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Only Do What Works for You A couple of days ago I wrote about the huge amount of free advice that is around on the Net today and the fact that much of it is only worth what you've paid for it. You will find that piece here at Caveat Emptor. My own message was strong my mind yesterday as I read through a free download from John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing. John is obviously a very talented marketer and his advice, even his free advice, is well worth considering. But just because something works for him does not necessarily mean that it will work for you. In this world everyone's mileage is different and no two people will have exactly the same experience. That is true in your personal life and it also applies to your business life as well. One of the things that John recommends is that you need to develop the ability to say no to a client who wants you to do work that doesn't fit with your focus. And personally that horrified me. Not all that long ago Toni wrote a piece for an online publication that suggested that a small online business should never say no to any client. She wrote that from our personal experience. We have found over the years that many clients come to us with requests for work that might not quite fit with the services that we currently provide. We have never turned one of them away and we have always been able to meet the client's expectations. So to read someone's suggestion that a small business should turn clients away was … well it kind of took our breath away. For us, every client is important and keeping them happy and keeping them coming back to us has been the key to our success. In an industry where writers, and people who think they're writers, are a dime a dozen turning a client away because they ask for something different is as good as committing suicide. Once those clients have gone they'll never come back and we see that keeping every client we have is vital. Finding new clients is much harder than keeping existing clients happy. Obviously keeping existing clients happy when they come to us for something that is completely outside our set of skills can be difficult but not impossible. For example, a client recently asked us to design a website for him that included some custom scripting and a less than amateur looking design. Scripting is not our thing at all. I run away screaming at the site of a PHP script while Toni can make minor alterations to a script but has no idea how to write one from scratch. Website design is also not our strong point but there was no way we were going to turn this client away. So instead of refusing the work we accepted it gladly. For scripting and design we went to our network of other small business people and within an hour we had the script being written and the design under way. While we did the copywriting the other work was done on a sub-contract basis and at the end of the day the client had a site that he was happy with and we had a happy client who now recommends us to others for a variety of services. We also had another service to offer to prospective clients and our business had taken another step along its evolutionary road. So there are two opposing points of view. Turn customers away and concentrate on your core business or never turn business away, welcome challenges and evolve your business. Which one is going to work for you and your business? |