Do you know how you can grab a dog’s tail, cause the animal to spin, then grab the dog’s tail again, cause the dog to spin in the opposite direction with no lesson learned by the foolish animal?
Well, I just went through a similar experience with one of my clients. It was so jarring that I had to release the client from the engagement for my own sake!
Some Types of Clients Do Not Come First
The problem began because I was unaware my client, who’d engaged my services, was in business partnership with a spouse. And she had not kept her husband thoroughly aware of ongoing discussions with me. The wife had led me to believe that her husband was aware of our business engagement at a level of detail that proved untrue.
So, when their divided mind became evident, I had to tell both that I’d have to fish or cut bait.
I seldom have to bring a client to such a blunt end point of affairs. But this one did something rather unique that kept me from discovering sooner that there would be a major problem completing the engagement together.
This client had fallen victim to opportunity lust.
“In this world, you only get what you grab for.”
Except Giovanni Boccaccio, who said the above, assumed you’d remember you only get two hands. Try to be a two-headed octopus and you may miss your opportunity.
Opportunity lust is what led one of these spouses down a promising path that, without the moral fiber to stick to a single commitment, eventually made it impossible to do business with either.
Opportunity lust is what I call spotting a chance to make a ton of money in a hot market so clearly that you lose all sense of perspective about how to exploit any opportunity from your existing vantage point.
Lusting for this opportunity keeps the immature cycling round and round, back to the starting point. The person keeps speaking of how great a market there is and how good a chance there is to make great money in it without doing what is critical to get a grip on those opportunities.
This is why opportunity lust will break you.
It will leave you penniless while hoping to make a buck.
This type of lust is characteristic of people who don’t mind spinning their wheels to release all the energy within, from their excitement of having spotted the glint of gold in thar hills! Yet, regrettably, their enthusiasm also quickly moves them from one shiny object to the next, keeping them from ever digging down to mine the gold they first spotted.
Consequently, they never gain traction but do cause plenty of friction and subsequent smoke that blinds them from any progress to be gained getting from Point A to Point B in a reasonable space of time.
In the process, not only do they go nowhere, they also waste time, fuel, rubber, and damage the vehicle’s clutch. In this case, I was their vehicle. I was their connection to the road. I was the expert hired to get them from Point A to Point B. And all they had me do was rev up, spin my wheels and squeal tires in place for several days.
When I came to realize the main reason why we were at crossed purposes relative to what we had agreed to start from and move toward only a few days earlier, I had to make an executive decision and let them go.
Clients Do Not Come First When It’s They Who Hold Each Other Back
One of the two married associates quietly accepted my decision to quit the project. He did so almost submissively. Basically, he wasn’t surprised, while the other remained aloof to the very end about whatever had gone wrong and why I insisted we’d had no foundation onto which to build a business that would last.
For the sake of clarity and to ensure I wouldn’t be contributing to a squabble between husband and wife, I pointed to the fact that priorities had been continuously shifting. And until priorities could be set in stone, there wouldn’t be a foundation upon which to build the system we had discussed to create.
Nevertheless, in my innermost being, I knew the problem was a classic case of unequal yoking between husband and wife. Clients do not come first if they naturally hold each other back from advancing. And this is what unequal yoking achieves.
Unequal yoking is a term used in the Bible to refer to someone belonging to the Christian faith being forbidden from marrying someone not belonging to that faith. The reason provided is “For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?” The idea here is that it is pointless to move in one direction thinking one is doing what is right and enlightened only to expect incorrectly any fellowship with an associate who is moving in the opposite direction thinking it is he who is doing what is right and enlightened. “Can two walk together, unless they are agreed?” says another portion of the Bible.
That’s a rhetorical question. The answer is an emphatic no, and it proved true by what I went through with this couple.
Don’t Even Out The Yoke If It’s Not Your Job
Clients do not come first when their divided mind cannot progress. If it cannot bear the yoke of work evenly unless both parts work as one, you’re out of luck as a consultant. And you’ll be getting caught in the middle of a whirlwind if you try to favor one side at the risk of failing to favor the other just in order to get the work done.
Because the fact is that you will not get the work done since both sides are uneven and cannot bear the weight of your guidance together. You will waste too many resources trying to salvage whatever good could come from such doomed engagement. So, preferably quit as soon and as graciously as you can.
This goes for any type of shared leadership or partnership you may have to deal with in your clients. They don’t literally have to be married. They just have to bear the brunt together and make that weight one of your dependencies in your ability to fulfill your side of the bargain. If they cannot act as a united front, then quit.
The particular case I was addressing a few days ago involved building a demand generation and lead management system for a realty agency that needed to produce cash flow for a separate business to pay for its own marketing campaigns.
The husband worked the cash-rich business. The wife worked the realty agency. Nobody worked marketing for either, which is why I was brought into the picture. Bridging the gap between these two operations to facilitate the funding of one by the other required careful synchronization of promotional activities, and a systematic approach to grow demand for each business.
One operation couldn’t take precedence over the other willy-nilly. They both needed to operate as partners.
But the wife wouldn’t do the work no one else in her business could do for her, and the husband wouldn’t collaborate by making her business priority over his when needed. So, we lived in a perpetual impasse despite all appearances indicating they were working together as a household with common objectives and shared values.
The fact of the matter is that they run two entirely different and separate businesses with only a hope someday to perhaps work on the same business as one, to leverage each other’s strengths and remain afloat, rather than sink individually and so the whole household – the whole partnership – with them.
The big lesson for me here is to keep out of unequally yoked business relationships. And unless you’re in the business of counseling to such situations specifically, my advice is that you also keep out of them always. They will frustrate you. They will waste your precious resources.
And they will find also ample opportunity in you to turn you into a common enemy that may at last unify them in a uniquely and particularly satisfying way under one common banner against you for incommoding them about doing what they together don’t want to do, i.e. bear the same yoke together. Ironic but true.
So, beware. Some clients do not come first. Leave the dog’s tail alone, and find some better way to become amused.
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