I have a little, painful confession to make!  Despite all the endless hours of valuable coaching about maintaining a red-velvet rope from Michael Port (author of “Book Yourself Solid”), I ignored my intuition and frequent advice I give my own clients and made the “well this one can’t hurt” justification in taking on a client who was not in my red velvet rope client base.  Ouch!!!

Can you relate to this? An “opportunity” comes along to service a client for what appears to be a lucrative sum of money and then here’s the BUT -, but the opportunity costs sanity, energy and ridiculous amounts of patience to maintain.  What seems to be a profitable venture becomes a painful distraction from the rest of the business.

I am referring to a particular situation recently, when I managed to briefly meander off the tight adherence to my target market which is heart-centered entrepreneurs, primarily women, committed to making a difference in the world, having integrity and passion for what they do and offer.

The social media client I took on has none of the qualities I just mentioned.  I have gotten familiar  (after entering the agreement with them) with several products this company sells and generally the goods are of poor quality and there is great disparity between the quality stated on the web catalog and the quality given.  This is a slight problem, when organic social media success happens by promotion of the value and quality a business offers by it’s “fans” (aka loyal customers) = social proof.

The “practical” side of me justified the acceptance of aforementioned relationship as a “good business decision” and in today’s economic world I would have been crazy to decline an “opportunity” that so many others would want!  I really want to say to the client is “the reason you have problems with repeat sales and client retention is the fact that you are selling crappy goods, social media presence is the LEAST of your concerns”.   Two things that may be likely if I say this:

1) It will end the agreement and I could receive the title: “Most Tactless Vendor Ever Retained”

2) The client will hear those words every time someone complains about the products and MAYBE, JUST MAYBE it would plant the seeds of productive change

Chalk this up to the lesson book. We’ll call it lesson #10,987 in the business school of hard knocks.  The LESSON:  I hire my clients as much as they hire me! Time to straighten my red velvet rope and move on.

Now…to proceed with a healthy strategy to exit this business relationship so that it leaves both me and the client with more wisdom than we started with.