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business ethics

Do You Practice “Naked Consulting”?

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Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty (J-B Lencioni Series)*

A few years ago my business mentor recommended a book to me that I was reminded about in a meeting today. The main premise of the book is Naked Consulting. No, that doesn’t mean taking your clothes off to get business. That’s a different topic. 😉 What it means in business is to be completely open and honest with your clients, Something I try to practice with my clients.

In the conversation today we discussed learning from our clients and really digging in and understanding their business. Many agencies forget this and think that they have to portray to their clients a sense of having all the answers. The problem is since they have all the answers, they often don’t take the time to really understand their clients business and end up pushing their preconceived ideas on clients. This often is not the best fit.

The bottom line is clients are people and people really want honesty and humility. The book outlines three fears that hold people back from gaining and retaining better clients.

  1. Fear of Losing the Business
  2. Fear of Being Embarrassed
  3. Fear of Being Inferior

Getting Naked is a great read and if you are in the consulting business or any other business for that matter. You should definitely check it out.
*Disclaimer* Click on the image to buy the book. The link to the book is an affiliate link.

Is Customer Service a Dead Art?

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I’ve been working on a project for a client where I’m correcting someone else’s errors and omissions. Don’t get me wrong I appreciate the work, but I’m amazed at the poor service that the other company has given my client.

The other company (we’ll call them MasterPortal) has a software package that can be integrated into websites. So, essentially a web portal running on their software for the back end. To create the web portal, MasterPortal slapped some aspx code together, crudely mashed it up with my clients current site and said their part was done. My client in turn asked me to make it look good and make it functional. By “functional”, I mean so it can be used the way I imagine MasterPortal said it could be.

Since, I’ve been working with it I found many problems including misspellings, code errors, css errors and generally sloppy design.

The point I’m trying to make here is; I just can’t imagine ever doing something like that. If I’m selling a product to someone I want it to look,feel, and act the way I promised. Sometimes I’m just amazed at how lazy people and companies can be. Plus, what further amazes me is how companies like MasterPortal stay in business.

Oh well, back to serving my client with the best service I can.