You know that moment in a job interview? The moment where the person sitting in the power-chair turns to you and asks these two questions: ” What would you say your biggest strengths are? And what would you say your biggest weaknesses are?”
Most of the time, the first question is easy, but you hesitate to answer the second. Is it really a good idea to be honest about your faults? If you want to get the job, should you really be totally transparent about your failures?
At Visual Harbor, we believe the answer to that question is yes. That’s why we’re not afraid to tell you that, like most businesses, we occasionally lose a client. In fact, we just lost a client the other day– and we’ll even go so far as to say we fully deserved it.
Here’s a short summary of what we did wrong and some lessons we learned throughout the process:
- We neglected or took too long to pay attention to the details we thought did not have any major impact, like “this text needs to changed”, “the color needs to be changed“, or “this font type is not the same as we have on the homepage”. And I have to say the client was very patient with us for a while, reminding us the things we forgot to update or change, so it took a while for some things to get done.
- We failed to produce pretty reports that can be shown to the bosses! This is the most serious crime you can commit in a service industry. We focused on working on new “creative” things, and managing technical things that are hard to understand and forgot to offset the negative experience mentioned above by creating pretty reports about our activity and, what’s more important, hours spent. You see, this is my problem over and over again, I focus on creating and perfecting a landing page for a search marketing campaign that generates leads like the client has never seen before, but I assume they know the hours that go into it. I assume they count and analyze the rate at which they are getting leads and see the improvement after the improved site design is launched. I assume they measure and I forget I am in marketing, and perception is 80%, substance, actual results are maybe 20% of the success (the 80/20 rule again). Come to think of it, why should clients behave differently? This world of online marketing is so different, so technical. It’s like when you have a car problem and you don’t know a much about cars. Your perception of the mechanic is going to be formed by whether or not he was nice to you, attentive and gave you a pretty print out of the things he did on your car (it does not matter that “Visual inspection of the brake pads ” really means him looking at your wheels for 30 seconds, it looks like something that can look impressive in a print out) . You are not in a position to inspect his work, so to assess, you use the “circumstantial evidence”, the things you can observe and understand.
- Poor Communication. We’ve worked with a company for a software development project recently that sent us daily reports on what was done. The reports were full of detail and clearly took some time to create. Although they assured us they were not charging for the reporting and project management I know they were factoring it into the hours we paid for. Until two days ago I thought this was crazy (I was not reading these for the lack of time, bi-weekly summary was enough). I thought, “you are over communicating and I am pretty sure I am paying for it”. I don’t think of it in the same way anymore though. That time they spent creating the reports, matters, because it’s part of their marketing, and they even got me to pay for it! In other words, communicating a lot, even though there’ might not be a rational need for it, is another type of task you have to perform to be successful in the service business. And, like I said above in most cases it’s “billable” although you would never put it as a separate item on an invoice.
So as you can see, despite the dozens of positive customer testimonials you’ll read on this site, occasionally we come up short . But, at the end of the day, our hope is that by admitting our mistakes we can spend our time making things right rather than covering things up.
