On fear and trembling... A colleague suggested recently that it was not a good idea to give too much away on a page such as this, lest readers secretly hunt out your clients. No-one is irreplaceable, they said, reasonably enough. Now while Im hardly going to post the telephone numbers, budgets and inside leg measurements of my various contacts here, I do wonder about this culture of fear. When you develop a direct client base, treat them well, get to know them personally, and do your best to deliver good service, then its highly unlikely they will switch to someone else. Of course, a new manager may arrive, with an address book of their own. Your contact may move on. But even then, in most cases, people want an easy life. They dont want to begin the search all over again... Your friendly client might also of course fall in love with a tall, dark and handsome translator. But there are relatively few male translators, so theres hope. And I am fairly convinced that rare is the client who will switch based on price alone, without at least trying to negotiate with you. I am also reasonably confident that values such as loyalty and trust, (which were incidentally the very backbone of my fathers small town family business, which he inherited from HIS father) still count for something. And even if one day, someone did pinch 1,2, or 3 of my clients, well so what? Nothing is permanent. Id just go out and find some more... Because the one great and incontrovertible benefit of having built a business from scratch, is that you know you can always do it all over again. https://facebook/standingoutasatranslator?ref=hl
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 08:20:57 +0000
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