…somebody else will do.
You cannot avoid competition but at least you should not feed it with your actions! Every client that you lose is a new customer for your competitors.
Of course:
- If the client is clearly a toxic client, sending him/her to a competitor may end up being a very smart decision
- You should stick to your business model (unless is not one client but almost all of them that have similar requests). It’s better to lose some clients than to lose your focus. E.g. some clients would like the design of a new theme as part of my drupal – wordpress migration services. For them, everything should be part of the same package but in reality both tasks (data migration and theme design) ar two completely different tasks. Obviously, I could hire a designer to do this but I prefer to focus on my speciality instad of worrying about dealing with another freelance, supervising her work…
Keep all this in mind next time you find yourself dealing with a difficult customer!
Yesterday I had a clear example of what I explain in the post. I got a message from a person who had NOT used my services for migrating from drupal to wordpress but that was not happy with the service she used and came to me to see if I could fix some migration problems she had detected.
Unfortunately, in her case, the migration was too messed up to fix it (without remigrating everything) but it is a good example of how you are going to lose clients if you don’t do your job well