The title of this article might conjure up romantic sentiments of the classic 50’s movie which started Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr but the type of affair to remember I’m referring to is the one we should all be having with our clients during recessional times. Your relationship with all your clients and indeed your close business associates should be ‘a mutually joyous affair’. Your dealings with your clients should be fun and exciting. Creativity should pour fourth from the relationship. It may sound sappy but you should be really looking forward to working with them again because you remember what a real pleasure it was the last time. When relationships grow and blossom like this, truly inspirational work can be done and the whole becomes far more than the sum of its parts.

So what do we do if our client relationships are not happy occasions? Well it is important to remember that in times of difficulty and in our case recession, People’s moral compasses and business ethics tend to go south as they are pressured by external factors. Good clients turn bad and well bad clients become almost impossible to work for. I find the following quote from James Allen can serve as a mental pick-me-up if you are having a particularly tough time with a client.

‘Circumstances do not make a man they reveal him’ James Allen

I appreciate that this may seem a little simplistic and perhaps even a little naive in its approach but do try to remember that the other person (your client) is a person too. They also have good days and bad days. They also probably have a boss or at the very least are accountable to someone else for their actions and results. They might be going through a rough patch with their spouse. Perhaps they are missing their kids having not seen them all month due to long ours in the office. What it is so extremely important to remember is that there is often reasons behind the reasons behind the reasons if you follow me. Things are not as you see them; they are as you think you see them. Your client may not be being difficult as a total result of your actions. We might take it personally and think we have failed or done a bad job when some days your client or customer might just have got out of bed on the wrong side.

I have a client who has regularly patronised my company for several years now. They always seemed loyal to our services in that they came back repeatedly to give us business but what I could never quite work out was that they never seemed happy with the product they got. There was never any problem with our getting paid but they always left me with the distant impression that would be the last we would see of them. However, sure enough they would keep coming back with more work, I’ll be honest I dreaded them coming to us. I just found their being permanently down about our quality of work or level of service really demoralising. Then something very strange happened, our ‘difficult’ client got a new job and left their old place of employment. We didn’t hear anything from them for a couple of months and then they re-established contact from their new company. I know work is work but I will confess my heart sank a little and I did find myself thinking here we go again or perhaps it might have been a bit more colourful at the time!. After the re-establishment of contact we began to work on a new project with them and something just wasn’t sitting right with me. It wasn’t the project because it was a real chestnut and anyone in our industry would have been proud and excited to be working on it. No, the reason for my uneasiness was that he was being nice. I don’t mean I just got extra sugar in my tea nice, I mean it was more he was a different person nice. The projects which I and my staff dreaded soon became the most popular jobs in the office with the staff vying to work on them because of the pleasant way our old client now conducted their business dealings. They had become an absolute joy to work for and if I you will allow me to repeat myself our relationship with them had blossomed into what can only be described as

‘A mutually joyous affair’.

The benefits don’t stop there though as they recently awarded us one of our biggest projects to date and I was told after the fact that the project wasn’t even tendered. They had just decided to use our company based on the quality of product and the high level of client service we offered (these are not my words so I make no apologies for being big headed). This just goes to prove that it’s worth taking the grumpiness and idiosyncrasies of ‘funny’ clients as you never truly know who is in your audience. We need to remove our egos from our day to day business dealings and do what is best for our company and our better future. So what if one of your clients is off with you. So what if they don’t seem to be happy with your service this time. Do some investigating and try to find out what the issue actually was. You may even find that ‘you’ where not actually the issue and they had other problems that day. In the case of the above example I began to socialise a little with our long standing client and begin to scratch the surface a little as to what might have been the cause for our troubled history. I never asked them outright and nor should you, but after a couple of lunch meetings and a coffee or two it began to come out that their old boss had been a tyrant and a bully and generally horrendous to work for. There had been a massive staff exodus due to this boss and our close client had been one of the casualties of their regime. It then became clear to me that my client was exactly like me, they too where trying to please those he served under. They where prone to good days and bad just like me and they too just wanted their boss to tell them they had done a good job.

So try and remember the next time a client of yours is being shall we say, challenging. That they really are just like you with the same feelings and dreams and perhaps you will be able to forgive them for bruising your ego this time around.

Mr Anthony Hartley Denton has written several eBooks on similar topics. He is author of the eBook 'The Diamond Principles' Coal face case studies to recession proof your business & survive a downturn Click the below link for more information.