We have all been there. An established client, a good source of income, but a difficult client, one that we dread even thinking about. It can be the personality, the demands, the tone of the relationship, but regardless of which, it is impossible to conceive a conversation with that client that doesn’t leave you exasperated, frustrated, angry or wondering why it is we continue to do business with them.
After we founded our firm, it didn’t take long to realize that the choice to work with a client or not was entirely up to us. We soon came to the conclusion that we had the right to refuse service to anyone we did not feel comfortable working for or with. As a young but growing firm however, we welcomed many clients regardless of their shortcomings, so long as they could help build our revenue and expand our client base we were willing to live with the headaches.
As a result, we began to do work with a few clients that caused us much consternation. I personally found myself waking up in the middle of the night, dreading the fact that I had to speak to them the following day. Some of these clients represented a fair amount of income to the firm. We forecasted much of the following year’s growth based on their work. But once we saw ourselves losing sleep and feeling deeply anxious about dealing with them, we decided that the amount of energy that it took for us to keep working with them was not worth it. We made the decision to no longer work with them. Of course we didn’t tell them directly; instead we decided to raise our fees to where we knew they would balk. In the end, we succeeded and they chose another consultant.
It wasn’t long before we started to feel the financial pinch of their departure and began to seriously question our decision. Could we have done something different? Could we have approached the client with our issues to try and make the relationship more palatable? Did we do the right thing? In these difficult economic times I look back on that experience and have thought hard about what we could have done differently to salvage the relationship.
As expected, those would not be our last difficult clients. We would likely cut out much of our client base if we were to avoid work with every challenging, hard-to-work-with client. We had to figure out a way to deal with them without alienating them. The first step was to understand not only their needs and expectations but to also understand their method, their personality, their work product and work process. That led to some core changes to our approach. Now if we find that an architect has the tendency to add scope as the project moves along and is reluctant or difficult in accepting additional fees as a result, we consider in what ways we can alter the way we respond. We cannot really expect anything to be different because we complain about it. By repeatedly complaining we run the risk of being pegged as nickel and diming consultants and lessen the likelihood of continued business. Instead, we have to try and plan for it; expect it, so that we are not surprised when it happens.
If we know that an architect or developer has the tendency to change his or her mind a number of times before making a final decision, we need to plan for that when we do our work plan. If a client is rash and lacks in social graces, we need to get to know them and try to control our own reactions to their inopportune or insensitive comments. We need to realize that we cannot control a client’s personality any more than we can work without getting paid. We need to look at what we can control and make the changes needed to alleviate some of our perceived difficulties. Once we know how a client operates, how they behave, how they interact with staff, their own clients and sub-consultants, we can anticipate some of their actions and plan accordingly. We would be foolish to think that they would change from project to project.
This is not to say that we need to take everything the client dishes out regardless of how unreasonable. We can certainly communicate with them and find mutually agreeable solutions to whatever issues ails the relationship but if we have strived to truly understand the client’s core concerns, values and personality, it will make it much easier to discuss the matter with an objective viewpoint.
A client’s needs are usually not just professional; they are often very personal needs that we need to comprehend. We must be observant and attentive so that we can adjust our way of thinking, make our lives easier and along the way, keep a client for the long term. We need to listen, observe, understand then plan.
Posted by Jesus Sierra, S.E.
