When clients determine if your business sails along or dies

There is apparently a moment of revelation in Zen Buddhism known as ‘Kensho’ when you suddenly see something you never understood before, opening up a path to freedom.

And there is surely one particular ‘Kensho’ in business, an enlightenment that marks the difference between businesses that sail along, and those mired in troubles.

It’s the moment when the entrepreneur realises that his business is as good as his clients.

So decisive is it, that now I think about it, I cannot comprehend that so little is written on the subject.

We all read plenty about quality in our product, systems, inspiring our teams, marketing, understanding ourselves, and so on.

But whoever points out that a row of awful clients is a path to misery? And a set of great clients close to bliss.

On which basis, it seems time to offer up a real, from-the-coalface guide to client bliss.

For here in Kenya, the first client test, and the one about four-fifths fail, is: do they pay?

Listen carefully: if they do not, then recommend a supplier the other side of town.

Another supplier so much cheaper, more effective, more anything… and definitely more interested in lending services to this client, possibly indefinitely.

However, you do it (we’re awfully sorry, the company is relocating to New Zealand), get them off your books, so you can stop lending to them.

This, alone, starts to change everything.

It’s the ‘no free credit’ moment that means you move, inexorably, towards the simple equation of being paid for the work you do. Step one to heaven.

And a step that equally means valuing prompt payers highly. These are the clients you want. Yes, squeeze the margin for them. Yes, put in extra time and effort.

From where, onto client test two, which becomes variations related to the word ‘demanding’.

This rests substantially on your client’s comprehension of the product, which makes first-timers buyers high-risk.

This has been acute for my own company in PR.

First-timers are also less likely to understand the work involved in what they are buying. And why should they?

After all, it’s not their business. But the knowledge gap can make for some rough rides.

In website building, it’s just a fact that a second-time buyer knows a website isn’t two conversations and a pen-shake: up-it-goes.

It’s a complex set of decisions that include the client supplying the content.

Even managing content on clients’ websites has seen my own business plough into a land of contrasts in client comprehension.

We have a contract for one company that long ran its own website, sourcing all its own material.

Not surprisingly, they seem fully aware of the hours involved in the research and publishing for their slim-line project.

Another, however, on a much larger project, has never done it themselves, and appears to believe the hundreds of listings every month are arriving by zero-effort magic, instead of being collected from more than 40 different sources, involving visits, phone calls, emails, and then hours of loading.

The trouble comes when the knowledge gap becomes grounds for striking a cheaper price.

For a client that wants it all, for less than it costs to make, is as damaging as one that doesn’t pay at all. The sum is still one of giving it away.

Yet, we can’t make rules that we will only offer PR, or websites, or content management to companies that have done it before.

For sure, we’ll have a better time if we do.

But sometimes, with particularly engaged clients, first-time business can be spectacular.

However, we now realise, those engaged first-timers are spottable.

They listen to the expertise on offer, form easy relationships of co-operation and appreciation, and end up very happy indeed, with the sum in results far, far greater than with a second-timer who now knows everything (but doesn’t) and isn’t listening at all.

As it is, no matter how many poor unfortunates (by way of suppliers) have gone before you, if the client sounds blinkered, looks blinkered, and behaves blinkered, chances are: they are blinkered.

They are never going to get it. Which means it will probably end badly for you, just as it did for all those suppliers before you.

Once you’ve surmounted the issues of expectations, and understanding of the work involved, the final hurdle is fair play.

jenny@webaraza.com