Building on the idea of approaching law from the point of view of creating effective relationships (as an overall commitment for my legal practice), I have being looking at other ways of doing this. So far in my blog I have covered positive focus in contracts and working towards specific visions, objectives and values. I have also spoken about my ‘assisted communication’ work. Something new came up during a client meeting yesterday.
All of this came out of the realisation that in essence everything, as a human-being, is about relationships. In particular, successful business is about successful relationships. The distinction however between business and personal is much more grey than it might at first appear. In looking to build freedom and flexibility in my own personal relationships, it has started me thinking about how this can operate in business.
Yesterday I saw a client whose business is effectively an intermediary between the members of the public and certain specific service providers (for confidentiality reasons, I cannot say exactly what). He goes out and seeks customers, has them sign up to a commitment (which they are bound by after the appropriate cooling off period) and then he sells the contracts on to the service provider for a set fee. The client was very interesting in that he wants to expand the business rapidly and create franchises so he is interested in building on what their success is so far by focussing on quality assurance, etc, to build the brand.
As we sat down to discuss how we might work together, I asked him what he thought would be possible for the expansion of the brand by turning his current approach on its head, risking losing the benefit of long-term contractual commitments (which might be quite hard in practice to enforce anyway) in favour of the probable popularity of a service that is so confident in itself that it does not feel the need to tie people down. What I was effectively suggesting was that contracts only provide a loose structure for when the two parties (in this case the customer and the supplier) choose to work together. I was suggesting therefore letting go of the attempt to tie them in for a fixed period. Any short term gain in terms of some people cancelling would probably be outweighed by the increase in the number of people who would be probably willing to sign up to a contract where there was no long-term commitment so that trying it out is effectively a “no-brainer”.
The down side in the short term is that if he took on short commitments rather than longer ones, when he sells on the contracts to the service providers, they would not be willing to pay a large up front sum and he would have to then take payments from them in instalments, probably by way of standing order. However, again this was something that would also enable him to more easily sign up service providers as only that day he had encountered resistance to a request for an up-front payment from a supplier bearing in mind that they had no guarantee that the customers would actually perform their contracts. He again saw that this could be very beneficial in the expansion of the business.
As we explored the subject in greater depth, the client saw that such an approach would make a powerful statement of confidence in their service and also make it much easier to sign people up and he saw that this would be very beneficial in the long term development of the brand.
I ended up our first “get to know” meeting leaving him to reflect on what we had discussed and to speak to his business partner. The meeting itself seemed to produce a whole raft of possibilities for expansion of the business that he had not considered before. I found the experience of our discussions personally enjoyable and fulfilling and he seemed to find it invigorating as well.
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