I met up with a new client last week and was blown away by her photography. A self-taught amateur turned professional, it was obvious – even from someone who knows nothing about the art of photography – that she had a real eye for capturing startling images.
But talent, a business does not make!
When she started to tell me about the story behind her business and where she was at today, it became clearer and clearer to me that it wasn’t a lack of business skills that was holding back her business.
What was holding her back was her business attitude.
Her pricing was so low, that even she couldn’t quite believe what her hourly rate really was once we divided her commission rate by the number of hours she took to do the project (and I know I was being generous with the actual time she spent!). What was her reason for charging such so low prices?
“I am just so grateful for any work that I can get,” is what she replied.
Grateful is very dangerous word to use when talking about your clients. Thankful and even appreciative are great words. But grateful – never!
Grateful puts you in a place where you secretly beg for a client to work with you. When you are on the phone to them, you find yourself crossing your fingers and talking randomly to fill up the silence while the potential client decides whether to hire you or not. And when you do get a “yes” from them, you throw yourself in to the project, nothing being too much for you to do, despite the number of hours you end up spending.
Grateful will make you bend over backwards for a client who never pays you on time.
Grateful will make you drive for miles just to have a cup of coffee with someone who picks your brains and then says goodbye, leaving you to pick up the tab.
A grateful mindset must be left well alone and you must be able to speak with potential new clients with a “I’ve got a full diary this week” mindset. Even if you have to pretend to flick through your calendar to arrange a meeting (I did this on many an occasion in my first couple of years!!), you’ll notice a huge difference to how your potential clients make their decisions and how much you are able to charge.
Have you found yourself being too grateful for clients? And how has a grateful mindset affected your business? It always great to read your comments, too.
There’s no getting away from this story. Whether you watch X Factor or not, you would have to live on another planet not to have heard their names over the past couple of weeks.
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