The Parable of the Trekker, Or How I Learned To Stop Struggling And Find The Right Clients For Our Agency
One of the most difficult parts of running an agency is finding the right clients to partner with. When we were first starting Digital Natives Group, we would take just about any business that came our way. There was no scope too small, no demand too ridiculous for us to handle. But we were young, both professionally and personally, and needed to do what we could to pay our bills and build our portfolio.
Once we were a bit more established, we started to shed the relationships that didn’t work for us. Firing clients is never the point you want to reach, but it’s a meaningful moment to reach as a business owner, to say no to revenue and know you’ll be okay, if not better off. It also meant so much to be able to free up our headspace and talents to work towards projects that were a better fit, and to allow our now former client to find a creative partner who could better execute their vision.
But firing clients is always the last resort. Our goal should be to avoid getting into wrong relationships from the start. Of course saying this is easy, doing so is not.
Once we’ve evaluated if a client is the right fit for us based on the box-checking criteria (market, resources, budget, objectives), I have one last trial to clear, and I call it the parable of the trekker.
Clients always want to know what working together will be like, and I tell them to think of our relationship like scaling a mountain. Because a lot of our work is referral based, I remind our clients that they’re coming to us because they saw what we did for Client X, and they want to achieve similar results. They want to get to the top of the same mountain. Like Everest, once Edmund Hillary did it, many others wanted to follow.
And we’re happy to lead them there. We know the terrain, we have the first aid training and can pitch a tent, but the mountain won’t always cooperate. There may be rock slides, mud slides, adverse weather, or any number of obstacles that we will face that will force us to change paths. Like Everest, weather conditions may change and we need to change our timeline or our path. We may ascend to 100-feet from the mountaintop only to find the lay of the land has changed, and we must backtrack to try scaling from a new location. We never give up, we just rely ever more on our knowledge of the mountain to find alternative paths to the top.
My goal is to remind our clients that we are on this collaborative expedition together. Our team has the skills to scale the mountain, even if the path is uncertain. Trust us, trust the process, and we will get you where we need to go. It’s also a reminder that we will make miscalculations or mistakes, and that this won’t mean the project is off-track. We may spend $100 on PPC ads that flop, but even our failures will point us in a new direction.
It’s also important to remind clients that what worked once will not always work again. Look to how social as evolved as the case-in-point here. If you had a bestselling book launch campaign or sold $1MM in DTC product in 2013 using a strong organic Facebook strategy alone, there’s no way you could rely on those tactics to execute the same in 2016, 2019, or 2021. The landscape of the mountain has changed.
In total, I’m looking to find out if this is a client who is willing to place their trust, and their dollars, in our expertise to get them where they need to go. When we don’t have this, the project tends to get cast as “troubled” by the client as soon as we have any performance metric that varies from an initial benchmark . Rather than having the support of a client, we end up with one-hand tied behind our back, focused on looking backwards to meet the expectations of a member of our climbing party, and not on making it to the mountaintop. For us to see success, we must all be looking, and moving, the same way.
I encourage you to find you own parable of the trekker for communicating these ideas to your clients, and if you have one, I’d love to know what it is.
