Experiences of a Professional Consultant: Overcoming Difficult Client Situations and Keys to Success

Overcoming Difficult Client Situations

Difficulty at a client can arise for a number of reasons, but, as my experience has taught me, it is often due to one of the following situations, most of which are preventable: 

1. There is an expectation gap between what the client believes can and should have been done and what the consultant has done. The way to overcome this is to communicate, communicate, communicate from day one. If you haven’t been doing so, do it now and keep it up until the end of the engagement. If you don’t tell the client about the challenges and impediments you have encountered, they may expect too much, too soon. More than one consultant has told me they thought they were doing a great job only to be told by the client a month later that they were not. Manage the expectations. 

2. Don’t overpromise something to the client that you can’t deliver or can’t deliver within the timeframe you indicate. I always like to use the caveat, “barring any unforeseen impediments or challenges.” Clients will also be more lenient if you have proven yourself with former work product and you have established a real working relationship. This is unlikely to be the case during your first few weeks on the project.

3. The client’s communication style just doesn’t mesh with yours. The emails are often cryptic because the person is busy. They know what they want, but they don’t seem to communicate it well. I try to overcome this by saying to myself, “What would I want in their situation?” and then by clarifying with questions in an email. If my gut is saying I am not quite sure what they are asking of me, that is enough for me to get clarification. Better to do that and be successful than to think you know what they want and be wrong. This can be difficult to do when the client is busy, tied-up in meetings, and needs the work product yesterday. The clarification communication has to be done. Use your judgment. You may or may not be able to start on what they have asked you to do until you get your questions answered. 

4. Finally, the one I find the most challenging and thankfully the rarest, is you just don’t mesh with the client or situation. On this one, I don’t have any great words of wisdom, but some, or all, of these may help: 

• • Remember the old saying, “this too shall pass.” You can handle almost anything if it is short-term. If you are working very independently, this will be easier. It will be harder if you are working closely with and individual who is the source of the problem.

• • Be thankful you didn’t hire on as a permanent employee. I have been at many clients I would not join as an employee. A client relationship is very different from an employer relationship, but in the end, you can never know what you are getting into until you are there for a while. 

• • Communicate your thoughts with your J Curve contact. They may know the person better and can offer some advice. 

• • Don’t get angry and walk out in a huff. Remember they are a J Curve client and not your employer. Clients come in all shapes, sizes, and personalities. 

• • View it as a psychology experiment if this helps you get through it. My wife likes to say, “Experience is what you get when you get nothing else.”

Keys to Success

When you think about it, success in finance and accounting consulting is really no different than success in all the skilled professions. I measure my career success by the satisfaction of clients, my ability to make a living, and how happy I am while doing the work.

I believe you need three things to be successful: 

1. Keep your skillset current through life-long learning. Imagine if you never learned another thing after graduating from college. Someone like me would be a dinosaur and useless to clients. While a current skillset is absolutely necessary for consulting, I don’t think it is sufficient by itself. 

2. Bring your best interpersonal skills when dealing with clients and their employees. Treat each one like a different flower, requiring a slightly different approach to their care.

3. Have the wisdom to know your role at the client. You are a consultant through J Curve and must remember they are your true employer, not the client. They provided you with the client opportunity and the recommendation to get your foot in the door. 

I believe it is the combination of these three, applied in the right manner, that is really the recipe for success at each client.

Finally, here are a few examples that demonstrate why I enjoy consulting so much. All of you have, or will, experience similar types of situations. 

1. Helping a staff accountant of a client gain more advanced Excel skills so they can shorten the time it takes to do many of their tasks and carry that knowledge forward in their career. 

2. Cheering up the former owner of a business, recently sold to a venture capital firm, by reminding him it is not unusual for a rift to develop between the two within the stay-around period and that the building of a business from scratch is, by itself, a great accomplishment that can never be taken away.

3. Working long hours for many weeks with the client’s accounting team to get things back on the rails in time for statutory reporting deadlines and completion of the audit. 

4. Writing a thank you email or taking someone out to lunch because s/he was so integral to your success on a particular aspect of the engagement. 

5. Helping a client hire a new Controller when they didn’t feel comfortable doing so.

For more insights from Dean, please see Episode 1: Transitioning to Consulting and Winning Client Engagements and Episode 2: Servicing the Client on the J Curve UpSuite blog.

In this series, we highlighted the experiences of a very successful J Curve consultant, Dean Bragg. Dean shared his personal insights from 20+ years as a consultant. If you have advice or stories to share from your experience working as a consultant with J Curve, we would love to hear from you!

For individuals considering a career move to full-time consulting or those who have been consulting and are interested in collaborating with the team at J Curve, please reach out to us at info@jcurvellc.com.