The Phrase I Won’t Ever Hear From a Client Again; Lesson Learned
March 16th, 2006
“I had pretty much given up on you…”
That is a phrase I won’t ever hear from a client again. His words are real and honest. It is an expression of frustration. My saving grace is that he did in fact express them at all.
The reason my client is rightly upset and nearly gave up hope is that I failed to communicate, failed to keep promises and failed to handle simple time-management and prioritization. I have learned though that those are merely surface symptoms of a greater ill — ego and sef-centredness. I didn’t give my client the respect and time that I would expect from others for me. I pushed work onto the back burner and rode my hobby-horse projects far too often.
As someone who has worked as an employee for most of his life, I faced being the boss — being in charge of scheduling, being in charge of time-management, being in charge of when things got done and in what order. It was difficult to admit that I wasn’t in charge of anything. I found that I was not only ignoring and disrespecting my clients but also jeopardizing any of the good that I was doing in the process.
Lesson Learned:
Treat people better than I would expect from them. (Hmmm… sounds familiar.)
I wish to show the journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur — the entire journey. What most people leave out from their story is all the stuff they do/did wrong. The acknowledgment of failures and misteps is the only way to move past them and to become a better person and better in business.
Entry Filed under: Miscellanea, Lessons Learned
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2 Comments Add your own
1. Kim | March 16th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
The hardest Boss to work for is yourself. Been there
2. Jules | March 16th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
I too am being pulled in many directions and find it difficult to attend to my client. Right now, I am gathering together documents for Income Tax (hate that!), reading 2 books sent to me for review, and beginning to write another book.
I would like to move my client to more of a self-running system (blog-like for the What’s New pages) but he is under the impression that management will not approve (I know otherwise but he doesn’t want to ask). By moving the What’s New page to a blog-like system, most of my requests will be handled internally.
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