You never know where that first client will appear – or how you will find them. My first client came through the classified ads, and winning that account represented for me an act of sheer bravery and chutzpah. My second client was, by contrast, a kind of repeat customer – as a teenager, I had babysat his two girls. Years later, after a lunch with my father, he called to ask for some help with a newsletter.
Now here’s the lesson I learned from our first lunch: sometimes (as it turns out, more often than you might think), clients don’t actually know what they want. Many think they do, but if you are a good practitioner with the patience to listen for awhile, you may discover that they need something entirely different.
My newsletter client needed an entire PR program: media relations, customer relations, and a trade show/conference outreach strategy. But he only realized that after our conversation had probed why he wanted that newsletter, to whom he intended to give it, and how he planned to use it as part of his overall communications program.
The other thing I learned from my newsletter client is that I was on to the right business model. My philosophy with a corporate account like his was that I could help to define the PR program, develop the tools, and train the people on staff who would take the program and run with it. I was, essentially, working myself out of a job. It was my client who first pointed it out, in fact: with respect, he saluted my choice, and said that it was a business approach that would resonate particularly well in the high-tech consulting world, where I hoped to parlay our work together into some referrals.
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