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The Right Clients
Someone recently asked me why I chose to capitalize the words ‘Client’ and ‘Customer’ in my texts. Well, the simple explanation is that I appreciate their business. As a sign of respect and acknowledgement of their importance to my company, I want to show my appreciation in every article that I write containing these words.
It’s wonderful to have successful, paying Clients but even better to do business with the right Clients. To start with, we are either big fans of our Clients or we become big fans as we get to know them better. I hear our employees and freelancers raving every week about some of the great things our Clients are doing to grow their businesses. I want to maintain this positive culture and have therefore decided that our sales teams will only target companies that we really want to do business with. I want to be selective with the people that we do business with so that the result is and continues to be a positive experience for all involved.
Today we have four business relationship guidelines that steer our Client acquisition decisions:
1. Essential elements of our Client’s business culture MUST match ours or at the very least, are similar to those that we value and respect on both an ethical and moral basis. We take pride in our reputation and credibility and wish to work with those with similar ideals.
2. The potential for success is reasonable to fantastic. We want to ensure that we have the necessary competencies and availability to deliver the project successfully and exceed our Client’s expectations. Should a prospect have what we determine to be unrealistic goals, we will gladly recommend a competitor. We will never try to convince a Client that an apple is an orange or that we can deliver something that we know we are not capable of delivering because we want to help each of our Clients solve their problem(s) and, as a consequence, recommend our services to others.
3. Profit = Fun. It is a simple equation and there is a ton of truth behind it. A project must be profitable and have the potential to be carried through to successful completion with high levels of motivation and contributions to our bottom line. In essence, we ask for a win-win deal. If our Client wins, we win as well and if our Client is not able to achieve their objectives, we reconsider our role and our efforts to provide the necessary ingredients for success. Competing on price has little merit in this equation since the team requires rewards for a job well done.
4. Bandwidth is an annoying topic for us because our product is based on people with specific skills and limited availability. We want to give our Client’s the best possible service and that means that we need to have a well rested, physically and mentally fit team ready to jump into action. Success brings with it some level of frustration as you learn that you simply can not please everyone all the time. Our people tend to be booked solid for 60 to 90 days out and that means that there is little available bandwidth to acquire new business unless we add additional people to the team. On some occasions this is exactly what we did because we were interviewing superb people at the same time as we acquired a new Client that required the type of services that these new people were capable of delivering. That was a lucky situation and in 10 years has only occurred twice. Most of the time, we are approached by prospects that were referred to us by Clients or read about a Client success story that we created. These prospects usually have some urgent needs and therein lies our challenge. We want to help such companies but only if we can put the right team together to increase the probability of success.
Naturally, there are exceptions to the above guidelines but truth be told, we learned our lessons in the past and such exceptions are rarely worth the time and effort when a win-win is simply not possible.
We count on people like you to understand our thought process and although it may seem in some ways to be rather exclusive given the way that we filter our opportunities, please know that we really appreciate new business opportunities, they are the lifeblood of our business model. BoxONline is currently undergoing some growing pains and thus further expansion is necessary to achieve our objectives so, if you know of people who may fit into and support this Client oriented model of exceeding expectations, please do get in touch with me directly using this form.
Your Best Year Ever?
How to make 2008 your best year ever
Q: What Were Your Greatest Accomplishments In 2007?
Even if 2007 was the worst year of your life, odds are if you look close enough there’s something somewhere to be proud of.
If 2007 was a great year for you, then this question is even easier.
Here are a three business ones from my list this year:
Restructuring 2 firms, one Swiss and one international
Building 14 brand new websites and refreshing 10 existing ones
Selling $2m worth of products online
Raising 6 million EUR for one of my Clients
Now, if you were to see my notes you’d see several takeaways under each of these. You should do the same.
So, after you’ve identified each and every accomplishment, go back to each one. This time through identify what you learned or were reminded of by each of them.
Q: What Were Your Biggest Disappointments Of 2007?
Practically every company and individual resists analyzing their mistakes. That’s a shame because this is where the best learning comes from.
No matter how great everything in life is going – we all make mistakes. The trick here is to really analyze them, what preceded them, what could you have done differently, and how can you prevent them in the future.
Even though 2007 was the best year of my life so far – I still had my share of disappointments both personally and professionally.
I won’t bore you with the details but once you have your list – once again, identify the big takeaways.
Q: How Did You Limit Yourself Last Year and How Can You Stop?
Were there certain actions you took or didn’t take that came back to haunt you? If you’re even the least bit honest with yourself you’ll be able to build your list.
In order to make sure you don’t limit yourself again – you need to bring these self-defeating actions to the surface, shine light on them, and most importantly determine what you must do differently to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes all over again.
Here are just a few of mine…
Not reviewing my goals & priorities each day
I didn’t stick to a daily sleep & fitness schedule
I counted on people that were not able to deliver
Of course, just like you did with the earlier questions, identify the takeaways.
For example, one of the big takeaways for myself (even though I know better) is when I don’t review my goals daily I get sucked into what’s currently happening and easily get distracted from what’s most important. That caused me to miss the mark on a few goals I had set out for myself in 2007. I now know I won’t make the same mistake this year. What about you? In what ways did you limit yourself and what can you learn from it?
Q: What Did You Learn from the Last Three Questions?
This is where it all gets interesting. Remember the goal of this exercise is not simply to know yourself and your business better but to actually to use the information to make certain 2008 trumps 2007.
What are the big takeaways from answering the first 3 questions. What do you know about yourself or your business that you didn’t realize or weren’t thinking about?
Here’s are two random nuggets (from my complete list of 44) I got out of the exercise…
Helping entrepreneurs and their businesses grow consistently gives me my greatest feeling of accomplishment. Therefore I need to spend time daily on creating and improving tools and materials and not let the fast growth of my business pull me too far away from what I do best.
Generating income online is key to our business success and I need to reserve time each week to keep current on the best performing strategies so that I don’t get lured in to buying the tactic of the month.
You should shoot for as many distinctions as possible because it’s here that the rubber meets the road. It’s these distinctions that’ll practically guarantee that this year is the best year of your life.
Obviously, having this list isn’t going to do it all. You still need to take this new knowledge and then put it to good use. Fortunately, that’s what the last question is about…
Q: How Can You Use This Information to Make 2008 even better?
The idea here is to build in to your schedule, your interactions, your management style or whatever else you’ve surfaced in question 4 and build yourself a new better approach.
For example, I’ve already scheduled into my daily routine 2 hours a day of content creation, and 10 minutes every morning to review my goals.
Plus, I’ve already slotted on my calendar a weekly 20 minute appointment with myself to relax and then analyze whatever concerns I have.
Of course, I have a lot more – but you get the point. Besides, it’s not important what I am going to do to make 2008 great – it’s what you are going to do yourself to make 2008 great.
So, once again the questions are: