I like to practice what I preach, and one of the ideas I have been thinking a lot about lately is being radically client-focused.
Marcy Phelps and I are regularly invited speakers at Kim Dority’s class at the University of Denver on alternative careers for librarians. Marcy and I usually plan out what we’ll cover during our two hours and how we will divide up the time and the topic. Sometimes we talk about what impelled us to launch our businesses, sometimes we talk about the lessons learned from entrepreneurship that translate to any employment situation, sometimes we talk about the pros and cons of self-employment. But Kim commented to us that this year’s students are different than recent years, so Marcy and I decided to give her class a true example of entrepreneurship in action.
This time, we are going to introduce ourselves and spend a couple of minutes talking about what we do. Then we are going to just start asking the students questions about what they most want to find out about infopreneurship. Marcy and I will each have a couple of thought-provoking grenades propositions to toss out if needed to get the conversation going, but otherwise, we are going to wing it.
How is this being radically client-focused? We realized that we really don’t know what this class wants to know. Do they want to hear advice about how to get their own businesses started? Do they think that entrepreneurship is for them? Do they want to hear day-in-the-life-of-an-infopreneur stories? First, I thought of doing a flash survey of the class to get a sense of what they would want. But I realized that, because I didn’t know what I didn’t know, a survey wouldn’t really help.
Just as it is important for us to listen to our clients during the reference interview instead of jumping to conclusions as to what they want, Marcy and I decided that we would be of best service by being open to whatever comes up. We both have enough public speaking experience – one of the best ways to build word-of-mouth referrals – so the idea of speaking without notes or a structure doesn’t faze us.
More importantly, by taking this approach, we are showing the students an essential entrepreneurial skill – the ability to live slightly outside our comfort zone. We are willing to sound less polished, to have to stop for a moment to think something through, to get stumped by a question we hadn’t thought about before. And we leave ourselves open to the possibility of addressing concerns or worries we would not have imagined, of gaining an entirely fresh perspective on what we do, and seeing new ways to describe the value we bring to our clients.
As I describe in my blog post on why my clients are happy to tell me how much they want to spend on me, infopreneurs succeed when we tangibly demonstrate that our focus is on our client’s best interest and not just our own bottom line or comfort level. Marcy and I are putting that into practice in Kim’s class soon.
I’ll update this blog post to let you know how the class goes!
UPDATE: We had a great time! The class had lots of thoughtful questions, and we definitely would not have anticipated half of them. And, even more importantly, our “client” – Kim – was delighted. Win/win/win.