Ignore Some Clients

Today's post comes from Richard Wilding. Richard is the founder and owner of WMW, a creative agency which likes to pick fights with complexity at work. He's just written the UK Government's narrative for tech founders to set up, scale up and stay in the UK.

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Pleasing clients is a wonderful feeling.

Pleasing all your clients, it follows, is wonderfuller.

Maybe. But only if you’ve had the foresight, and the toughness of intent, to attract the right clients.

I used to take pride in my company’s ability to say ‘Yes’ to a client and then figure out how to do what they wanted later. It was a sure sign of how smart we were, how able to turn our minds to any challenge, solve it, and come back hungry for more. We were the Labrador Retrievers of the corporate world. Woof.

It was only after a while that I began to notice the effect that my ‘The Client’s Always Right’ behaviour was having on me and my business. Somehow, all those delighted smiles from the clients – you know: the ones that send happy-state endorphins fizzing around in your brain - had morphed my company from an agency trying to be a reasonably strategic culture communications agency into a hotch-potch yard sale outfit that did a bit of SharePoint building here, a spot of low-grade intranet site building over there, a kiss of competency wordsmithing over in the far corner. Every so often, we’d end up doing something that I actually wanted to do, something that I’d actually set the company up to do. 

At every stage, the clients had always been right to ask.

At every stage, we (ok: I, because in the end I condoned it and what a leader does is what the values are, never mind the comms campaigns) had been wrong to say yes. I should have said no. The clients were absolutely right to want what they wanted. But they weren’t right to imagine we were the right people to do it.

Believing that the client is always right, at the expense of the mission you’ve set out to achieve, means that you end up hiring the wrong people and wasting their time and yours on their development; losing the right people because the penny drops that they’re no longer doing what interests them; piling on all manner of costs you don’t need; spending time grappling with problems you shouldn’t be having to grapple with; spending hours on way too many meetings making decisions about things that couldn’t matter less; and ending up not especially happy with the world and the wonky mark you’ve made on it.

The trick, I learned, is to be clear about what it was that I wanted to do. I had a mission statement. Why the hell not spend my time pursuing it? Duh. It meant that I’d only look for the right kind of clients who wanted the same thing I wanted, and happened to like the way we did it.

The client’s always right only if it’s always the right client.

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