Dealing With Unreasonable Expectations
What do you do when a client has unreasonable expectations of your small business?
Since Toni’s business has been in operation she has built up quite a decent number of clients and there are now at least three that undoubtedly fall into the major client category.
Each of them spends a considerable sum of money with us each month on a variety of written work. Two of those clients often come to Toni for advice and suggestions on ways that they can extend their business and increase their income.
Toni does not charge for this consultancy work at all because often her suggestions lead to more work for us.
Early last week one of those clients approached Toni for some advice on what was ‘new’ on the Net and Toni suggested that he look at building an authority site. She pointed out that it would be a long-term investment that would require a reasonable amount of money to get off the ground. She also pointed out that, while there was no guarantee of success the client did have more chance of making money from it if he aimed at a particular niche.
He asked for some prices and went away to think about it. By Friday he was back and wanted to develop Toni’s suggestion into a project almost exactly as she had suggested. However, there was one sticking point.
“I don’t know if this will make money or not – can you reduce your prices to help me out.”
Basically he was worried about risking the sort of investment such a project was going to require and so he wanted us to carry him. Now if he made a million dollars out of the project there was no indication that he would then pay us the difference between what we wanted to charge and what he wanted to pay.
Instead he wanted us to carry some of the costs of him getting this project off the ground without any hope of making any more money than what he was going to pay us.
Needless to say, the short answer to his request was a polite ‘No’.
At that point it would have been easy just to forget the whole deal but Toni hates to see money walk away so she has put plan B to him. Instead of having Toni and I write the articles he wanted (because we’re well-qualified to write in that particular niche) Toni would get our other writers – who have little or no experience in the niche he is targeting – to write shorter articles for a much reduced price.
Toni pointed out to him that he would be getting what he paid for and the chance of his site achieving genuine authority status with those inferior articles would be greatly reduced. And now he has gone away to think about it again.
Lesson: It’s not up to a small business to carry its clients and we should never give in to unreal expectations … but sometimes there are options.
