The Client Partnership

In simplest terms, a partnership is an arrangement in which two or more persons combine resources and effort for mutual benefit. We typically think in terms of professional partnerships such as legal or accounting firms, or of domestic partnerships. As long as they are functioning, we think in terms of “the whole being greater than the sum of its parts”.

Within our professional and business partnerships we typically think of “we on the inside” while we think of our clients as “those on the outside”. But let’s “think outside the box”, if I may use that clichéd expression. Let’s imagine you and your clients combining resources and effort for mutual benefit.

This is not artificial at all. The client comes to you because you hold yourself out as having the capacity to satisfy their needs. Ideally, they agree to pay you to perform certain services, which you will perform as ably as you can, as promptly as you can, and with clarity on the part of the client that their needs have been met. The object of your activities for the client is that their need is satisfied, their problems are solved, their itch is scratched.

In other words, if you do your job, the client receives the benefit for which they bargained. But the benefit to you is not only monetary compensation, but personal satisfaction, and most importantly, reputation building. If ever there were a “win-win”, this is it.

Now, if you just have a “job”, then exercising your art for the client’s benefit is just another day at the office, grinding out your daily bread until you finally get to retire. There’s not much in it but a paycheque. But if you’re in the middle of your Giftings and spending your days doing what you love and what seems like play, then the client is giving you much more than money.

A client who receives more than they had hoped, on a timely basis and on budget, gets not only the work product for which they had bargained, but typically a positive emotional “rush”, a kind of aura that makes their experience fondly remembered and enthusiastically shared.

In other places I have written about clients being “the canvas upon which you paint your masterpieces”, which is entirely true, but here we’re talking about the mutual experience. And the mutual benefits occur optimally where the Giftings of the professional are exactly aligned with the Needs of the client.

Like all great partnerships, the keys are trust and communication. As a lawyer, I understood that most new clients came through the door having heard all the lawyer jokes, fearing having to bare their souls, and afraid they’d get robbed in the process. Trust is something which is earned, built out on reliability and openness about the process and predicted outcome. For the client, trust comes much easier when it’s easily apparent that you are working exactly “in your wheelhouse”, and much less easily when it’s apparent that you’re stumbling along, figuring it out as you go.

The partnership between professional and client depends on open and purposeful communication. It’s essential that the professional listens to get to the heart of the client’s Needs and Wants, it’s essential that the professional recite those back to the client so that everyone is clear about what we’re doing in this room, then it’s essential that the professional keeps the client fully and promptly informed as to progress. In the absence of knowing what’s going on, the worst is assumed, and trust is eroded.

How are your professional-client partnerships going? Happy to talk!

(Oh, and by the way, exactly two months to Christmas!)