Clients: The Best and the Worst part of being an Entrepreneur

I cannot even recall how many times I have been asked these questions – Are you happy with the decision of quitting a well-paying job to be an entrepreneur? Is it worth all this effort? The askers of these questions most of the times are clients or prospective clients who find it hard to understand why these young guys have decided to move away from a well settled life to one that will require constant hard work, with little prospect of retirement whatsoever. I just have one answer to all these questions. Sir, if I had not done this, we would not have been having this conversation. If I was still working for someone I might never have gotten the chance to meet and work with people like you.

Apart from the freedom of living a ‘Boss-free’ life and the great joy of getting to create something of your own, having a lot of different clients to work with/for is a major attraction for us. And being primarily a service based firm we get to interact with a lot of clients at a regular basis. As a matter of fact, as this post is being penned (penciled) down, I am on my way back from an interesting client meeting only.

Clients are important, well, nothing new there. They are the ones that pay our bills and the source of our bread, butter and beer. But for us they are a lot more than just that. In my experience (the little that I have) I have realized that I have picked up a life lesson or two from each client, prospective client or meeting, even the ones that didn’t convert. All of them have a uniqueness of their own in even the most generic of the problems. They all have a different attitude towards different problems and hence have different expectations. Even if they have the same requirement, focus point of 2 different clients could be radically different. One might be more concerned about the aesthetic appeal of the solution while the other might be looking for a bare-boned but robust solution. With all being masters of their fields, they have immense knowledge to share and can at times provide insights and viewpoints that we might have never seen on our own. Some might even present us with a problem so radically unique that we are just compelled to take it up and put in all our effort to fix it. That’s great fun too. My favorite clients are the ones that know what they are looking for. They might or might not be able to communicate that very well ,but they are aware of what they need and can identify it if presented to them.

But just like the way life is, not everything is fine and dandy here. For all the amazing clients/prospects that you meet, you also get to meet the ‘not so nice’ clients as well. You can say they are the other side of the same coin. And they can be found in many types as well. There are the ones that do not have the slightest idea of what they want (or even why they want it). Then there are the one that will simply refuse to accept what you deliver but will not provide any other input from their side other than their rejection. These in my experience are the entry level ‘not good’ clients, just mildly annoying. Next in line are the self-proclaimed experts that constantly remind us that truly ‘little knowledge is a dangerous thing’. They might be totally unaware of what/how things are going on but still will have strong, rigid opinions about the technicalities of the project. It’s irritating in the beginning but not a deal breaker. It becomes kind of annoying if an intelligent client makes someone of this type the project handler at their end and you end up feeling like you are talking to a wall that is between you and the client. But the worse kind in my experience is the one that do not appreciate the value of the solution that has been provided to them. They will most likely have all the bad qualities as mentioned earlier and that is what makes it the worst. They will not respect the solution or the consultant, gravely undervalue the services and will completely undermine the underlying effort. They will come up with totally random deadlines of their own without any regard to the actual estimation of error or margin of error. They will act as if they own you just because they pay you. Worst Kind. This list still doesn’t include the bad paymasters, overzealous and over curious types as with experience you come to know how to deal with them and that’s kind of easy.

There is still a silver lining in all this as well. Each encounter with such clients is an experience of its own. You get the firsthand experience of the hardships of life and learn how to tackle such issues. Each instance of such sorts prepares you for the next. And this I personally feel is what being an entrepreneur is all about. Constantly learning, constantly growing.