It can be both impressive and inspiring to watch the reaction/interaction with your day to day clientele. Just today, we did something that we’ve never done at dotfive – we passed on projects.
Lately, we’ve become overwhelmingly swamped — almost to a fault, where we notice that our projects are slipping out of our weak, keyboard ridden designer finger tips. Instead of becoming an assembly line filled with template’s and swoosh laden logos, we’ve opted for the latter; succumb to our innate perfectionism and produce less products with high focus quality.
Potential Clients Respond
For the most part, this went over extremely well — many of our potential projects we have been discussing with we posted noting that our workflow has become overwhelming, and that we cannot give them the direct attention that they and their product deserve – and for some we recommended designers and firms right away, others we noted we’ll keep an eye out, but above all we offered to leave them up on our management system so we can continue to answer questions and guide them as asked pro bono (we often add them to our project management list to help guide them — even if they don’t ultimately choose us for their needs, it’s a much better business decision to take a few minutes of your day and help guide people into the realm of the internet and marketing and branding than to throw them to the wolves of home dreamweaver users, and old school non-standard developers – you’re in the business of relationships, and someday, someone will return the favor to help you. Regardless, I consider it design humanity).
One potential client did not take this so well… in fact, I’d say irate was not the term for it. The project was a simple online store — and most of this the client wanted to learn on their own time — so it was free guidance in some sense. We’ve noted that we can no longer entertain the prospect of designing and coding the store for them (not ‘easy’ as they assumed) regardless of the cost, but that we’d be happy to continue to leave the project management site up to answer questions and offer guided input as inquired.
Not good enough.
The user was ‘highly disappointed’ in us, and felt that we had left him ‘high and dry’, ‘ruined’ his holiday weekend, and created ‘considerable stress’ in his overall life because of our notice… I’d like to note that this project was never agreed to be taken, no money was passed, no contract signed — and save one in house meeting (where the potential client was 3 hours late and threw a fit because I tried to reschedule to not shun another client), one post, and two emails — no other information was passed. The project had sat flat in our management system for almost 2 weeks without any response from the person or answers to the questions we inquired save one notice he posted about a site he thought looked nice.
Instead of me apologizing for the inconvenience, and wishing him all the best (which I did at the end of the email of course), I took the poor course of sparring with his extensive gripes defending our company and our person.
That has failure written all over it.
Business or Personal?
Because of this I’m riding an even more aggressive email — blatantly calling me reactive to his comments, and noting that they were means to guide and teach me about issues I need to potentially overcome in my person and profession – and going out of his way to slam dotfive to any and all potential clients. The assumption that you can offer this advice after brief contact is somewhat unfounded, but he is correct in issues I need to address: reactive responses.
For the most part, many of us can clearly sever business from personal — but when you’ve created the business, it can become understandably personal. This does not justify a personal response: it is simply business.
While on the one front, I should have understood that on the end of this impersonal email is a person stressed about the fact that their cold project just dropped ten degrees — on the other, I should have remembered that business is not meant to be an attack on who or what I am. This does not validate the persons need to chastise us for halting the project bid and offering continued free advice; but it clearly does not allow me the right to respond with ill tempered passion over my business. Because… it’s just business.
Your Reaction reflects your Professionalism
Failure keeps you fresh. A response and one angry client by no means equates to failure, but it does ground you in the fact that all your associates are not you nor will they do business in the way your previous clients respected. People are people, and you’re not anything different. Remember that in every client interaction is a lesson to be thwarted or accepted, and how you choose to enact on your thoughts is a direct reflection of your companies vision.
While I don’t agree with how this client viewed our notation for continued free advice over developing the project ourselves as a death blow to development, I’ve now gained a person not rooting for our vision, but blatantly contrasting that ideal.
Keep. Cool.