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Having “The Talk” With Your Client

Recently, a friend of mine had to have "the talk" with his son. You know what talk I'm talking about. The Talk. Like many kids, the realization of "the birds and the bees" was alarming and apparently he walked around in a state of shock for a while afterwards.

If you're a business coach, you have a similar awkward job with your clients as you help them understand their business and how it is changing. Things may be really cooking for them as a successful start-up with two or three employees full of hubris… and all of a sudden they realize that they can't handle things the way they are and they need to make changes. They contact you to help them. You talk them through the process of adding staff, creating systems, and all that kind of stuff. It's just like a business version of The Talk: You need to explain how things are really done now that they are growing up.

One of the primary ways that your client's business is going to change is in its culture. Once, a couple of people – probably co-owners – sat around a table 24/7 brainstorming and selling. It was crazy and messy and fueled by coffee and convenience store snacks. Those may have been fun times and the owners will look back on those as fondly as we all reflect on our carefree childhoods. But as the business grows, things change: They can't simply add another half dozen employees and expect business to still take place in that one room 24/7. Non-owners, for example, will have different motivations. They'll want to go home in the evenings. They'll care when they get paid. They won't feel the same sense of ownership.

That is exactly what happened to Method, a cleaning products company that grew. In their early days, they were that fresh-faced aggressive business that was able to combine fun and work in a way that only entrepreneurs can. But then things evolve and they soon found themselves with a group of employees that couldn't be sustained by that culture.

I read about them in an article at BNET called "Taming the Type-A Culture Gone Wild". In the article, author Melanie Warner describes how free spirited and collaborative things were and how they changed as the business grew. Suddenly, the entrepreneurs found themselves needing to formalize a culture where once they let the culture be defined by the few people who worked there. 

The article reports that they successfully created five rules – "Collaborate", "Care", "Innovate", "Keep Method weird", and the odd-yet-humorous "What would MacGyver do?" – to help define the corporate culture.

The article in BNET was just about culture but if you're a business consultant, there's a good chance that your clients will need guidance in far more than cultural shifts. They'll need to be coached in successful hiring (and eventually, successfully firing), administration, vision-casting, and more. They may do these well now but these skills need to be formalized and that is where you come in. You need to walk them through what they need to do and you need to help them formalize and systematize various aspects that were once carefree. But it often starts with culture.

Are you ready to have "The Talk" with your clients?

Related Articles:

• Finding New Clients from Businesses
• Succeeding With Two Tools You Were Born With
• Clustering Change
• Business Coaching
• Do I really have to sell?

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