„Customer collaboration over contract negotiation“

I agree that sometimes it’s necessary to stay away from ugly people to practice this philosophy. But if you manage this you’ll love your job.

You philosophy of clear contracts assume your own perfection. That impossible. Perfection is a moving target. There’s nothing more stressful than knowing that you’ll be the one who violates deadlines etc. – so communication is better. Your customer will realize that something takes more time as he is involved into the work process directly.

But… for each kind of support/consultancy… here it is essential for survival to keep distance to customers. Especially when dealing with software/server support. The main problem is that in this case customers requests are urgent always. In the scope of the customer. But in your scope every concern has a special priority in whole context of all customer concerns. Setup realistic SLAs and try to keep them at any price. If you realize that you SLAs don’t work – change them or hire more people because wrong exspectations lead to disappointmens.

@ Arthur – The client rating system sounds interesting. I’ll have to check into it and see if I might be able to implement something similar. Well said, “it’s always a good time to end a bad business relationship.”

@ Kamen – I think we might be talking about two different types of work or parts of the process. I mean that you should clearly establish what it is that you will and won’t be doing for a client so that there’s no misunderstanding.

In other words good planning/outline/description can add significant value and is fair to be paid.

IMHO the best approach is to select right people and to avoid dummies

I use a client rating system similar to that I’ve seen used by CPA’s and corporate law firms to improve the quality of my own business, and it’s working wonderfully. In a nutshell, my goal is to either improve or eliminate the relationships with marginal clients in order to increase my productivity and profit.

I’m wrapping up my business with a difficult client right now, in fact. They’ve been a steady client for ten years, but the CEO has become increasingly unreasonable in the past few years, driving away his highest quality employees and a few contractors, too. It’s always a good time to end a bad business relationship.

Thanks for the great article–these things happen so frequently, and it’s important to keep them in check.