One of the odd things about luxury businesses is that we’ll spend hours agonising over which clients to attract, but almost no time at all thinking about which ones we should let go.
Which is strange, because unlike furniture or inventory, clients aren’t inert. They don’t just sit there being profitable. They influence tone and they shape pace. They also have a habit of messing with your internal language in ways you don’t notice at first, until you catch yourself saying things like “let’s just be careful” about what should have been a perfectly routine email.
And of course, by that point, nobody’s talking about the actual client anymore. They’re talking about the ‘weather’ around the client. So staff hesitate more, decisions take longer to make and confidence drains like the heat through a window in a stately. And the odd thing is, you’ll still find someone, maybe even yourself, insisting, “Yes, but they spend a lot and they pay on time.”
As though this compensates for emotional extortion, which make no mistake, this is what it is.
Now, demanding clients are fine. Expected, even. Especially in luxury. But there’s a difference between being pushed and being undermined. One improves the work and the other erodes it.
But this is where it tends to get interesting: the client will usually be perfectly polite to the owner or the manager or whomever is in charge. Because they know exactly where the power sits, but they save the petty tyranny for your assistant, your coordinator, the junior who’s just joined.
And if you allow it, what you’re really saying, no matter how many times you mention “our people are our greatest asset” at a town hall or in your LinkedIn posts, is that being a bit of a dick is perfectly acceptable, provided you give us money.
That’s the message you’re sending, and I’d imagine it’s not the one you want.
See you in the next one
Paul
