Client Relationships

“Being brilliant is no great feat if you respect nothing.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

As I work in the creative field, I am constantly interacting with people. While I sometimes think back to the times where, as a programmer, I found myself a bit secluded in my day-to-day routine, I generally like that aspect of my job. The work that FORGE does simply can’t exist without the insight and collaborative partnership of the clients that are paying us. This collaboration is crucial to a successful project of any type, and is dependent on things like trust, professionalism, and honesty.

While price is the universal leveler when it comes to economics, contracts are the glue that binds the relationship together. So while price is busy helping us (or hurting us), the contract is ensuring that everyone does their job. So why then do we find ourselves in the precarious situation at FORGE of having our contracts treated as a “mild suggestion” rather than a legally binding agreement?

It’s funny to me how things work out. We can plan, research, work hard, study, and generally we awesome at our jobs, but in the end the best work is produced when everyone is moving in the same direction to achieve a goal. In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about the formation of a company being like filling a bus. HP, for example, started by finding the right people. While hiring great people may seem pretty obvious, they didn’t always have a position predetermined for them. HP just wanted to fill their company with the best people they could find, then figure out where the bus was going to go together. This is exactly the position that FORGE is taking. We are trying to fill our company with the most amazingly talented people we can find, then decide together where we want to go. The thing that makes this work is the unified push of talented people towards a common goal. When FORGE is hired to help a client enhance their brand, for example, why is the client not key to have on the bus. If the client has a separate agenda, then the project will be much more difficult, and the likelihood of spectacular results is diminished.

There is a level of trust and respect that, I think, must exist in the creative field between clients and the creative professional. This may seem obvious, but I assure you, it’s not. I have seen projects go adrift because of things like agenda and outright lies during the planning and production phases. While, this is certainly rare, I can’t seems to shake the feeling that misplaced personal agenda and power struggles are a detriment to the successful completion of creative work.

One example of this happening is on a web project. During the planning phase, we created a timeline schedule that was agreed on by the client. However, during the design phase, we were continually being bombarded by our client asking for us to “hurry it up”. At this time, we were ahead of our agreed-upon schedule, and the constant harrassment was beginning to wear on our designer. Our repeated questions on this were met with double-talk and manipulation. As it turns out, the reasons for the push were purely personal, as our client was trying to impress his boss by delivering the project early. We eventually delivered the project slightly ahead of schedule, but only after unneccessary strife, stress and some long hours.

On many occasions, we talked about the fact that, if he would only treat us with respect and not lie and manipulate us, that we would gladly help make him look good for his superiors. We routinely work extra hours for our best clients, because we like and appreciate them. We do the things that we don’t get paid for, and are glad to do it. We have, on occasion, made small changes and updates for clients and not billed them, just to say thanks for working with us.

At FORGE, we always put in the extra work to get to know our clients business (not a shameless plug, read on). We have found that an in-depth kowledge of, for example, the train industry will give us the ability to help make better decisions and recommendations for one of our clients, DPG. While we will never know as much as they do, we feel like it is our duty to know as much as we can. What winds up happening when you spend this kind of effort on a client? Relationship! The more you know about someone, the more that you are personally invested in them. You begin to care. You begin to put in extra effort without even trying. You don’t know why, but your’e going to go ahead and tweak the design one more time, just to make sure it’s as polished as it can be. This isn’t favoritism, or lack of professionalism, but the result of relationship.

People are desparate to care. In an earlier post, I talked about the role of project manager in a design firm. I talked about the fact that the people producing the work and the people paying for the work need to know each other. The traditional role of project manager keeps this from happening. It’s hard to care about someone that you don’t talk to.

Professionalism is not a removal of all things personal, but rather a combined focus on the task at hand. This unified focus, mixed with a high level of skill and desire, will always produce amazing results. Results that both client and producer can share in. Isn’t that what everyone really wants, to be proud of what they have achieved. If we are honest with ourselves, what else is there.

I’d love to hear some thoughts on this. A story or 2 perhaps (not all bad, of course). Be blessed!

This entry was posted on November 27th, 2009 and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.