In the beginning, we approached new business with a take-what-we-can-get mentality. This simply means that we’d take any and all work that came our way. The goal was do as much work as we can for as many different clients and work really hard so that we could do it all at a high level. This also meant compromising on hours and budget in order to get happy customers.

This was fine then, but as our business matures, we find that this is ultimately just plain wrong.

Your relationships need to be based on mutual beneficiality. The work we do should provide good solutions that impact our client’s businesses and in turn they should value the work we do appropriately.

Touchy-feeliness aside, this makes business sense when it comes to bottom line. We have some clients that don’t really value our work, we see this when they try to suck every last minute out of us for free and expect something for nothing. This is shit. And, this is not a good relationship.

I believe that if you truly value something (whether it be a product in general or a certain property of a specific brand), you’ll pay what it’s worth, even if the opportunity is there to get it free. For example, I ran over my 40 hours of Pandora for this month. I could have switched to Grooveshark.com, or hell, even signed up for another Pandora account and had 40 more for free. On the contrary, because I value the service provided, I paid for the unlimited hours.

Lesson: Expect no different from our clients and only get into relationships where the work we do is truly valued.