Posts Tagged ‘clients’

@maurilio:

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Sometimes You Can Only Win After Failure

Sometimes your client or potential client needs to fail before you can help him. That was a difficult lesson for me to learn, but has proven to be an important one. And if you’re going to be successful in the service industry, you better learn this one, and fast. Earlier in my career as a consultant, I would try to argue and convince my clients of a course of action that I thought was best for them. Most of the time my advice became strategy or a tool that eventually brought results. But from time to time I encountered, and still do to this day, people who believe they know more than I do and decide that their solution is preferable to mine. As a consultant, this know-it-all attitude has always puzzled me. After all, if you know the “what” and “how,” why hire me in the first place? In…

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3 Reasons to Fire a Client

Sometimes you have to fire your clients. That sounds almost wrong until you give it some thought. Early in entrepreneurial career, I would say “yes” to anyone willing to hire me. The reasoning was simple: I needed to eat and someone was willing to pay for what I had to offer. However, over the years I have lost a lot of money and opportunity courting and working with clients who were not strategically a good fit for my company. Until I realized the true cost of working outside my sweet spot, I continually jumped on every opportunity that came my way. What I did not understand for a long time is that for every less-than-ideal client or project we pursued as a business and took on, we gave up the ability to find and work on the projects that were the most enjoyable, most profitable and, therefore, most successful. The…

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Text Messaging and Your Business

Nothing has had a greater impact on how I do business than text messaging. Not long ago, I was on a conference call with someone in Texas, someone in Sao Paulo, Brazil and I was in a car driving through New York City. The conversation sounded clear in spite of the thousands of miles and time zones separating us. However, I believe nothing has revolutionized more the face of business in the last decade since the proliferation of email than text messaging. Just a few years ago, text messaging was seeing as an annoyance designed for teens and not a serious tool for business professionals. But lately, I have seen a major shift in how my busiest clients want to communicate. Some, if not most, of my clients fit into the type A, let’s-get’em-done category. They value getting quickly to the bottom line. They prefer the succinct, and yet effective…

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