The Client Letter
December 11, 2013
The Desert of Arizona
Sunny 50 Degrees
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Ever get “the call” from your client? The one that starts, “We need to talk…?”
Does anything good ever come out of those calls?
I used to be scared of those. One, because I was a sheep who liked getting a pat on his head and told what a good job he was doing.
Two, because it really mattered to me what other people thought of me.
Given those two qualities, “the call” is a pretty stressful event. (“The call” could just as easily be an email… or a letter, or a text.) It’s easy to feel as though you are on trial.
This is the wrong feeling to have. I’m not invalidating what you’re feeling, that’s only something a fool would do.
But you only get this feeling because of the lie you believe deep inside yourself.
The lie is believing that your client is the judge, jury and executioner in your professional life. The lie is that your client has all of the authority and you have none. That you’re a piece of chattel owned by your client.
Believing these lies leads to misery.
The natural reaction is to “defend yourself.” You want to argue your case in order to stick around.
Your job isn’t to argue your case. We do that in court, we don’t do that in client relationships.
The trick to remember is that you have just as much authority and power as your client, even more.
They have the money, but you have what they want MORE than money. That sounds pretty even to me… it’s even kind of stacked in your favor. Unless you throw the whole game by showing up as your small, scared, sheepy self.
Most people do this.
So does anything good ever come out of those calls? Of course it does. In fact, I’d recommend you welcome those calls.
They can be extremely valuable and extremely helpful. It’s almost like a gift… provided you have the right version of yourself show up to the call.
The goal isn’t to keep your clients, it’s to get to working with the right clients as quickly as possible. Calls like this help you get to that goal a whole lot faster.