Business Ownership: The Joy. The Pain. The Truth. by Paramore Breen Hannah

Author:Paramore Breen, Hannah [Paramore Breen, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pink Boa Publishing
Published: 2020-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

There is no such thing as an accurate estimate. An estimate is an estimate. It will change as we get further into the project, setting up some of the toughest conversations that agencies have with their clients.

Disconnect #6:

Clients say they want strategy—but they don’t.

Clients are impatient with the strategic process. They’d rather have a whole bunch of transactional wins and retrofit a strategy to it when it’s time for a board meeting than to do the real work...because most of them don’t know the difference between a strategy and a tactic.

Short-term tactics are like a drug; they provide an instant hit. Strategy is like physical therapy; it’s slow-going. Strategy doesn’t look like it will accomplish anything, until it finally does. But it doesn’t work at all if you don’t put strategy first.

Disconnect #7:

Clients don’t want you

to make a profit on their work.

Possibly the largest disconnect in this dysfunctional relationship is that clients want to work with a successful agency, but they don’t really want you to make money on their business. They negotiate you down to an hourly rate that you cannot survive on and then refuse to pay for the additional work required when the project grows beyond the original plans.

People are so focused on always getting “a deal” that they forget that agencies are in business to make money, too. This creates a relationship that is out of balance. The agency puts forward their best thinking in order to make the client successful, but the client wants us to work basically at cost. Not only is that an unsustainable situation for the agency, but eventually the client loses, too. They won’t get the agency’s best work if they aren’t willing to pay for it. The relationship devolves. That’s particularly true when hurt feelings coming from inside the agency translate into dishonoring the client, something I vowed to never do.

Honor the Client

At Paramore Digital, we had nine core values. The most difficult one to put into practice day to day was “Honor the Client.” The rest of that core value said, “We treat the client with respect even when they aren’t in the room.”

This meant that if you were having a bad day with a client, you weren’t allowed to bleed all over the rest of the staff, who might have had only good interactions with the same client. It meant that if there was a conflict, you honored the client enough to address it head-on. It meant that you supported clients in the community and that you fought for their best interest inside the agency.

If we found we couldn’t abide by this core value, we did one thing: we resigned the client.

I’d like to be able to say that our clients were the reason we were successful, but that’s not always true. They hired us, and most of the time they paid us, but often they didn’t pay us enough to support the amount of time and expertise they had consumed. We had to fight to get additional budget when the client would scope creep the project.

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