Client selection is very important to a small business. Typically your small businesses will ‘follow the money’ during ramp-up. As you grow and build a reputation, you can be more selective about choosing who you work with.
Here are 4 suggestions for selecting great clients for your small business.
1) Make sure your clients have a good feeling about you already. I can already hear your response. “How do I get them to like me?” Our clients come to us through a handful of referral sources. We have found that the clients that turn out to be challenging, come from a Yellow Pages call or someone doing hunting for our services and comparing us to 15 other companies. If we can’t establish some form or trust and mutual like/love between us, I try to move on. When I get tempted by the deal, and just try to follow the money, I end up bringing in a client that is going to potentially cause problems with my team mates. My team does that actual work on the project, so I need to keep them happy too.
2) They can afford you. When we have a company that starts out a conversation with “You need to cut me a break”. Or “well, we’re going to have LOTS of work later on down the line” we do all we can to hand them off to another company. “We’re just not the right fit” I’ll tell them. Recently, one of our clients asked for a discount on hosting, in the first 5 minutes of our meeting. I gave it to him, because he had just sent a payment into his old hosting provider and I wanted to offer him a small gesture of good faith. It was a small discount, but EVERY call I have had since, has been wrought with him asking me to ‘shave a little more off’ or ‘can’t you cut me a break, I’m a small business’. All of our clients are small businesses. We need to work with companies that value us and can pay for good service.
3) Remember what business you are in. I talked to a company this morning that had some Mac computer issues. They mentioned the programs that they were using (very old) and the problems they were having. I am confident that we could have helped him, but our strength is NOT Mac consulting. There may have been a learning curve on the part of our technical team. I focus instead on getting projects where our expertise is strong, and our skills are valued
4) Trust your instincts. There have been 3 occasions this year when I walked out of a meeting, looked at my team and said “this person is going to be difficult to deal with.” I was right all 3 times, and even if I look at the fairly large amount of money we made, I would give it all back to have said “I don’t think we are the right fit for you.” The hassle wasn’t worth the money. Difficult clients can really affect morale, and I have seen arguments spring up internally about a situation with a difficult client. Most of the time it’s either a communication breakdown somewhere or misunderstood expectations on our part. However, I can smell a potential problem client, and I’ll bet you can too.
Take a little more time up front to screen your clients. Your reputation depends on it.
Jason
