PSA to service providers, consultants, and agency owners.
Make sure you choose who you work with wisely.
This email is based on my recent LinkedIn post. Feel free to read it and comment on it here.
PSA to service providers, consultants, and agency owners.
If you meet a new potential client and your spidey sense goes off - maybe the person trashed their last contractor, maybe they are overly aggressive with metrics, or they just don't seem...nice...
And especially if they are early stage...
RUN!!! 🏃♂️➡️
Don't even think about it, just run away from the opportunity. Right then.
I had an experience where I met a new potential client.
Aggressive founder, rushed, trashed their old marketer. But needed a lot of help.
Instead of trusting my gut (and running), I thought "you know, I can HELP this person, this company...they are just stressed out, being a founder is hard."
I had empathy for what they were going through. I've been there.
So I took on the project.
We did the work. We took it on. We went above and beyond. The client was very tough - applying a perfectionist attitude to work that was also being nickeled and dimed. Everything was scrutinized. Their last marketer was fired was playing over and over through my head.
We crushed the metrics, across the board. We took on overhead to get things done.
We literally 10x'd part of the business year over year.
But...it wasn't enough. Not for this founder. They became an a$$hole, becoming ever more demanding for the last scope of work we took on.
Nope, we didn't do a good enough job. Look at what you missed here, or look at what you had to change there. As if having to change something because you thought changing the thing would make the offer better is a bad thing.
Look, we're not perfect. Nobody is.
But to the stressed, aggressive, overly entitled human treating our work as a commodity, nothing was good enough and nothing ever will be. Good luck to future marketers. Sorry for your last marketer.
And so they didn't pay for some of the work.
Sorry for us! We lost a bunch of money.
And this person gets away with it, as it's not worth chasing.
We have near 100% client retention at my growth consultancy. We build strong, deep relationships with our customers. We do amazing work. We're told that over and over. We build trust, our clients trust us with their business. Quite literally.
But none of that matters to a bad person running a not great business.
Nothing you do will change that.
And you won't convince people like this to view things the way you do. They don't change. Sometimes the people you work with and for are not great people. Or whatever they are going through is getting the best of them.
And unfortunately, in my experience, roughly 1 in 50 or so people seem to be like this in the business world. When you encounter these people, even if you need the work badly, run.
Don't try to fix their problems. You can't. You never will. They'll burn you, they'll burn the next person. And you'll be left holding the bag.
I learned a great lesson the hard way.
As I mentioned to this person when saying goodbye: at least my accountant will have a nice writeoff for me :)
Also - if you are in business and hiring vendors and consultants, PLEASE don’t be an a$$hole. Manage them, run a tight ship, but don’t be a bad business person. The world needs more good ones.
Craig