Client Management For Nice People: Jaw-dropping client experiences (and how they changed us.)

That time your client needs you to make them $1 million in six months but will only pay you to work Thursday afternoons (With Paul Stephenson)

In this week’s take, we receive Paul Stephenson, founder, and CEO of 47 Insights, who tells us a story on going back to working with clients after many years in consultancy, and how to take a harsh come back to the industry. All along his interviewing process with Our Beloved Host, Morgan Friedman, we have the chance to take on a lesson or two on following our guts, being able to detect yellow flags (and realizing the moment where they start getting darker), and know how and when we should settle boundaries. 

Client Horror Stories’ 10th take (Yay!) is a great opportunity to figure out which type of business we should avoid working with, and when’s the moment to press pause and back down. Paul here teaches us 2 key points for life: First one it’s that sometimes it’s ok to leave a project, opportunities will always come along. And the second one is that everyone is smart and rational until the friend of a friend gets rich by doing something they are not doing. 

Paul here narrates the whole story of how a new ambitious start-up managed to drag him into their own internal process (Trello and Slack included) and created a whole mess with his productivity system. So much that not even Paul’s intentions to be always 100% honest and communicative were able to solve it. 

 

Morgan Friedman