In the middle of the curve are the vast majority of clients. They require a moderate amount of attention. Keep them on hold for over twenty minutes waiting for tech support and you’ll lose most of them. There’s no need to overstaff, though, in order to answer every phone on the first ring. They’re not prima donnas; they’ll gladly wait a minute or two on hold while you play them a pleasant message explaining that they’ll be taken care of very shortly. These clients are profitable; they’re the bread and butter of any business.
The real prize clients, though, are the few at the opposite extreme of the bell curve. They’re the ones who pay no matter what. You can keep them holding for hours and they’ll apologize for interrupting you when you answer. In truth, though, this rarely happens because they almost never call. They don’t want to bother you. They solve their problems on their own. They may only log on to computer service for a few minutes a month, but they gladly pay as if they were on for hours a day. Servicing these clients costs you almost nothing, and they’ll usually stay with you forever. These clients are often the ones that constitute your entire profit margin.
Think about it. In a typical service business maybe 10 percent of your gross take winds up as profit. And to do that well is rare. Here you can clearly see that it’s really the few accounts at the far end of the spectrum—the ones who make no demands—who actually constitute the entire profitability of most service businesses. Everyone else is just a break-even or money-losing proposition.
The problem is that there’s really no way when you’re building a business to target getting only these kinds of clients. What are you supposed to do? Run ads saying, “We offer lousy, second-rate service, and if you’re willing to put up with that, we’re your guys”? Or perhaps, “A classified entrepreneur seeks sugar daddy clients who will pay their bills no matter what, for a long-term, financially secure relationship”? Obviously, this is foolish. the super-tolerant clients, like everyone else, sign up only because they feel your service gives them the most value for their money. It’s only over time that their nondemanding status emerges.
Many businesses, however, that have been around a long time, particularly those whose problems have driven the most demanding accounts away, are huge repositories of just this sort of low-maintenance account. Often the business is losing money only because it is still trying to provide a service level to satisfy clients who are long gone. What a potential gold mine!
