Using Your Professional Intuition with Your Business
Engagement letters, retainer fees, scopes of work.
All of these things are designed to help us ensure the project or contract is well-defined, mutually agreeable and fee specific.
And yet, for every “I” that gets dotted and “T” that gets crossed there are still those times when you just KNEW you should listen to your gut and not take the work. Learning to trust your professional intuition with your clients is one thing. Learning to trust it in your own business can be quite another.
With Who Becomes (or Stays) Your Client
We have been around this block so many times in my financial services agency. We have reviewed pricing, (re)educated our referral partners and gotten very, very clear on our scopes of work.
But not all projects or clients are created equal – even if they look that way on paper. There is no fee spreadsheet or preliminary intake that is going to give you enough data to say yes or no to each project or client before you send them an engagement letter. At least we haven’t found one thing or magic combination in our 10+ agency years that does. (If you have, I’d love to know how it works!)
If those things don’t work 100% of the time, what does?
That professional intuition and expertise you are using with your clients.
Ever get off the phone and think “they are going to be high-maintenance” – and still price their work just like any other client because that’s what the fee sheet says?
Ever get two months into a retainer engagement and slap your forehead because you knew this was going to be a bad fit?
Ever felt like you had to “talk yourself into” taking that one client or project because…
it filled a schedule gap
it came from a referral source that has been solid in the past
it should have been a slam dunk
That’s called ignoring your intuition…also known as not trusting your gut, not following your instincts, ignoring the red flags and disregarding the warning signs.
It is possible for this to go the other direction, too, resulting in missed opportunities, stagnating revenues and a smaller network. Those aren’t the ones that tend to cause us the most grief though.
It’s the ones we knew – in our gut – that weren’t a fit. It’s the headache-causing, eye-crossing, maddening ones that make you say “Next time, I’ll listen to my intuition.”
With Your Offers
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. ~Author Unknown
I am a CPA. Have been for a very, very long time – decades, in fact. And I have never done a client’s taxes. I don’t even do my own.
Do you know how often we get asked to do taxes? So much that I put into my conversations with any client who might, sometime, want us to do their taxes.
Do you know how easy it would be to add this as a service?
My financial services firm COULD do a lot of things. There is an almost endless amount of services we could offer that would meld easily with what we already do. In fact, we used to offer more services than we do now. Some of those decisions are based on what we’re good at and the business decisions I have made on what we are going to specialize in. Some of those decisions are fully backed by historical results and future pipeline.
And some of them are based on my intuition about how we can best serve our clients, our network and our team.
If we are going to offer a service or product, I want it to be something that will produce profit and that anyone on the team would enjoy working on (client issues aside). That means that it needs to be engaging, maybe a little challenging and builds on our past experience. Those are subjective things – things that my gut will help me work through.
With Your Team
“They aren’t a good fit.”
This is what every boss ever has said when they can’t quite put their finger on why a job candidate didn’t make the cut. It can also apply to employees who do acceptable work but are the first to be considered for termination if someone needs to go.
In most cased, these people are technically qualified. They present well. They aren’t making obvious mistakes.
They’re just…not a good fit. That statement is a gut feeling put into words. That is your intuition picking up on subtle cues and patterns that are sort of like a color that is just a shade off. Don’t ignore that. Don’t rationalize your way out of it. Don’t say “it is just a personality difference.”
Once you know your intuition is on point, it’s time to minimize how long the situation continues. It’s easy with a job candidate because there is less invested. It’s harder with an employee…but you are not doing anyone on either side any favors by prolonging the inevitable.
Three areas. Three opportunities. How are you going to start or deepen using your intuition in your business this week?
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