I’m learning a lot about salesmanship these days.
Downstairs at Helpful Towers, where the people who manage our serviced office work, there are posters on the wall celebrating great customer service and setting out the company’s model for managing the customer relationship from first contact, right through to careful ‘off-boarding’, when the client moves out. It’s an attractive and logical concept – treat people well, they’ll be your advocates even when they stop being your clients – which of course bears no relation to reality. When monthly targets and quotas come into it, it’s about protecting revenue over the next few months, as the sales guy had no qualms about saying to me earlier, while forcing me to pay six weeks extra rent for literally nothing. I’m indeed off-boarded, and not a little off-fucked too.
This evening, I dropped in to the summer party of Movement for Change, a great organisation training local people around the country to be community organisers, set up by David Miliband three years ago. I remember sitting down with the first National Director in the draughty Royal Festival Hall cafe at Christmas time 2010 to take the original website brief, registering domains names, and setting up a WordPress site which grew from a holding page, to a blog, to a BuddyPress network, and back to a blog as plans changed. Today, they migrated away to a platform based on NationBuilder, the cool political campaigning software that’s driven hundreds of US political races. I’m genuinely happy for them – it’s a better fit for what they’re doing, it looks nicer than the old site, and it will help them do more as a distributed political campaigning force. We had a nice Skype chat last week to finalise the domain switch, totted up the final hosting bill, I did a quick scrape and archive of their old site in case they need anything from it, and we’ve been chatting about hosting recommendations for their other bits and pieces. They invited me to their party, I had some nice canapés, and bumped into familiar faces. I haven’t always managed the end of client relationships so well, sadly: some have petered out rather in a fug of busyness and mismanaged expectations. If that’s you, I’m mortified about it, and sorry.
I’m going to do everything I can in the coming years to help fellow entrepreneurs avoid the trap of my serviced office company. I hope the Movement for Change guys will remember us as helpful and positive, to the end and beyond.
I think that’s what off-boarding looks like.
Photo credit: FrogStarB
