Why the Dogs Come to My End of the Table

Bynormbowley

I like to think it’s because of my magnetic personality, but that wouldn’t be the truth. Our dogs sit by my feet at the table for a very pragmatic reason: I’m an easy mark. While the other end of the table has a strict no-scraps policy, my end has nothing of the sort.

Now, there’s a life lesson in this: if you find that certain kinds of individuals are over-represented in your life, or in your business, it may not be coincidence. There may be a stimulus-response thing going on.

Many years ago in my law practice I found that certain real estate clients were dreadful. They whined about everything, especially postage and photocopies, they thought my time was free and inexhaustible, and they were completely devoid of gratitude. In true Pareto fashion, 20% of the clients ate up 80% of my time. Interestingly, when I raised my rates and demanded a retainer up front, all the bad guys went away, leaving me with far more time and energy for enjoyable clients. And my practice grew and prospered.

It’s true enough that you have less latitude in some professions than in others. In medicine, social work and seniors care you can’t easily “fire” bad clients, but you can have and enforce boundaries, with consequences for breaching them. Whether public or private sector, the trick is to stop doing whatever attracts undesirable clients or undesirable client behaviour, and do more of whatever attracts the desirable. Often, like demanding a retainer, it’s more symbolic, but that can do the trick.

Are you feeding the dogs under your table?

Similar Posts

  • Blame Your Tools

    Bynormbowley

    There must be ten thousand things I loathe about Donald Trump, but of all of them the one which most disqualifies him from being in charge of a hot dog stand, let alone a country, is his habit of throwing his staff and advisors under the bus. He spends most of his waking moments braying…

  • The Happy Shoemaker

    Bynormbowley

    Angie was a summer student in our office many years ago, bright and cheery and trilingual English, French and Italian. And one day she introduced me to her grandfather. Domenic was a shoemaker, carrying on a profession he had learned in Italy long before coming to Canada. For at least five decades he toiled over…

  • The Hard Case vs. the Bad Case

    Bynormbowley

    There is a very critical distinction between hard cases and bad cases, and understanding this makes the difference between professional excellence and professional mediocrity. Or worse. To understand the difference, let’s first revisit Professor Czikszentmihalyi’s seminal teachings about flow. Flow is that state of existence where time loses meaning and you are in a zone…

  • Brexit and Beer

    Bynormbowley

    It’s no accident that Wetherspoons, the 900-plus tavern chain in the UK, is a staunch and generous supporter of Brexit. Nor was it coincidental that Hitler’s first attempted power grab was the Beer Hall Putsch. And we see Boris and Nigel more often than not hoisting a glass, not so much because of thirst as…

  • 400 Pound Bed?

    Bynormbowley

    Donald Trump said that the DNC hacker might have been a “nerd sitting on his bed that weighed four hundred pounds.” You know what he meant, but that’s not what he said. The plain meaning of the phrase is that the bed weighed 400 pounds. Silly Donald! Recently the CBC headlined “Dangerous Stories About Barbecue…