The Better Question To Help Your Clients

Today I finished reading The Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha. It’s a great book for every entrepreneur and anyone looking to add entrepreneurism to their career (which should be everyone with a job). Highly recommended.

As with all books on my Kindle I’ve been taking notes and determining how I can apply the knowledge to better help my clients. At the end of this book though I had a huge realization – I’ve been approaching this the wrong way.

Over the past months I’ve been approaching my product and service offerings at Dempsey Marketing from the standpoint of “what else can I offer my clients that will help their businesses?” It’s that thinking that gave birth to our premium WordPress hosting solution. Today though I realized that I’ve been asking myself the wrong question.

Rather than ask, “what else can I offer my clients” instead ask “what do I need to know and be able to do in order to better help my clients?”

This different approach provides a great direction for both learning and networking. Here are a few examples:

When creating strategies for our clients I know that my knowledge and thinking only go so far. Instead of ending with an answer such as “this is what my best thinking came up with” I can go outside of myself to my network and brainstorm additional ideas with them.

I don’t have to have all the answers; in fact no one person does. And that’s okay.

So it behooves me to make contacts with people in the industries in which my clients operate.

Secondly, I love to make tools. Blog Summaries will be going private beta for Dempsey Marketing customers soon, and I already have ideas percolating for additional tools. Based on the new question, rather than asking myself “what should I build” I approach it like this: “what information do I need to gather and analyze and from what sources so that I can better serve my clients?”

It’s a subtle difference with a profound effect.

So let me put the question to you to noodle on: what do you need to know and be able to do in order to better help your clients?

Get writing!