The #1 Skill To Predict Success
If you were to ask me to gauge the success of an interior designer’s business without ever looking at their books, the one thing I would want to know is how comfortable they are talking about money.
If they’re comfortable talking about money with their clients, I can almost guarantee you that they have a healthy, enjoyable business where they are happy with how much they pay themselves.
And I’m not talking about the “I’m-going-to-fake-it-’til-I-make-it” false comfort, I’m talking about “I’ve-been-around-the-block-and-have-earned-this-money-talking-skill.”
Which came first? Does the skill of easily talking about money lead to success, or does the success that lends itself to making money easy to talk about?
The answer is “yes.”
The good news here is that it is a skill to be honed. And once you hone it and OWN it, so many other things fall into place for your business.
If you want to see this concept in action, you have got to watch the most recent video that DesignFiles did in their Facebook Group with Kimberly Horton. Brilliant. (You’ll have to join the group to watch the video, but it's totally worth it. They do a great job of keeping content useful and relevant.
Last week I told you I’d be talking about WHEN to talk about money with your clients – but I’m going to waylay that so I can gush over the brilliance and confidence of Kimberly Horton.
The understated message in Kimberly’s presentation is that she at no point ever says “I won’t serve that client because they can’t afford me.” But she doesn’t swing the pendulum in the other direction of “I’ll work with anyone” either.
She is so confident in her carefully honed skill and so secure in the value she brings, that instead of asking “who do I exclusively serve,” she asks: “where is the overlap between what you are willing to pay and what I am willing to do without compromising my value, brand, or energy?”
This question is overlooked far too often. We’re told to:
niche down,
learn to say no to anything below a certain budget, and
take on only projects/clients we get along well with.
But this advice also gets misconstrued to mean “only say ‘yes’ when the stars are perfectly aligned” which can be so frustrating when the people knocking on your door don’t fit all three criteria, and you just want/need the next project to keep bringing in revenue.
So we compromise. We take on a client that’s not the best fit. We give them more of our time than we normally would and we don’t charge for it because we know it’s over their budget. We start to resent the project and *voila* – it’s a project you don’t really want to put your name on and you just want it to be over.
What if instead of treating each criteria as a binary yes/no, we asked ourselves “what would I be willing to do that gives large value to the client, and doesn’t require a lot of emotional or long-term energy from me?”
Follow up question: “Would I be excited to do little pockets of this type of work?”
I’d love to hear your answers!
I’m rooting for you.