Southwest is my airline of choice in the United States because it rewards thos who game the system.  Every seat is first class, so they’ll tell you, but really there is only one per plane located next to the over-wing exits. The row ahead has no seat ahead of you.

If you hit Companion Pass, their top tier, you get to choose someone to fly with you for free, even if you’re on a free ticket. It takes 110,000 points in a calendar year to hit this, so if you fly Business Select, which earns 12 points per dollar, you need spend just under $10,000 to hit this level. If you fly a lot of one-way, last minute flights, this isn’t hard.

Never buy round-trip tickets. Better to buy a series of one-way flights. If you need to change something, you don’t have to cancel the whole reservation. Sometimes, Southwest will have 40% and 50% off deals on roundtrip tickets– that’s the only exception.

If you don’t know when you’ll be flying back, book two or three of the options. Maybe one of your meetings is unconfirmed or you just need that flexibility for some reason. Cancel the ones you don’t fly on. I believe they will automatically cancel if you forget, but do it anyway. You save money by booking in advance, of course, and there’s no downside to canceling the unused segments.

Use miles for your friends and colleagues, not yourself. You may find yourself close to A-List or A-List Preferred at the end of the year, wishing that you had used real dollars on your flight segments, instead of real dollars on a colleague and points for yourself.

If the flight is less than 70% full, board last. Yes, when you have status, you get priority boarding. But would you rather choose your seat or choose who sits next to you? I’ve been victim to some 450 pound monsters that sit in the middle seat next to me– so big they spill over into you and need the wretched seat belt extender.

Don’t drink 20 minutes prior to landing. Descending will make that last drink hit you like a full six pack. “Macho” guys will pass out deboarding after just a couple beers. Don’t believe me? Ask a flight attendant. And at altitude, things taste different. People who hate tomato juice will often enjoy it when high (Harrison– not that kind of high), since your taste buds are dulled.

Wifi is free for A List Preferred. But you can also give it out to friends on the flight. I’ve not seen a limit.

Choose related cities to save money and time. Oakland is often cheaper than San Francisco or SJC– plus faster if you’re non-stop into OAK. Same for Newark over LGA or BWI over DCA and IAD. Southwest has been consolidating Airtran’s routes, which will increase prices, but also improve availability. Indianapolis, a 2 hour bus ride, is far cheaper than SDF. If you’re really on a budget, Buffalo is cheaper than Toronto, but you have a 90 min shuttle ride, which can be up to 3 hours with customs delays.

If your flight is canceled or you need to make changes while you’re in the airport, call instead of waiting in line with everyone else. You’ll get a faster response. Sometimes a few minutes is the difference between getting that last seat or being stranded.

Southwest is usually, but not always cheaper. Certainly will be if you book in advance or are hitting popular routes. If you factor in the rewards, no bag fees, no change fees– it’s the best business bargain. I use the FancyHands.com service to search for alternate flights in some situations. Southwest doesn’t do red-eye flights, so if you need to go coast-to-coast on a tight schedule, often JetBlue or Virgin will get you there in style for less. Their snacks are better– no question. But I like to save money.

Great salespeople aren’t just about pushing the current set of product features with hard-sell tactics.

imagine if you didn’t have to create weekly reports anymore– that one button could automate things? Wouldn’t you do it?

VC’s and various strategy-minded folks ask me all the time what competitive advantage Blitz has versus a slew of other social analytics vendors. Hey, what if Facebook decides to build a real analytics tool? How about the other players that pop up every day?

Your competitive advantage is the quality of your people. Period.

I heard Bill Gates say that he was ultra picky about hires in the early days of Microsoft.  Even if you’re desperately understaffed, don’t make the mistake of letting your standards down, he said. You’ll regret it. “A” people attract “A” people, while “B” people bring in “C” people.

And man have I made that mistake many a time. Might as well have Dave Thomas of Wendy’s descend from the sky to brand “Quality is our Recipe” on my forehead.

You think high dollar pros are expensive? Try the cost of incompetence, when you lose projects, sleep, money, and sanity.

The great tech giants all started with their founders being ruthless about keeping the quality bar high.  I witnessed it myself in my days at Yahoo!, until they hit a point where the “C”, “D’ and “F” people snuck in, soon to be followed by what we all know has happened.

I look at the times where I’ve succeeded, and it’s when I’ve had a strong team that I would go to the mat for. And when I’ve failed, which is embarrassingly often, you can trace it back to low quality. The cynical will say that it’s really a management problem– allowing unqualified people to be in positions above their skill or not providing enough supervision. Yet I’ve found that if you have bright, eager folks, you can teach them anything.

Jack Welch, who is arguably the greatest manager to have ever lived, would fire the bottom 20% of his staff every year. In banking or consulting, they call this “up or out”. I felt it to be cruelly unfair, as it causes an adversarial work environment, plus penalizes the great teams. Yet if you believe in statistics, you’ll usually have a normal distribution in any of your classes, so the rule works.

So while you as a company founder or entrepreneur care about your baby more than any employee likely would, consider how to never let in unqualified people in the first place. No matter what they say about their skillset or how motivated they are. You will regret it later.

There are no shortcuts to quality. Do you agree?

And if you have the luxury of choosing who you want to work with, don’t you want to be excited to be around those who make you raise your game? I think it was Perot who said his hiring strategy was to find folks who were smarter than him. Or perhaps you can just hire away people from Google and Apple, like Facebook has done. Let others do the screening for you.

I was chatting with a friend who has amazing online marketing skills and serves local clients. He wanted to grow his practice to include Fortune 500 brands. Here is my advice.

Don’t assume growing is automatically a good thing. Once you get beyond a dozen or so clients, you’ll have to bring on other staff—freelancers and then full-time.  Freelancers are usually horribly flaky (which is why they freelance), so you’ll be spending most of your time managing them, instead of doing what you love.

Do you love management? Better get used to it—managing payroll, contracts, accounts receivable, project schedules, hire/fire, and the operations of running a business that has more than one person. Get bigger and you have to deal with a physical office.

Big clients can be big headaches. With a small business client, you have one person to deal with—the business owner. But with a major brand, you have to work through multiple levels of decision makers, a contract process that may take 3 months, and a payment process that can take even longer. It’s sexy to say you have a global brand as a client—make sure you have the resources and stomach to handle it.

As a small agency or freelancer, you can develop closer relationships with clients. You don’t risk having so many clients that you’re working 24-7 to keep up.

Congratulations! You’ve been promoted to manage your very first project. You’ve demonstrated that you’re a good worker bee— you can make campaigns, prepare reports, and do whatever else you’ve been assigned.

But managing a project is a completely different matter. Now, instead of dutifully doing what you’re told, you have to figure out what the client wants, build project plans, coordinate between multiple people, and make sure things happen on time and in the right way. Being new in the position and perhaps even young (which makes it harder), you’re afraid that your co-workers and client might not respect you or that you don’t have authority.

Relax—use these simple techniques and it will be hard to fail.

First, get organized. If you are not organized yourself, there’s no way you can begin to think about tracking all the things that your teammates are doing. Are you using basecamp to track who is doing what? Every task should have a description, be assigned to a person, and have a due date. These 3 items are the building blocks of project management—who is doing it, what they’re doing, when is it due.

Use it for anything you could potentially forget about—people you have to call, stuff you need to read, even personal errands. You don’t need Microsoft Project Central or any fancy software—even the Tasks feature in Gmail is sufficient. Even a simple spiral notebook works just fine.

When you’re organized, you don’t have to worry about that one thing you know you were told a few weeks ago, but lost track of. Terrible feeling to be lost and behind—it’s like drowning. So don’t let yourself get there. Check your email twice per day and quickly take care of things by doing one of the following—do it, delete it, or delegate it.

There’s no other option. Don’t read it and then mark it unread. Don’t skim over things with the thinking that you’ll come back to it later. You gain massive efficiency by taking care of things just once—the first time. Plus, when you take care of things right away, they don’t fester into bigger problems that result in all sorts of drama later. I can’t tell you how many people I see complain about being busy or having too many emails, when all they’re really doing is just moving sand from one pile to another, getting nothing done.

Second, create a specific statement of the goal. If you’re lucky enough to have just one project to manage, this is easy. The client may want a website to do X in Y amount of time for Z dollars. Then you break down X into minute little measurable tasks that you assign out to people. Perhaps there is a Statement of Work you can reference where most of the work is already done for you.

In either case, you should check back with the client to affirm the requirements, if for no other reason that to show them that you care and to start building a relationship. Many first time project managers fail by hiding from the start, letting their project go down in flames while they bite their lips in silence. Perhaps they are afraid of looking stupid or whatever reason, but the net result of these good intentions is failure, all the same.

Establishing with the client that you are the lead—the person they can go to for anything—is critical to get you off on the right foot. It then takes the burden off your boss, who likely doesn’t want to step in and do your job for you. Your boss is busy doing other things and if they’re a good boss, will only want to step in if you are in trouble. If the client feels the need to relay requirements or other project communication with your boss, then they are saying you have failed to do your job. So you want to establish the requirements early and make it clear you are responsible.

Third, communicate actively with your project stakeholders. We like to use the RACI model, which stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.

You are the R— meaning that you’re Responsible for the project success. Completely. The buck stops with you, even if so-and-so didn’t reply to your email or give you access to that particular system. It’s your job to stay on top of dependencies, as opposed to having a great set of excuses later when someone else fails in silence. There is only one R, else you have too many cooks in the kitchen.A is Accountable, which covers multiple people that are accountable for doing particular tasks. Sometimes you are the R and the A for smaller projects. But more often, you delegate tasks to engineers and designers who are on the hook for various things. And these folks will forget to do their things, do them improperly, provide excuses why it was someone else’s responsibility, and so forth. You are there to resolve these issues before they become visible to the client—you want to monitor this BEFORE you have slipped the schedule irreparably, and before the big emergency. A great project manager can see problems in advance, then escalate as needed.C is consulted, which means that you might need the expertise, advice, or permission of others to proceed. The C role is dangerous here, since a lot of people will want to be involved in your project, especially if it’s high profile and involves social media—something that everyone feels they are an expert in. To prevent meeting madness, where you’re unable to hold meetings because of too many people wanting to attend, make it super clear who is doing what in the Accountable section—the list of tasks.You’ll come across many corporate folks who will say they are responsible in some vague sort of way, upon which you politely explain your role, who else is accountable for certain tasks, and then ask them what exactly they would like to do in this project. If you’re suave, you can pacify these backseat drivers. If you’re too blunt, you’ll offend these people, even if it’s clear that they have no specific useful skills to the project or add any type of value.I is Informed. These are folks who you should keep updated, usually AFTER you have made a decision and have taken action. Only the Consulted people need to be asked in advance of a decision. Because most corporate folks attribute their value in direct proportion to how many meetings they attend (if you’re busy, then you must be in high demand and very important), you’ll have to fight to keep most folks in the I bucket versus somewhere else.The easiest way to ward off these folks is to publish meeting minutes. That way, they’re not afraid of missing something juicy from not having attended—they can merely read the summary. Ask yourself how many project managers are guilty of not publishing the meeting minutes? They’re the ones who are struggling and haven’t even gotten around to placing people in the RACI roles. Ironically, their excuse is that they’re too busy. The reason they’re too busy is that they’re wasting time doing nonsensical things to actually have time to produce things of value.There you have it. Nothing magical. But it sure works like magic. When you make it clear that you have a goal, specified the team and specific tasks needed to get to your goal, the waters will part. The cubicle dwellers will respect that you have a mission. Those who want to know what’s going on don’t have to call a meeting to waste the precious time of your team—they can just log into basecamp or read the latest meeting minutes.If the big boss decides to derail you because of the latest fire drill, you can confidently say “yes” to any of her requests, because you at the same time mention the impact to the work schedule you’re already on.

If the client decides to change his mind and increase the scope of the project (they would never do that!), then you can say “yes”—AND the impact is $X and Y days to the timeline. You never say “yes, but”, which is arguing with them. You say “yes, and”. Let them trade off between time, money, and scope—pick two, as they say.

If you follow these three steps I this orders— to get organized, be clear on your goals, and run the RACI project management model—you’re well-protected from every angle. People will marvel and how well you manage and what a good job you do. By making the model clear, everyone knows what is expected, so there’s little room to hide. The typical corporate cubicle monsters who are looking for a big company to hide in will know they are not welcome. And you’ll be spending less time dealing with the same old excuses, and more time doing things that you enjoy.

How do you fare against this model? Are there certain techniques that work well for you? Perhaps you have a horror story to share (names kept anonymous to protect the guilty)?

An Article by Keith Wilcox

When I was in high school, I was a good runner. It wasn’t just in my head either; I won all sorts of fancy awards during my junior and senior years. I was good in college, too, but that’s a different story. I had the one trait that I thought mattered in a runner – natural ability and a high threshold for pain. My coaches, on the other hand, didn’t like me very much. One coach in particular, it seemed at the time, made a special point to thwart my self-imagined rightful place on the team. I never made the varsity team as a freshman despite the fact that I ran varsity times and regularly beat other varsity runners. I thought it was the height of injustice, but in hind sight I can see why I didn’t make it. It had nothing to do with my speed; it was because I rarely practiced and, when I did, I would make a joke out of it and spend my time distracting anybody within range of my shenanigans. It wasn’t clear to me until I got to college that the one trait that really matters in life is passion coupled with a willingness to learn. I eventually did learn my lessons, but it was a tough road. Most people never get it, and it’s one factor that makes hiring new employees a pain and firing them routine.

Get a Job, Keep a Job:

It’s one thing to fake your way through a job interview. It’s an entirely different matter to fake your way through a whole job. Do you know why people spend so much effort complaining about cubicle jobs yet almost no effort in finding alternate employment? It’s because this most common of employee subspecies can easily escape detection as a fraud in its current, and comfortable, habitat.  It has the luxury to complain about a job that affords it the ability to hide behind the redundancy of a multi-tiered corporation. Why would it ever risk detection in the big bad world of competition if it’s every need is already being cared for, it’s only sacrifice being freedom? This employee would convulse if it ever had to work for a boss who actually paid attention to how little, if any, daily work gets done.

Keeping a job in which your boss cares about results means that hiding isn’t an option. You’ll have to take some risks; perhaps also, when entrusted with responsibility, you’ll be required to make few command decisions. You’ll fail a few times in the learning process. Bosses tend to be upset when screw up happen, and you might spend some time being upset with each other as a result of mistakes, but don’t worry because the thing a boss, a good boss, really wants to hear is that you’ve learned something by the mistake and are enthusiastic about trying again (it would help of course if the boss also admitted his mistakes, but don’t hold your breath on that). Anybody of reasonable intelligence can keep employment provided he/she actually cares about the job at hand. Working for a boss stinks most of the time because bosses can be assholes with enormous, unwarranted egos.  But,  here’s the thing about wanting to learn that makes this risk worthwhile for the right person: when the time comes, and you’ve accumulated enough knowledge and experience, you can become your own boss with your own company. Isn’t that a nice little side effect of passion and dedication?

Washouts Like to Complain: Inoculate with Competency

I love to complain when things don’t go my way. I played a bad round of golf? Oh, it was because the grass was a little moist. I fell off my bike? It was clearly that damn rock that jumped out in front of me! I’ve even seen my kid complain about losing a tennis match because his serves didn’t go in. Serves are, incidentally, a prime ingredient in tennis; he could have been more convincing if he’d complained about a bug flying up his nose or something. Sports, academics, or whatever. It doesn’t matter – The fault for failure lies directly at the feet of the one doing the failing notwithstanding external, unpredictable influences. Losing is no great sin. Everybody does it. Making excuses, therefore, is unnecessary as long as you want to get up to try again. My boy’s coach doesn’t want to see sulking or some contorted look of dejection. Buck up, camper! Quit yer bitchin’ and try again! Competency doesn’t come as a natural right or like a union raise. It comes through actively searching for it. Good bosses, coaches and teachers (sometimes one and the same) know that their best students are the ones who want to be in the classroom. They can do without the naysayers or class clowns who do nothing but drag down the beating heart of the organization.

It’s about 5 am and I’m on my way to the airport again.  If you’re an entrepreneur like me, you know it’s a difficult and lonely road that usually ends in failure. If you are not a start-up or business owner, you can safely ignore the rest of this article.

Those who aren’t entrepreneurs might not appreciate the path we trod. I’ve witnessed many a well-known, now super successful, entrepreneurs spend their last dollar on a lavish client meal, miss payroll more than once, and even lose a wife in the process. And all the while, people come and go. Perhaps the #1 complaint I hear from successful business owners is how hard it is to find good people– folks who won’t flake out and can think for themselves. You, as the business owner, are the only one who cannot call in sick, blame that other guy for your mistakes, or make excuses to the client.

And it would be a mistake for you to try to get your employees to care as much as you do. The reason you’re alive and progressing is simply because you persevere until the point where you reach your goal.  This Boulder tennis pro wrote nearly 500 consecutive posts when he started out and now ranks on the first page for searches such as Boulder tennis instructor. Another friend has been doing SEO for 3.5 years and this morning we had a conversation about what a trip it has been. She started knowing very little and now is well-connected.

And it’s not about skill, intelligence, or other factors, though these, as well as luck, play a minor role. So don’t worry about things like that or even what the “competition” is doing.  Odds are they are dealing with the same issues– finding and retaining quality people.  The race goes not to the best php coders, of which there are many, but those that see it through.

I’d recommend connecting with other entrepreneurs who can identify with the issues that we face. It could be a formal group you pay for such as Vistage or EO– or it could even be a local chamber of commerce, meetup, or another group. Whatever the case, keep at it and here’s to your success!

P.S. If you’re over 35, congrats, as 80% of high tech startups are founded by folks like you.

If you’re a fledgling software company like us, you know how many ways potential clients, relatives, and partners want to get you to consult for free. But if you’re going to be a viable company that can pay bills and hire quality people, you have to say no so that you can say yes when the real clients come along.

While it’s tempting to try to serve every lead that comes in, don’t. You’re awesome at what you do– charge appropriately for it. Don’t sell by being the cheapest game in town– unless you are Walmart or competing in a commodity market. If you’re bootstrapping your software development by doing enterprise consulting, here are some techniques that work for us which might benefit you:

Require a token $1,000 to begin consulting

Sure, give them 15 minutes to discuss their needs. But don’t let them drag it out into some hour-long free consulting session under the guise that they want to get to know you, qualify your abilities, pull in other people, or whatever. If $1,000 to start is a big deal for them, just imagine the headache you’ll have trying to ask for $10,000, after you’ve spent all this time on them. This is called the “sunk cost” phenomenon in finance, or what I call the “bad girlfriend problem”, where you’ve put in so much time already, it’s hard to be rational. The $1k trick is super effective and gets folks qualified in minutes.

You can offer the $1k to be credit back towards the project if they’d like. Or call it an assessment. Your time is valuable.

We’re not the cheapest game in town

I want you to memorize these 7 words. If the prospect talks about someone else being cheaper, don’t discourage them. If they think they can get a quality heart surgeon to operate on their child at 50% off, then let them try. Their company is their baby, so if you want to do it right the first time, you have to pay for expertise.  And while the hourly rate or project fee might appear “high”, what they’re really paying for is your years of experience.

Half now, half later

Not only must you get a signed contract, but you need a deposit to start work. The $1k trick is a good way to mentally commit the client to working with you and treating this seriously.  If it’s not a Fortune 500 company, then you’ll need to get something down.  You don’t pay your employees or your rent based on promises (though it does happen with startups), so don’t let them do that to you. We have been burned many times here in the oddest of ways– the company goes bankrupt midway through the project, the project sponsor is fired, they change their mind, whatever.

Hence the title of this post– In God we trust, all others pay cash.  As a software company, you must keep enough working capital to be able to service current and future clients. Perhaps one of the biggest hidden killers of startups is success.  Yes, you can be so successful that you run out of money. The concept of working capital is that you might have to spend $10k of resources now to be able to collect $20k in 90 days. But if you’re growing quickly, that’s a lot of money you’re having to put in now.

Take on Pro Bono work cautiously

Pro bono is just latin for “free”. Unless you really believe in the cause or they have viable operations, don’t do it. All of us have friends trying to start non-profits– great ideas, but no resources. So the promise is that if the venture is successful, then they’ll be able to pay you all this money, make introductions to important people, or whatever. Don’t go for the Siren’s Song. Not saying it can’t work.

Our company got its start via pro bono work almost 4 years ago. Grameen Foundation is a multi billion dollar non-profit that invented microfinance, creates jobs worldwide, and helps eradicate poverty. We managed their Google AdWords, rehosted their site, and called in some favors to help them out. In return, we got access to some senior people that became great clients. The folks who are on the boards of major non-profits are often super-connected, and we made a name for ourselves as PPC experts, which then transitioned into Facebook marketing experts.

Fire 80% of your clients

Why? Because you’re not properly serving the 20% of them that are paying your bills. If you’re a growing company, the clients that were a great fit a year ago aren’t the kind of clients you’d love to have now. I took an entrepreneurship class at Southern Methodist University from Jerry White in my undergrad days. He taught me that you “bootstrap” your new business venture by taking on small clients to get your name out. Then use a few small clients to be able to help you get some medium sized clients. And then you’re ready to try some big clients. If you go for the big clients at the start, you might not be able to convince them to choose you and you might not be ready.

Intrapreneurs to Entrepreneurs

In our case, we ran an internal consulting group at Yahoo! that served many big clients.  That’s called intrapreneurship, since you’re effectively running your own company inside another company, but bear neither the risk nor the reward. It’s a great middle step to take if you want to transition from employee to successful business owner.

If you’re the founder of your company, there are many hats you must wear– many of them are areas that you have no experience in. But hey, that’s what entrepreneurship is about. But among these duties, you really have only 2 things to worry about– finding great people and keeping the money coming in.  All the other functions you can delegate to some degree. And #2 (keeping the money coming in) is often the hardest.

Yet in a start-up, we are ALL in sales, even if we pan off the “dirty work” to some hired sales reps.  ABC– Always Be Closing.

There has never been a better time in the history of the planet to start a business– low cost of entry, plenty of talent, access to capital.

How is your business faring?  Let me know at http://www.facebook.com/blitzlocal.

Many folks speculate why Google has overtaken Yahoo! in search or why Facebook has dominated in social networking, versus Friendster. I believe there’s one key factor— if you’re running a technology company, you need a technologist at the helm.  Larry and Sergey of Google were Ph Ds (or about to be) in Computer Science.  The last few folks who have run Yahoo! were anything but technology people– one was a film executive, one was a financial analyst, and another is a professional manager.  Running a technology company requires a deep understanding of what’s coming next in a rapidly changing world.  And to not have a keen pulse is to drive in a dangerous fog.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a young computer science genius– not a 55 year old male who is good at manipulating spreadsheets.  If you see a social networking start-up being founded by 55 year old males who are probably not even on Facebook– run the other direction as fast as you can.  The folks who can best guide a company are those who connect deeply with their customer base.  How can you start and manage a company if you don’t use the product yourself?  Even the guy who runs Hair Club for Men is also a client, so the commercial goes.

Of the technology companies we see fail, it’s not just age.  Often it’s also a lack of having a balanced core team.  Salespeople hire salespeople.  Engineers tend to like to hang out with other engineers.  It just works that way somehow, as people hire folks who are like them.  But to operate a technology firm, you need folks who are experts in sales, engineering, marketing, finance, and other disciplines.  And the technologist should be king in the technology company, in the same way that Nike was started and run by a star athlete, Phil Knight.   Does Frito Lay have a technologist at the helm?  No, they have a marketing person, since that’s the firm’s core expertise.

So watch out for technology companies that don’t have any engineers in sight or believe that engineers are commodity products that can be contracted out or hired offshore.  If you are a business person and are thinking of starting a company in the Internet space, my advice to you is to quickly find a technical co-founder.  You’ll thank me later for this advice.  

A great entrepreneur knows what he knows- and more importantly, knows what he doesn’t know– finding someone to complement him or her.  If you’re an engineer, find a strong marketing/sales ally and make him a business partner.  Your freelancer will give you great results for a couple months, maybe longer– but eventually will flake out on you, which is why they’re freelancing.  

Are you a technologist— and if not, do you have a technologist that is part of your founding team or is at least a CTO level person?  If you are one of these companies that’s lacking a technologist, but wondering why you may be having trouble executing, I hope this article helps shed some light on why.

Sometimes you get a piece of advice so deep, yet so obvious, that you have to stop for a minute to think about it. Thanks to Gillian Muessig, President of SEOmoz, for mentoring me on this– her five magic words a bit later….

Have you ever been approached by a prospective client that would like to do business with you, but clearly doesn’t have the money? These are “wanna be” clients. They can’t afford to be clients, but have champagne tastes on a beer budget. See if any of these sound familiar to you:

• “We want to be business partners with you and share the risk” (translation: “we have no money”).
• “If you deliver us the revenue, then we can pay you your fee” (translation: “we have no money”).
• “I can get this a lot cheaper elsewhere” (translation: “we have no money”).
• “Let’s do a trade-out of services” (translation: “we have no money”).
• “We need to ask you some questions to qualify you” (translation: “we have no money and want to string you along for free advice in the meantime”).

If you ever hear any of this, here are the 5 magic words you say…. Drum roll, please…

WE ‘RE NOT RIGHT FOR EVERYONE.

Repeat that to yourself three times to lock it into your head. Don’t fall into the trap of selling yourself short. You’ll regret taking on a cheap client– and not only are they the ones with the least money, but also the neediest and hardest to deal with. Our best clients pay us handsomely, treat us well, and are a joy to work with. The clients where we’ve made exceptions to this rule suck the life out of us and sometimes make us wonder why we’re in this business. Spare your staff the angst and remember these 5 magic words, else you risk losing your best people, too (who can work anywhere).

Tell the prospect, firmly and politely, that you work with a select group of clients — that you work with the best in the industry and pay your people well, because you have the best people. Mention that you don’t compete on being the cheapest game in town, nor are you the most expensive. If they keep pushing, hold the line — say that you’re not a discount agency, that you can refer them to other agencies that would gladly take their project.

The clients that do pass this bar are going to be businesses that are likely to be solid in their operations, have folks who appreciate value, and will rekindle the excitement that caused you to strike out on your own to begin with. You’re being paid well enough to afford to do a good job, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your staff members look forward to working with these clients and the enthusiasm is infectious.

Bruce Clay pulled me aside at SMX Advanced last year and gave me similar advice. He said the key to getting the right clients is to “stand in the middle of the road, arms outstretched, screaming that you are the best.” Half the people will think you’re crazy and walk away. The other half will say “Gee, he really must be the best” and then hire you.

Bruce also advised to ask the prospect this question, “If your child was sick, would you go for the cheapest heart surgeon or the best?” That should do it. If not, you don’t want to work with them. Their business is like their child– and when you have only one shot to do it right, they should choose the best every time, unless they have no money.

You don’t want or need to have every potential deal that’s out there. Be choosy. Would you rather have 40 clients that each pay you $1k a month in fees or 4 clients that each pay you $10k a month? If you have 4 clients, you can focus your efforts to deliver solid value, build a solid relationship, and have on-going solid business deals — as opposed to spreading your efforts thin among the chorus of squeaky wheels that compete for your attention.

So let’s make it 6 magic words, courtesy of Gillian:

SORRY, WE’RE NOT RIGHT FOR EVERYONE.

Maybe when that prospective clients get a little larger, they’ll be right for you– or maybe if they’re serious about what it takes to succeed in online marketing. But remember that if you’re having a hard time with them when they haven’t even paid a dime, imagine how they’ll be when they’ve handed you a few dollars.

If you follow the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule), then remember that you need only a few clients to have a great business. Don’t be afraid to cut some clients loose. They may have been right for you a couple years ago when you were a smaller firm or just getting started. But now you’re a different company and have moved on to a different client base. You can recommend others that can do a great job.

If you like this, please let me know or send a note to Gillian thanking her for the advice she’s has generously given here.