Creating Long-Term Partnerships with Clients

By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan, Organisational Provocateur

While contractors and employees often work FOR their clients in superior-subordinate relationships to perform tasks, as advisors, we work in concert WITH our clients in collaborative partnerships, helping them to achieve and sustain certain results and improvements.

Contractors carry out tasks on behalf of their clients, with very little client involvement.

Consulting projects are joint "adventures" [options: engagements, crusades, happenings, journeys] to achieve jointly established objectives. Clients must accept the fact that they must provide their own implementing teams, in which consultants operate as catalysts, not as extra pairs of hands (situational elbow grease or external labourers).

When clients' teams do the real work, they will be more appreciative for the accomplished outcomes, they can claim ownership of the improvement, the overall cost will be lower, new skill building will take place among team members and it will actually be possible to sustain the improvements after the consultants are gone.

This requires of us to create win-win relationships. So, what is a good partnership?

Partnerships are developed when with time, our clients' investments in our unique skills is in balance with our investments in their opportunities. The partnership is about maintaining this magic balance between our skills and clients' opportunities.

The more unique opportunities clients have, the more unique skills they require. Also, the good new is that the higher fees you can charge for that kind of help.

So, the relationship is a psychological contract in which there is a balance between the consultants unique skills and the client's unique opportunities.

The client's massage to the consultant is: You receive these opportunities if/when we receive your skills.

The consultant's massage to the client is: You receive my skills if/when we receive your opportunities.

So, since it is a something for something relationship, they must regard each other as peers, based on mutual trust and respect. No of them has any advantage or disadvantage. This is not a "give me money and I deliver what you want" type relationship.

So, let's go and discover the four key elements of this win-win partnership. They are 1) Uniqueness, 2) Balance, 3) Chemistry and 4)Wants.

1)Uniqueness - On the one hand clients must have to be able to offer us unique opportunities and sexy projects, on the other hand, we must be unique enough to deserve these unique opportunities. We must be unique enough to be wanted for these unique opportunities. So, it is important we spend significant amount of time to build our skills. The good news is that individual consultants can easily define themselves as unique entities. This is where we bring together who we are and what we do.

The bad news is that many consultants do not do it at all, for they are "too busy". Yes, they are too busy doing commodity work in very high volume for commodity fees. And that may be good for revenue, but bad for personal life and family.

Surveys indicate that average consultants have about 21 billable hours per week. In order to bill 21 hours, consultants work about 55-60 hours per week. The way I look at it, this is not the starting point for an enjoyable and balanced life.

I suppose this is why I am for value-based billing, which has nothing to do with elapsed time. It is also a unique selling point because so few people use it. All in all, it has a few advantages.

2) Balance -Balance is about the mutual aspect of everything you and your clients do together. It means you do not do things "FOR" the client, but "WITH" the client. There is a huge difference. As a consultant, you are a passive repository of abilities and resources for your clients, and they must activate you if they want to benefit from you.

In the same way, clients are passive repositories of opportunities for you, but you must activate them to benefit from them.

Although I am talking about balance, there is one important factor to consider. For your unique skills the client gave you a unique opportunity. The client may think it was a fair trade, and at that time you accepted it too. However, later the client may move the goalposts, and you realise that you were taken for a ride. You discuss it with the client, but he is not willing to increase your compensation.

So, what can you do?

The best bet is to walk away, I believe.

Here is a comparison between the viper and the cobra. When a viper bites, it gives out all of its venom. The cobra, however, can control the amount of venom it ejects.

The same way consultants can control the amount of their abilities they are ready and willing to use to improve the client's condition. You will match the value of the opportunity with the value of the ability you are about to use to help the client. I think, this is perfectly normal.

Two years ago I was helping a small firm to develop an operations system and an operations manual for consistent service. About 65% down the road the president told me he also wanted me to write a new business plan for his firm with detailed competition analysis. I refused and told him that was not part of our project, so he withheld some of my fees. So I left. Two years later, everything we developed together is still lying on his desk, waiting for proofreading, perfecting and further analysis, while he has gone back to his hyper-busy schedule. So, he was willing to lose $21,000 by never implementing what we did together. How sad.

3) Chemistry - This is very important factor, but very often missing. There must be a match of personalities in collaborations. Many sales courses teach that we adjust ourselves to our buyers. While I believe that approach is all right for selling things, where close relationship is not necessary, it is not necessarily the best approach for selling services. Providing professional services is heavily relationship-based, so it is important to choose well who we are or are not willing to work with.

4) Wants - In healthy collaborative engagements, both you and your clients have certain wants. Again, your wants and the clients wants must match. So, what do we have clients may want?

The list is almost endless, but some clients want from us are insights, new perspectives, different frame of reference, know-how, information, experience, objectivity, courage, wisdom, authenticity, vision, etc.

And what do we want from clients in return. Attention, commitment, money, feedback, ideas, time, respect, willingness to risk, experience, etc.

Clients make both objective and subjective assessment on us, and we do the same with them.

Objective assessments look at what service we offer and how we offer it. The subjective assessment is about what it feels like working with us. And being comfortable can include being challenging and provocative. That will give the feeling for our clients that we are more than a pretty face and a yes person in the company.

In traditional relationships clients put consultants on the spot: "Prove to me you are good enough". And after consultants get hired the scenario changes to "perform FOR me, so I can assess you."

In the ideal client partnerships clients trust their consultants to make recommendations about improvement in the status quo. The basic client assumption is that consultants will act responsibly to help clients to improve their condition. The scenario here is "Let us collaborate, so we can be successful together."

On the final analysis, consulting is a relationship business. Our services can be objectively compared to other consultants' services, but well-built and maintained relationships are subjective, thus cannot be compared. They are either enjoyable experiences or not.

That is why it is important to aim for breakthrough relationships right from the start when we decide it would be a great experience to collaborate with that dude/dudette. It may take time, but if we create a mutually enjoyable relationship with that person, some day s/he will say "I would like to discuss a project with you." By then that person knows what you do, the results you have created with other buyers, and most importantly, that it will be a pleasant experience to collaborate with you.

After having discussed partnerships and various criteria needed for good partnerships by discovering the emotional components of creating equal playing fields, now let's see what we need to consider for for clear contracting, making certain every player is on the same page in terms of objectives, time frames, availability, measures of success and the value of the project.

1) Working towards the same objectives - This vision is the guiding light for the whole project and beyond. You must make sure that everyone has bought into this vision before you even start the project, otherwise you may end up the only person working towards that vision, which is not even yours, but your clients'. And when clients abandon their visions, that is when we can hear comments like "Just keep working on it, but I am busy doing other things right now." This is why it is very important

2) Make sure you got paid upfront - We make our commitments when we start working on improving the client's condition, and clients make their commitments when they actually invest in that improvement.

Money is the walk of the talk. When you ask buyers to write you a cheque to invest their own money in their own visions and goals, you will learn very quickly how serious they are. Buyers vote with their money. When you ask them to make an investment (your service shout never be a cost or expense but an investment with stipulated return), the message as to whether or not they believe in their own visions becomes crystal clear whether or not they cough up the dough. And if they do not believe in what they do, nor should you.

Remember Machavelli's words: "The Prince who himself is not wise, cannot be wisely advised". You can have a very hard time to be the advisor for a business owner who is really just a third rate punk.

3) We all work within the same frame of parameters - When you start working on new projects, both you ad your clients are highly excited and enthused about the outcomes you will create together. However, you need more than excitement. You also need a jointly developed plan that gives all the people involved in the project a clear road map. Basically this road map serves as both a template for implementation and a reference for occasional checkpoints.

4) Acknowledging the importance of the project. We all know this work is important and serves higher causes. It is important that everyone's condition is improved. Yes, most projects' missions are to fatten business owners' bank account, but there must be more to it. Owners, partners, associates, clients and - I dare to say - their family members must have a sense of improvement in their lives after the successful completion of the project.

Right at the beginning, it is vital to gain - besides intellectual - an emotional buy-in from all the key people. Engaging both the head and the heart makes the hand take the right action.

5) We work as collaborators - The whole concept is to create, make mistakes, fail and succeed together. You do not work for me, and I do not work for you. We all have great knowledge in our areas, but it would be hard or even impossible to do the work alone. So, by emphasising our strengths and circumventing our weakness we can contribute our best to the joint work, which eventually will be much much more than anyone's best. We explore opportunities together, take risks together, sometimes fall flat on our faces together and succeed and celebrate together.

6) We keep communication open - And communication is not about accepting orders some mentally deranged clients bark at you, but a two way street, so both of you can express both good and bad news. It is important to have regular written clients feedbacks, but it is even more important to provide instant feedback to keep the engagement and the relationship on course.

7) We value results and outcomes, not activities and deliverables - Many consulting engagements go apeshit because clients insist on seeing a buzz of activities and receiving a pile of deliverables. Yes, this is a rather convenient approach because it requires no real commitment from clients. And most consultants like it for they labour for hourly fees, so the more tasks they can find and the more deliverables they can conjure up for their clients, the more they get paid. And many of those deliverables have nothing to do with real improvements in the client's condition.

The fact is that most clients, especially managers of manual workers, have no idea about how to treat knowledge workers. Here again we must distinguish between consultants and contractors.

8) We actually fit to work together - There must me more than an intention to make money for the consultant and improving the existing situation for the client. That is usually the traditional consulting model, in which clients expect consultants to do the work, and consultants work hard to generate enough deliverables that justify their fees.

Consultants focus on the number of reports written, the number of workshops and surveys conducted. That is, the whole process is task-centred, not outcome-centred. To be outcome-centred, there must be a good chemistry between clients and consultants, so they actually collaborate as equals, instead of plugging away in superior-subordinate relationships.

That is why it is important to meet clients 2-3 times before starting projects. If you start the project and then find out that your client is a somewhat obnoxious and belligerent person, then there is nothing much you can do. Because of the emotional attachment, it is hard to step out of an already running project.

9) What is right is more important than who is right - Both clients and consultants can fall into this trap. Clients may say, "I am right, for I give the money". Consultants may say "I must be right to deserve my fees". And there is war even before you can say Jemima Puddleduck.

I believe the key is not who is right but what is right. That is what the whole collaboration is all about. Clients did not hire you because you know all the answers, but because together you know more than individually. Clients know their businesses better than you do, but you know certain aspects of that business better than your clients do. So, together you can achieve more. When there is a common vision of what to achieve, then it is easy to do the right

10) We all acknowledge that the project is to be done by clients not for clients - One important aspect of any consulting project is that clients learn how to sustain the improvement after the consultants are gone, and are capable of relating the process anytime in the future if/when necessary. And they can only sustain the improvements, if they are willing to do the work with their consultants' guidance. The funny thing is that - apart from some demanding idiots - clients do want to do the work, but many consultants believe they must do the work themselves to justify their fees.

According to the - Canadian Oxford - dictionary, the verb "consult" means to seek information or advice from a person and refer to a person for advice and opinion. It mentions nothing about doing manual labour FOR clients.

Partnership Poisons

Last but not least we discuss how to stay away from the pains and sufferings caused by toxic partnerships. Every now and then some of our partnerships go down the drain and we do not even notice it until it is too late. So, let us go through a few issues that can cause these toxic partnerships.

1. You get into something you normally do not do - We all know what kind of people we want to work with, and what kind of people we want to avoid like the plague. Most of us put our heart and souls into our gigs, and it can be a major emotional blow when the client turns out to be a belligerent arsehole, who we would have never accepted an opportunity from if we had known better. Yeah, but we did not. How could that happen? There is a very good chance that we accepted that engagement with our heads in spite of the fact that our hearts were rebelling against the decision and were quietly screaming in anticipation of future agony.

The other option within the same category is when the client is just brilliant, but we accept a totally unfamiliar piece of work out of greed or out of fear, thinking, "the client expects me to know all that".

I believe we actually increase our credibility when we honestly tell clients we do not know something. They will accept it, for there are many things they do not know, so we are equals

2. You hold over ambitious hopes - All right, we must be optimistic, and with ourselves we can even be overoptimistic. After all, only you know what you are capable of pulling off. However, it may not be a good idea to be overoptimistic with clients.

You can never be certain about the level of commitment they are ready, willing and able to put into the project, and if they back off, you may land in deep yoghurt. Remember, you are an outsider. You have more or less no credibility with other people, so whatever you do in your power, you can only have a tiny fraction of the influence on them your buyer can.

The important point here is that we must create and environment in which people can easily say to each other: "I don't know. Please help me?" There can be people's egos in the way. That is why it is so important to create a "heart level" connection among people, so the role of the ego is reduced to the bare minimum.

3. The buyer loses interest and drops commitment on the project - This is one more reason why you must get your payment – well - before completion. After you started the project another consultant can walk in and show something interesting to the buyer, so s/he starts that project too with full zest.

But then what the cricket will happen to the buyer's zest for your project? Well, it often goes down the drain, leaving you chasing your money all over hell's half acre. When you notice that buyers' commitments are dwindling, bring it to their attention and do some contingent action to get buyers back on track. Your best weapon is communicating the values of the project (result the buyers' companies will receive and the wins the buyers will receive personally). Make sure you keep buyers emotionally engaged in the improved condition, so they have a better chance to give their full commitment.

4. You become part of the client's problem - There may be certain things in partnerships which remind you of some bad experiences from your own past, and can trigger you emotionally in the wrong way.

Imagine that you are working with a funeral director, and in one of his cemeteries lies the guy who was sentenced to death for raping you when you were a child. You walk around the "jobsite", and suddenly find a grave with his name on it. From then on the whole project is messed up, for every time you come to the "jobsite" you will be in an emotional turmoil.

But this is just one issue. You can become part of the client's problems in other ways too. You can be easily kidnapped by internal politics. This may sound extreme, but it is important to be aware of it.

5. There is no match between you and the buyer - There are times when although we look forward to a nice sexy project, but we just do not have the right kind of connection with the buyer. When we accept these gigs, we can end up in pretty disastrous marriages.

In my opinion, our relationships with our clients are very similar to our romantic relationships, and I dare to say the sales cycle is the professional equivalent of dating, whereas the project period is the professional equivalent of marriage.

A while ago I had a client whose wife was a government employee. In most countries government employees are trained to act and behave like gods, and she was very good at it.

One month into the project, she started challenging her husband to demand more work from me for he pays me anyway. Eventually the whole project went apeshit and I walked away.

The project went down the drain and he lost his investment. For instance, in an email he demanded me to revamp his business plan while he would go on vacation. The fact that he reached record sales in the second month of our collaboration went unnoticed. When I mentioned it to him, he shrugged: "What's the big deal? That's what I pay you for!"

I loved the project, but there was no proper match between us.

6. You push your own agenda - Here comes the problem when you know too much about clients' industries and businesses. Using Zen Master, Shunryu Suzuki's words, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are just a few." Actually, the less you know about your client's industry and business, the more valuable your insights can be. There more you know about them, the more likely you colour within the same lines your client does. You become just another yes person, and cannot be provocative any more.

And that is when you can create scenarios in your head and pushing them upon clients. Then clients quickly learn you are there not to help, but really feeding your own ego by being right all the time, and they will never invite you again. Also, when you know too much, you may end up telling clients what they want to hear, instead of what they need to hear.

7. Either you or the buyer runs some shadow issues - There are two aspects to relationships: Surface and shadow issues. We openly share surface issues, but do our best to keep shadow issues in the background. We can also call some of these shadow issues as good old pretence.

However, since many of these shadow issues drive change within organisations, it is vitally important to pay attention to them, otherwise we may well get half-arsed commitment from buyers and half-hearted buy-ins on propositions for improvement from implementing teams.

However, you need a hefty amount of trust from your buyers before you can start discovering shadow items. And this is where the advising profession splits. Some start cautiously, while some, including me, jump in, being challenging and provocative right from the beginning. At least, this approach helps me to filter out the kind of dudes and dudettes I enjoy to work with.

8. The buyer has lots of work but - allegedly - little dough - There are times when buyers – especially small business operators – say they have no money but need help.

Do you know what is funny?

Very often the very same people live in nice homes and drive BMWs or other luxury cars. They take every penny out of their businesses and then complain that there is no money left to hire professionals to help them with various issues.

I have recently done a marketing gig for a struggling 10-year old computer firm. The president was basically bragging about that they had never had a marketing budget but managed to - just - survive. Well, he had the BMW and the nice home all right, but the business was seriously underperforming. We worked together for six months (it takes time to start the momentum after 10 years of non-marketing), but then he suddenly ended the gig, saying he had better ideas. Yeah. Eventually he hired a salesguy, who would go out to beat the pavement day after day, trying to peddle some "boxes" (computer hardware).

This company has lots of marketing work to do, but the highest level of executive ignorance will make them struggle probably forever.

9. You accept a project for the money - This is a huge problem. When you take an engagement for the sake of the dough, you have just stepped on a downward spiral, and may not even have noticed it. There is a very good chance that the work will be a struggle and you will not enjoy it. In great projects there must be higher motivators than money. I dare to say that very often money gets in the way of good work, and when we accept an assignment simply because we need the dough, we cannot really put all our hearts and soul into that project. So, eventually even if clients are happy with our work, we will always know that we have done a half-arsed job, and that can be pretty damaging to our self-esteems.

10. The contracting is not clear - This happens especially traditional consultants who contract on delivering certain items. "I deliver a team building workshops with a 30-page workbook." The contract is crystal clear in terms of tasks and deliverables, but totally unclear in terms of what the blaze we want to accomplish here. Clients do not need sales workshops and workbooks. No. They need increased closing ratio, higher fees, higher loyalty of sales staff, lower client attrition and lower cost of acquiring new business. These are results with specific outcomes, so a definite investment can be made to realise specific returns. Tasks and deliverables are mere commodities and usually traded on price just like sacks of potatoes.

Copyright 1997-2010 Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan. All rights reserved. You are free to use this article in whole or in part. One favour though: Can I ask you to you include complete attribution, including a live website link. Also, can you please let me know where you plan to publish the article.

The attribution: This article was written by Organisational Provocateur, Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan of Dynamic Innovations Squad, a firm specialising in helping consulting firms to sell their expertise at the highest margins. Get Tom's free Practice Management Black Paper when you sign up for his monthly newsletter, Commando Consulting: Lessons And Practices From The Ultimate Professional Service Firm, The Military. Visit Tom's website at http://www.di-squad.com.

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