Still from American Psycho

What we make things mean.

We’re all guilty of passing quick judgement on others. We do it everyday, most often without giving it a second thought. That idiot who cut in front of you in traffic or the uncouth teen who didn’t hold the door of the café as you were trying to get in with your stroller and a myriad of kids in tow. It’s hardwired in our brains as a remnant of a time when we had to make split-second decisions that would make the difference between life and death. It worked well as a survival heuristic, but nowadays, where the most dangerous activity most of us voluntarily engage in daily is driving, very rarely any of us have to face real and unexpected danger.

What this means is that we routinely conflate behaviors with character traits and judge people as if one of their actions was representative of their whole person. This idiot driver may demonstrably be a terrible driver, yet mean well, in which case that behavior is only a manifestation of their lack of technical skills and not of their moral disposition. That uncouth teen might have been going through his first break-up and be heartbroken, thus completely oblivious to your struggles as a parent with children running around you in circles.

... what we often fail to recognize is that what we construe as a qualitative behavior, is just a behavior without a moral value attached to it.

The same goes for your clients. It is common to hear people being classified as either “good” or “bad” clients because they engage in one type of behavior or another. One client is slow to pay their bills, while another is very curt when we speak to them on the phone. We’ve all had to deal with those. But what we often fail to recognize is that what we construe as a qualitative behavior, is just a behavior without a moral value attached to it. It’s how we react to these behaviors that makes us perceive them as being somewhere on the spectrum of bad to good when they’re inherently neither.

If there is no bad or good client, then why do I have to deal with all these annoying behaviors?

Finding suitable clients is a bit like the courting process, you have to go through this little dance to understand if you’re a good fit for one another. There are people out there who get married on a whim and similarly, there are businesses who are willing to take on any and every client without qualifying them, but it doesn’t mean that this is a good idea.

The things that are widely accepted to make a marriage work, also work with the other types of relationships. Things like honesty, respect, communication and the ability to tackle problems head-on help make these professional relationships work. That means you have to become good at knowing what you want, communicating it and vet your clients to ensure that they represent a high probability of turning into a fruitful relationship.

It starts with working out your positioning in the marketplace. What do you do? Who do you do it for? And what do you offer that nobody else does? If you do not know the answer to one or more of these questions, there is work to be done, and that’s probably a good idea for you to explore this aspect of your business. With a clarity of expertise and positioning, comes the confidence and framework to identify which clients are suitable for you. The more precise you can be, the more refined will be your vetting process because you’ll learn to ask unexpected and tough questions while expecting specific answers that are indicators of a good fit.

With a clarity of expertise and positioning, comes the confidence and framework to identify which clients are suitable for you

I would even go one step further and say that working out your vision, will help you further refine your positioning and how you communicate about your business, which in turn will help attract the right clients. A good vision is a future-oriented desired state that expresses and summarizes your values, which when clearly expressed will either turn prospects on or shoo them away, as a form of automated vetting as the people who will contact you will eventually pre-qualify themselves.

From there, you will only perceive others’ behaviors as indicators of whether a prospective client is a good fit or not, without judgment of value, thus removing any emotional attachment to your vetting process. Your client will also thank you for being so intent on delivering maximum value to them via narrow and deep expertise. Over time, your confidence in the process will increase as you’ll realize that it works wonders at helping to find and retaining the right clients.