a third party to provide the minis at the retailer discount. Their ability to get your miniatures depends on the strength of that third party’s relationship with the manufacturer. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but the following steps will be added to your order’s timeline:
- The painting service’s ordering time. How often do they order? Immediately? Weekly?
- The time needed for the seller to receive the goods (remember when stock in hand, meant stock in hand?)
- When the seller ships the miniatures
More likely than not this will create its own timetable. So, unless you are getting a discount on the miniatures, it is not worth it. You may get annoyed at the painter, who was only trying to make your life easier by handling the logistics for you.
Years ago, when Games Workshop still had their factory at Glen Burnie, everything went great. We’d place an order with our distributor, and they would ship it within 48 hours, tops, with all items accounted for. Now, personally, I feel there’s no point in doing the purchasing. It’s easier for clients to buy their miniatures online, and just list the miniature painting service’s address in the ‘ship to’ fields during check out.
Note on resin bases: I hate using these because they can be quite hard to get. Most are made by smaller outfits, ‘Sunday Afternoon’ casters who can’t keep up, or suffer long mailing times because they’re scattered across the world. So, it can take a very long time for them to arrive in the studio - if they arrive at all.
Highly detailed and interesting basing cannot be done affordably except with requires resin bases, it’s that simple. However, a lot of miniature painting services will still do excellent work with regular basing and flocking materials, and you won’t suffer a time lag.
4 - Turnaround
How long will they take to paint your miniatures, and send them back to you?
Forget quality, quality is easy. Turnaround time is what’s tough.
A professional painter will always be able to at least roughly judge how long they will need to do a paint job, especially if it is minis that they’ve painted before.
Some painters will add some padding time to the estimate, so they have some cushion - under promise, over deliver. What we do is give the estimate, but add the caveat that delays are not unusual (I don’t pad. I think it’s better to tell the client upfront some uncertainty exists, and let them decide if they’re comfortable going forward). It’s hard for a painter to promise a delivery date before they even have the minis in hand, and miniature painting isn’t cracking eggs into a pan - or making Teslas. It is the worst of all manufacturing worlds:
- The client is awaiting delivery from the moment the deal is closed
- The products are all customized
- They require learning curve, or at least new work instruction, every single time
- You need to produce machine-quality consistency
- You can’t use machines
- Did I mention the client is awaiting delivery from the moment the deal is closed?
So watch out for:
- Miniature painters who give a precise estimate with no margin or error or conditions
- Miniature painters who won’t give you one at all
A precise estimate is fine - the painter could be padding it, or they could be excellent. But they could also have no clue what they’re doing. If they run behind and then seem surprised about it, on any level, don’t go back to them for a year (or better, 2 years). That’s a miniature painter with very low experience, certainly at doing commissions. You’re funding their learning curve. If you want to keep doing it that’s fine, but don’t act surprised when it goes badly. I know, I used to be that painter.
If they won’t give you an estimate at all, then they’re either unhappy about failing a delivery promise, or they honestly have no idea how long it will take them. That could be because of their process; some painters - and these are good painters - paint the entire army at once. So maybe all the flesh on all the models gets painted first. Then maybe all the pants. Or whatever. The point is that with this method, none of the army is finished until it’s finished - and that’s what they’ll tell you. It’s finished when it’s finished. They’re not giving you attitude. They’re telling you how they work, and it is more efficient.
Well, if they are going to paint for someone’s money, a painter needs to know how that job is going. They can’t know that unless they completely finish a certain number of minis a day. That’s how I prefer to do it - because I can’t have us all look like a bunch of numpties by saying ‘it’ll be done when it’s done.’
There is a trade off between painting efficiency and customer service. Smaller outfits and individual miniature painters will opt for efficiency, but this can mean a worse customer experience for you. They will see you as pestering them, and you will be - but what can you do? It’s not outrageous that a client ask to know what’s going on! You’re asking for a basic level of service any service provider has to be able to give.
Larger outfits will opt for service because they’re full-time bread and butter comes from making sure you’re happy (you don’t get larger by treating your clients like they’re a nuisance). It’s only when they get still larger that they can both chase efficiency, and protect the customer’s experience. What I like to do is split an army between 2 or 3 painters. If time is a concern or the army quite large, this can become 4 or even 5 painters. They can be as efficient as they like - I know generally how long the job will take because the pricing and the hours needed are related, and if one painter falls behind, the others can step in to assist.
Summary on turnaround: it is not unlikely your painter will take longer than they think they will.
Don’t get mad, understand this is the nature of the business: quality and time are directly related in miniature painting. Any painter who tells you they’re not, is full of shit, and you tell them Navin Weeraratne from Paintedfigs said so. A good painter might waste your time - but they’ll never waste your money. A painter who cuts corners and does poor work, just to hit a deadline, is just out to rip you off (you can tell them I said that, too).
Larger outfits can do better with timelines, because they have more painters to throw at a deadline. I say can do better, because those resources are painters, and painters take years to train. When a larger outfit (like Paintedfigs) starts falling behind,we have to turn away sales to get caught up. This bites, but it improves the client experience, immediately.
5 - Art Instructions
You need to tell them what you want! Usually this is easy; “can you paint them as Blood Angels?” “These are Late War Germans.” “I need them done as Bad Moon Orks.” And even “can you match them to my army?”
For the most part, all your painter will need is a picture or two, to be told what stock scheme to use, or sent a painted miniature from your army so they can match colors exactly. For anything more, you need to make sure your instructions are:
- clear
- unambiguous
- concise
See what I did there?
If the text of your art instructions (minus pictures) takes up more than a page, you’re likely going to have trouble. Trim it down to a page - less is more.
“Shorter words, shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs.”
Here is the art instructions file that we like to use:
We tell clients if it is too cumbersome or intimidating, they can just send us a word file and some attached pictures. Even if they don’t use the form, it does not matter. However, they will look at the form, and get an idea how to organize their info.
Samples
If you are getting additions done to an existing army, you already have the perfect art reference - your own painted miniatures! If you can send one with your order, your painter can match against its colors exactly.
Samples are great. A picture, even taken carefully with good lighting, can lie (we once painted a gray army, blue, because I read the picture wrong). With a painted sample figure, color matching is never a problem.
Things Not to Do
The temptation when you’re busy (and who isn’t?) is to be vague in art instructions. The problem with giving vague art instructions though, is the painter is not necessarily going to give the client what the client had in mind - how can they? They weren’t briefed properly.
Now, don’t worry too much about this. You’re full time living isn’t giving art instructions to a painter. THEIR full time living is to read those instructions, see where the land mines are, and ask follow up questions to steer them (and you!) around them. Also, they have to get a feel for working with you. Some clients can give me a throw away line, and I know exactly what they want and there are no issues. Other clients I know are picky and their minds wander - and I’ll do more samples with them and get them to expressly commit to them, or ask for specific changes, till everyone is on the same page.
And, even given all this, there will be changes a client may want, that were not in the brief. Don’t sweat this, it happens. It’s a bit of rework, but a painter either expects this or just bills after for changes. I prefer not to if I can help it, because I see it as client-specific learning curve, and the nature of the business. I may not make much on the a client’s first order, but I intend to work with the client for years and years, so whatever.
The problem is when people take advantage. You can’t ask an architect for a bungalow, and then turn around once it is done, and say that you really had a three floor apartment in mind. They will either refuse, bill you for changes, or quietly do what’s needed and then never work with you again. Remember, this is about a relationship. It won’t be perfect, but if you are obviously taking advantage of someone, they will know it, and you will lose that relationship.
Special thanks to Adan Tejada for help with editing!