I was filming an educational series last week, and one of the points that the speaker was making was the idea of making sure you always take care of your key clients, no matter how big you get. So I asked her, what happens when you start to outgrow your clients, at least in price point, and we discussed making sure you continue to have a price point for where you want to take care of clients who have been with you during your growth.
This conversation came a few days after having a conversation with one of my long standing clients. Now by long standing I mean we’ve done work for them years ago, and they call every once in a while to check in on projects that they "haven’t decided on yet", and let us know that when they’re ready for something new, they’ll call, but they haven’t been necessarily breaking bread with us all of these years if you get my drift.
It’s a different version of kicking tires.
However, most of our business is business-to-business, and we work strictly in the field of production marketing, which are products that should allow our clients to receive more business when used right. And in most cases, we’ve watched our clients grow with us, some have grown past us, and others have stayed pretty much at the same level they were at when they became out client.
That’s not a problem for us at all, but unfornately it’s become a problem for them.
The call came through with the project they’ve been talking about for years. They’ve contintually called in to talk about what they wanted to do over the past several years, and was finally ready to pull the trigger on the work. But when we mentioned the price, they about fainted on the phone. And I guess they missed the part where we say that included the customer discount.
For the work we do, and for what we were charging, it was an absolute steal of a deal, yet they had valued our time and work at a level that it was at 7 years ago. Times have changed and so has technology. Not only are we a lot more knowledgeable than we were 7 years ago, but we’re a lot more efficient and more advanced creatively. If you were able to get the same amount of work for the same price from us after 7 years, we wouldn’t have been able to have grown over all of this time.
And unfortunately this client took a bit of banging over the head to get it.
As the owner of the company, I try to make sure that we take care of all of our clients as much as we can within their budgets, and so we were able to work out something for them that would work and give them a service they could use. But as I sat there on the phone talking to them, I couldn’t help but hear the same kind of charitable askings that I run into with most black owned startup companies. They were in a sense looking for the same "hook-up" they wanted 7 years ago. As if there hadn’t been any growth in their company over the past 7 years. They had essentially placed the same value on our services they did 7 years ago, but wanted us to give them all of our past 7 years of experience, knowledge, and upgraded skillsets, at the 2005 price.
I began to remember a colleague of mine who always reminded me that at every level of growth, specifically in the service industry, as you grow, you’ll continue to lose a small percent of business, but you’ll gain a significant amount more to replace what you’ve lost. He was definitely right. And although I may view the comment "outgrowing" in a negative way, as a business we strive to provide a service of excellence, commitment, and value. Our prices go up and we get better, faster, and able to continue to serve.
You shouldn’t have to ever feel bad about your price.
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