“To be clear, your services are no longer needed.”

Gasp! Shock! Horror! How did this happen, wondered Trixie, the marketing and PR maven who leverages her 25 plus years of experience with Fortune 500 companies to bring value to clients? The professional who has delighted clients since starting her business in 2007, who is currently buried in work and enjoys a varied client mix including law firms, energy services companies and an international asset integrity corporation?

Easy. She lost her way.

Trixie’s tale of woe is not unusual. Like other savvy sole practitioners, she started out with a well-crafted business plan laying out,  among other things, a marketing strategy to reach her target audiences as well as a fee structure for worked rendered. From there, she created her brand through online and personal interaction; the latter of which included association participation, lunches, dinners and topical speeches at numerous organizations. In the beginning, she took any work she could get, lowering her fees to build her business and gain credibility in the local market. In time, things got rolling.

What Trixie did NOT do is adjust her business plan to embrace growth. She didn’t consider how to continue offering quality services to new clients while already at full capacity, or how to say no to people who wanted something for nothing, or next to nothing. Next to nothing was fine–although not great–in the beginning, but she didn’t stop to realize that it was impossible now.

So, when Trixie found herself across the table from a friendly, prospective client at a quaint coffee shop, she kindly agreed to help the client out by writing a multi-page web site for the cost of, well, a short blog post. Was she smoking her hair, you ask? No one knows for sure. Either way, the stage was set for failure, and any consultant can recite the rest: Trixie unintentionally pushed the low-paying project aside for clients who payed her full rate. She couldn’t outsource the work because she wasn’t charging enough to begin with. She asked for extensions. The quality wasn’t there. She made the client angry. The client said bye-bye.

This being the first tarnished mark on Trixie’s otherwise sterling reputation, she was mortified. And although some people would say good riddance to a low-paying project, Trixie wrote a list of reminders to ensure this would never happen again. If you’re a consultant or small business owner:

1. Revisit your business plan once per year. Adjust your marketing strategy and fee structures to embrace growth, or other factors impacting your business. Be in touch with where you have been, and where you want to go.
2. Charge what you’re worth. Trixie decided after this unfortunate affair that unless she’s starving, she will never again offer something for next to nothing. She meant to help the client, but by offering an unrealistic discount she could not sustain the project in light of higher paying work with tight deadlines.
3. Ask for half your fee at the outset of a project. Many consultants ask for half the estimated fee up front, which requires clients to have some skin in the game. By the time Trixie’s client told her to take a hike, she had already spent 10 hours on the project. Trixie can pretty much kiss those hours goodbye.
4. Remember that a reputation is a terrible thing to waste. Just like a major corporation’s reputation can be destroyed by one, single, bad incident, a consultant’s reputation can be negatively impacted by one frustrated client. The word “no” is much easier than rebuilding what is lost when you make a bad impression.

I hope Trixie’s tale of woe may be useful to you as you interact with clients of all sizes and needs. Who really is this Trixie, you ask? Hmm, I’ll never tell.