The Volatility Opportunity: Turning Risks Into Rewards With High-Profile Clients

Diversifying your client base and cultivating a deep commitment to exceptional service can build antifragility in your organization. They also set you up for success even when times turn rough.

What do these two scenarios have in common?

No.1: You have just partnered with a high-profile company and secured a lucrative contract. The sales process has been underway for months, and many of your employees are already preparing for their new roles. Then, everything changes. External disruptions hit your new client hard, and the deal is sunk.

No. 2: After negotiating a multi-year engagement, your early endeavors are on track and well received. Then, policy change brings the work in-house, and your contribution is eventually ramped down to zero. The change was abrupt, but the death was drawn-out.

The commonality? If you are a CEO, it is not your fault, but it is your problem.

In business, predicting the future can be a fool’s errand. Exposure tends to remain even after we look at a client’s trajectory and interpret data points. But there is an upside to the risk. Whether external volatility is impacting a client or internal dynamics are causing instability, there is an opportunity for service-oriented companies to offer bespoke solutions.

When External Factors Strike Your Client

Economic downturns and societal shifts can endanger even the most robust contractual partnerships. The more advance notice of bad news that clients can give agencies, the better off everyone will be.

Instead of hopefully peering into crystal balls (which never works out, by the way), we have learned that service-oriented companies can build antifragility into their business model by diversifying their clientele.

This advice flies in the face of the conventional “find your niche” wisdom, but recent events have shown us the dangers of that approach. For example, any software developer focused exclusively on serving the travel sector in 2020 would have seen their business die overnight.

Diversification is crucial not only in light of the wide swath the pandemic cut through many niche businesses but also because a narrow focus adds volatility to a situation already fraught with risk.

If you are beholden to the successes and failures of your clients, then the same is true for your clients’ industries. When you have a broad client base across such sectors as education, media, health care, and financial services, your business is more robust – and more resilient.

The strength of your relationships directly impacts the continued viability of your business. Companies come to us with a wide range of issues, and we take an approach unique to each business. That bespoke attention engenders trust and rapport.

An authentic orientation to service, especially in times of shock and upheaval, can set you apart

Internal Volatility Requires Hard and Soft Skills

Challenges of internal misalignment often plague larger organizations. While we are best known for our engineering and technical work, we have to be ready to act as mediators in more complex companies.

Some stakeholder maps require more navigation skills than others, as a diverse set of individuals will often answer the same questions differently.

How do you determine whose opinion matters more? Take an almost granular approach with communications to identify the commonalities across departments. By seeing a project from various viewpoints, you can then guide stakeholders through the resistance points to find a consensus.

You will often need to rely on the soft skills of psychology to remember that people inside the machinery of large organizations are driven by the very human fear of looking like a fool or getting in trouble.

You are likely to find yourself attending to secondary or tertiary goals like improving workplace culture and communication, even though you never explicitly agreed to help them maneuver through such potential minefields.

Remember that you agreed to help bring a vision to life and that invariably requires more than anyone realized at first blush.

In the lifecycle of companies like ours, once you have developed scale and expertise, your work can narrow to meet the very specific requests of large companies. You are asked to think in a deep, strategic way and to build a substantively different type of muscle.

Large organizations tend to be very siloed. If we are asked to build functionality and an intuitive user interface for internal software, our role often requires us to plug a capability into a pocket of that organization. The task is niche but has the broad impact of creating more internal alignment.

Snoop, Salesforce, and Sustainability

That a crisis may present an opportunity is a cliche but it contains an essential truth. While we get a lot of new clients through our reputation for rescue missions, we can build on that trust and expand the relationship over time to encompass new possibilities.

Equally important, we have learned that our own internal dynamics play a key role in getting the desired results. When you manifest confidence in turbulent times, you model the right attitude for clients seeking to conquer brave new digital worlds.

We have done work for both Salesforce and Snoop Dogg. What do they have in common? They have enormous demands on their time and limited bandwidth.

The challenge is to translate huge volumes of work and complexity into something simple and actionable that will enable them to make decisions or guide their product strategy.

Salesforce and Snoop share a deep and abiding concern about how to represent themselves to the public in ways that square with their brand values.

Getting this right for high-profile clients requires a depth of alignment and focus derived from your own internal dynamics and strategic approach — from a commitment to help clients translate their desired public image into a realm that feels foreign to them. You will need to match their leap of faith with your own and steer into the volatility with confidence that inspires.

Relationships: The No-Code Solution

Tech is rarely regarded as a service industry, but such an orientation builds antifragility into an organizational structure.

Just as setbacks have trained us to roadmap the development of apps before launching into an expensive implementation process, learning from adversity can make your business leaner and more focused on what adds value.

Our client's success or failure directly and significantly impacts our performance, so we cannot afford to indulge in catastrophic thinking. As you endeavor to develop relationships with high-profile clients, adaptability and deep optimism can help you lean into any volatility to build new relationships that will flourish into the future.