The Grid of Life

If you’ve attended any of my talks or webinars, you’ll know my fondness for the ABCD Grid, particularly as it relates to professionals and their clients. I’ve also used the device in a series of articles on the Ecology of Referrals. (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ecology-referrals-norman-bowley/)

Simply put, the A client is not only highly profitable to the professional, but requires little overhead. The B client is also low maintenance, but less profitable. The C client is highly profitable, but very high maintenance, while the D client is a nightmare of low profitability and high cost.

It’s a no-brainer who gets the boot first. Getting rid of D clients is so obvious that if you don’t get it, you shouldn’t be in business. But for many professionals, there’s a lot of agony about ditching the C clients. “I make a lot of money off them”, you might say.

Well, actually you don’t, if you account for the soft costs of catering to a C client over time. These people abuse your time, abuse your staff, call you at home in the evening and on weekends, and are miffed when you don’t drop everything to look after their latest last minute harebrained whim. Because they interfere with your really good work, they stunt your professional growth and business growth, and are a perpetual professional risk. Sooner or later they will put you in an ethical corner. In my experience, professionals who carefully push C clients out the door find their practices become safer, stabler, happier, and soon enough, far more profitable. (There are two narrow exceptions, but they’re for another time.)

More recently I have been introducing the idea that an ABCD Grid also applies to one’s professional talents, that is, there is a regression of benefit and a progression of cost as you move from your “sweet spot” to your “suicide zone”, and that notion is a theme in my book. More of that later.

But life itself benefits from such an analysis. In the A Zone we are doing the good things and being the good things which come ever so naturally to us and which yield great benefit to us and all those around us. This is where we need to spend as much time as we can. We also have a B Zone, an area of our lives where we do all the little things we need to do, which are relatively easy, and which yield modest (and often necessary) benefit.

Most of us also instinctively deal fairly well with our D Zone– areas of life which would cost us dearly but yield little or no benefit. It’s the C Zone that causes grief, and here’s why: we lie to ourselves about the true benefit and the true cost.

Most addictions and bad habits fall into this area, because at the moment of doing these things, we undervalue the cost and overvalue the profit. That’s because, let’s face it, most such activities feel pretty darned good at the time, and the consequences are an eternity away. Except for one brief mention, I’m not going to pick on anybody’s particular sins, because I have plenty of them myself. We all have C Zones: a perverse high felt value and a perverse low perceived cost. Ask any smoker to explain this to you.

It’s relatively easy for professionals to do a hard analysis of their C clients and then deal with them. I can help with that. But on the personal front it’s not quite as easy, yet the same principles apply: be honest with yourself and at least one other person to keep yourself accountable, then just put one foot ahead of the other, determinedly and intelligently. Often this calls for a formal coach or an accountability buddy.

In most cases, the old adage applies: “you can’t manage what you don’t measure”. I can guarantee that if you try to lose weight and girth but don’t have a set of scales and a tape measure, you’re going to fail. Unless you see some tangible profit, you won’t pay the cost.

Interestingly enough, in my experience, most successful professionals not only have their professional ABCD grid worked out, they also have their personal ABCD grid in hand. The analysis and the habits are transferable. It’s not unusual for professionals who apply the disciplines to their practice to carry them over into their personal lives.

I’d be happy to chat.