Excerpt from Chapter 13 of “What About Clients?” Building and Leading the Service Culture, by J. Daniel Hull and Hull McGuire PC. All Rights Reserved.
Chapter 13
RULE 8: THINK LIKE THE CLIENT ““ HELP CONTROL COSTS.
Ask any manager, professional, or employee at any level of your company what “profit” is.
You likely will get two different kinds of answers. Both answers are correct. But neither of them helps anyone in your company think like the client.
The answers will be something like this:
(1) “A profit is money remaining after deducting costs from receipts.” This is the correct young MBA or CPA answer.
Or:
(2) “It’s money left over at the end of the hunt.” This is the correct sales or brand person’s answer.
The right answer is that a profit is the reward for being efficient. Nothing else. And until an employee gets that, she or he will never know how a client and its owners and management really think.
Rule 8 is really simple. You want repeat clients, and a maximum of steady income streams, so let clients know you really care about saving that client money because of just that: you want to keep costs down so the client will stay with you for the long-term. Watch and minimize costs and show the client that you are interested in doing that.