Business relationships do not have to be, indeed they should not be adversarial, they should be symbiotic.

In my view the whole purpose of being in business is to make money. If you’re lucky then you enjoy what you do or at the very least don’t hate it. As a contractor one of my primary goals is to help my customer make more money and at the very least not lose it. Why is this? If I can help a client get bigger or earn more then my opportunity to make more money increases as well. It is also a good way to make sure they always have the money to pay me and that I keep a customer. This is what I mean by symbiosis. Together we both make more money than we could apart . Sometimes this means waiting to get paid a little longer than I would like or making some other sacrifices but in the long term my goal is to help that customer stay in business if not grow. 

Working with a contractor should be an enjoyable and mutually beneficial experience.

I have had many conversations with clients who told me horror stories of working with contractors. The contractors were either unfriendly, did not listen to their wants or concerns, did not know what they were doing or were just simply unpleasant to be around. In some cases the contractors did the work to the customer’s satisfaction, in other cases they didn’t. But what was universally true was that the client either did not ever call that contractor again or avoided it until the problem became so bad they didn’t have a choice. The result is that the customer had an unpleasant experience and that contractor has lost the opportunity for repeat business and a referral. Word of mouth advertising is my primary means of  growing my business so I try very much to make my customers happy, and let their experience with me be a positive one.

Contractors should always deal honestly with the client, even if the contractor thinks the client will not like the news.

Like most things in life the business world is governed by universal truths. If you don’t make money you won’t stay in business for long. If you’re in the customer service industry and your customers don’t like you or your service you won’t stay in business for long. To ignore these simple truths is to invite failure. Computer systems and networks also have universal truths. If a hard drive is making a clicking noise it didn’t make before then it is probably going to die soon and unless you replace it, you will sooner than later lose all the data on it. If you have a windows computer connected directly to the internet without any type of firewall there is a 99.9% probability that your computer will be compromised. As a contractor it is necessary to learn these universal truths and then figure out how they can best be used to benefit the customer. More simply put, it’s the contractor’s job to know how to get “More Bang for the Buck” by learning all they can about their particular field and applying it. Every so often a customer will not like what you tell them. When this occurs it usually leads to an experience the contractor does not want to repeat. It is not pleasant to have a customer angry at you or question your competency or accuse you of trying to make unnecessary repairs just to make more money. The result is that the next time the contractor has bad news to deliver to a customer they might not tell them or lessen the critical nature of the problem. Without total honesty customers cannot make an informed decision about what to do, this in the end only makes matters worse for both the contractor and the customer. I have had a few occasions where customer were not happy with what I said and didn’t take action only later to have a complete network failure and loss of business and in another case a total loss of data. I feel bad for customers when these things occur but I never feel guilty because I know I told the truth and tried to prevent it.

Realize all clients are not alike.

Whatconstitutes good service for one client may be totally inappropriate for another. Different people have different desires and expectations. As a contractor It is important to try and find what the desires and expectations are for each individual client and then try to at least meet if not exceed them. I have had customers who wanted to know every detail of a job I had worked on and wanted to it writing. I have had others who didn’t want to know anything except that the problem was fixed and preferred that I not bother them with the details. I once went to a doctors house and had his entire family gather around me with lawn chairs and ask me questions about myself and the computer business and treated me like I was a long lost relative. I have had other situations where someone answered the door pointed to the computer room and said “it’s in there just let me know when your done” and then totally left me alone. Part of the difficulty lies in that the customer knows what their desire and expectations are and quite often expects that you are aware of these and expects you to act appropriately. What I have learned to do in this situation is to try and gauge from the customer what their expectations are from their conversation and behavior and I’m not sure I’ll just ask.

Do what you enjoy, enjoy what you do.

Life is either too short or too long it all depends on your perspective. If you’re doing something you absolutely hate and find unfulfilling then life may be too long for you. If on the other hand you wake up every day excited to go to work and you love what you do then maybe you wish you could do it a bit longer. I love contracting. I think and feel it is a job I am uniquely suited to do. It’s never boring, I am faced with different challenges every day, which is really appealing to me because there are so many things I am interested in an enjoy reading about. I love solving puzzles especially the real life ones. I enjoy meeting different people and forming relationships with them. I enjoy solving problems especially of a technical nature. I am constantly studying and learning.  Sometimes it’s not even like a job but more like I get paid to do something I enjoy. There may be times when I don’t always feel this way because business is slow or I’m having particularly difficult challenges but in the end there is nothing else I would rather do. The advantage in this for the customer is that I will always try to do the best job I can for them.

Think in terms of the clients business, not the clients computers.

It is natural for a good computer/network technician to always want to fix a computer problem even when it may not be in the best interest of the client to do so. Ironically, it is often the case that the better the tech is the more they will focus on the computer problem and not the business problem. A good tech is a natural problem solver, problem solvers are persistent and intellectually curious. Whenever I come upon a problem I don’t understand I have a driving need to figure it out. The problem is that a customer may not want to pay $500 dollars for me to figure out that the reason they lose their drive mappings from time to time is because of a built in quirk in windows networking and there really isn’t a fix for it, especially if the drive mapping issue isn’t critical to the business. This is an extreme example but I think it makes the point. What I've learned is treat the customer money like it was my own, be frugal when it makes business sense and recommend spending when it makes business sense.