Twenty Years With the Same Client”
}What has made it last, as far as I can tell, is mutual honesty ...
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I have a client I’ve worked with for over twenty years.
When we started, they were a professional services firm with about thirty employees and a security infrastructure that was, charitably, functional. Their concerns were mostly about email reliability and basic network stability. The threat landscape was different. The regulatory environment was different. Their business was different.
Today they’re larger, more complex, more regulated, and operating in an environment that their 2004 IT setup wouldn’t recognize. And we’re still there.
I’ve thought about what has made that relationship last. It’s not that we’ve always been right. We haven’t. It’s not that we’ve never had a difficult conversation. We’ve had many. It’s not even that we’re always the most competent option available; I’m sure there have been moments when another provider might have done certain things better.
}What has made it last, as far as I can tell, is mutual honesty about how things are actually going.
Their leadership tells us when something isn’t working. We tell them when we think they’re making a choice that will create problems. Neither party pretends to be satisfied when they’re not.
And we’ve both changed. The way we work together now looks nothing like how we worked together in 2004. The relationship has adapted to who they’ve become and what they actually need, rather than staying locked in the structure that made sense at the beginning.
Long relationships require renegotiation. Not of the contract of the understanding. What are we actually doing together, and is it still right?
That conversation, done honestly, is what keeps a good relationship from becoming a comfortable habit.
What’s the longest professional relationship you’ve maintained, and what do you think has kept it going?