I recently had an experience I wanted to share with you.
I’ve been working on engaging a particular Client for about six months. If we got this Client, it not only would be a very nice engagement, it would help us reach critical mass in a particular market we were going after. For this reason, I decided to break some of my rules of starting engagements and as a result not only did the engagement not happen, but I spent an inordinate amount of time in a non-productive manner.
The rule I broke was not adequately establishing the value of the engagement and having a solid agreement about the work that was to be done. When establishing the value of an engagement, the value must come from the Client. In this case, I stated what the value was, but the Client never fully agreed. I assumed that since I had told them the value and they nodded their head that we had a deal.
There were all sorts of signs that the Client was uncomfortable with our deal. I wanted this deal to work badly so I ignored the signs. Once again, I learned a lesson. The lesson was when working on the details of the engagement, it doesn’t matter what I think, it only matters what the Client thinks.
Just to review, here are the steps that are necessary for a successful engagement to happen:
- Have a clear understanding of what the Client is trying to accomplish.
- Offer the Client a variety of options they can choose from.
- Have the Client value the engagement in dollar terms. This must be done from the Clients point of view.
- Set the fee for the engagement. This should be easy to do because you know what the monetary value the Client has placed on the engagement.
- Have the engagement signed and collect at least a deposit check.
- Start work on the engagement.
I unfortunately went from step one to step six. And, as a result, it turns out I wasn’t very clear even on what the Client was trying to accomplish. I once again reminded myself that these six steps are in place for a reason. Here’s to not making the same mistake again.
Josh Patrick
Filed under: Fees, For Business Advisors
