If you are a consultant, clients hire you – fundamentally – because they have a problem in their business that needs to be solved. And they don’t always know what that problem is, or how to solve it.
Solving it often involves change, and change is hard. We do change for a living and the way I see it, I have an easy job. I show up and tell you what you should do. The client has a hard job: they pick and choose which piece of advice they want to listen to, and then have to implement and execute those suggestions.
If I tell a client they should do something and they don’t listen, I’m not attached; I’ll just come back tell them again the following week. If they still don’t listen, I just keep telling them, week in and week out.
This was the case a few years ago with a client who I told about a change he needed to implement in his business. He heard from me every two weeks – we need to do this. Finally, after three months, he calls me and says he’d like to meet with me. I show up in his office. He says, “I have this wonderful idea.”
“Really? What is it?”
He tells me this thing I’ve been telling him for three months.
I’m going to tell you something, it was hard. I had to excuse myself and talk walk for 5 minutes. My clients know that sometimes I have to clear my head because I’m in the middle of a conversation and I’m being distracted with an unproductive thought, so I have to leave and flush it out.
With my ego out of the way, I come back and I say, “You know what, I’ve given this some thought, and I think that’s a wonderful idea. Let’s meet about it next week.”
To this day, I don’t know if that client got that he did that, or if he really erased the fact that I had been mentioning it for three months. I’m not quite sure, but it doesn’t matter; if my investment is in my clients’ results and success, it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.
The moment I said I think that’s a wonderful idea and let’s do it, my contract got extended another year.
If I would have said, “I’ve been telling you this for three months, why are you taking credit for this idea?” I would have been out of there in three weeks.
The hidden question in people’s minds when you’re doing work for them or on their behalf is that their boss is going to say, “Why did I hire you if we have this consultant?” It’s not a question that’s articulated very often, but that’s the fear. Our job as consultants is to do the work, get the results, and give the client the credit. Get your ego out of the way. If your ego can’t do that, go be a pharmacist.
I’d love to hear ways that you serve your clients by getting your ego out of the way.