The Mindset You Need to Run a Profitable Branding Agency
The agency owner lives to serve, and that can be both a blessing and a curse.
Even with the best intentions, you can actually set your business—and your clients—up for failure when you approach everything purely from a place of being helpful. I know it sounds counterintuitive since everything you do is about helping your client in some way. But how you approach your business and your clients will determine how successful you are.
Although the ultimate goal is to get clients results far greater than what they hoped for, if you approach your work from a place of pleasing your clients, you will not put the proper boundaries and expectations in place to achieve those goals.
And that can be devastating for any agency.
Where Most Brand Agency Owners Get It Wrong
The customer is always right—or so we’ve been taught to believe. This idea is as old as retail itself. We think that as long as we are pleasing our customers, we’ll be successful because our customers will love us.
Unfortunately, the byproduct of this is that the clients end up being in charge and do not see you as the expert or the leader in the relationship.
They hire you as a company to help them, but you end up being seen as an employee. And since you are not an employee, this becomes very confusing for both sides. The clients may expect you to respond quickly to urgent requests or bend over backward to accommodate their schedule or their tardiness. They’re paying you, so they get to dictate the terms, right?
Again, this comes from good intentions to be helpful. But the unintended consequence leaves you in a position where you are not only at the client’s beck and call but your opinion on the work is not seen as being as important as the client’s. Because of your mindset to be a people-pleaser, you may be thinking, “Of course my opinion isn’t as important as the client’s. They are the ones paying me, and they are the ones who have to live with the work, so they are the ones who need to like it the most!”
What this actually does is put the client in a position of discomfort where they are forced to have the final say and make decisions around something that they may not actually feel comfortable making decisions about. That’s why they hire you in the first place.
Let me prove it to you.
Have you ever been in a situation where a client kept asking for changes, but even though you did everything they asked for, they still felt that it wasn’t quite right?
Have you ever had a client tell you they can’t quite explain what they want, but they’ll “know it when they see it”?
Ever jumped through hoops making five rounds of changes, following every instruction from a client, only to have them finally relent on one but clearly not be thrilled?
Why do you think that happens?
It’s because we as humans think we want to have control over situations like these. But in reality, it’s the control over a decision we aren’t adequately equipped to make that turns us into indecisive and unhappy customers.