Just because you predict it, doesn’t make it any easier

Ever since Fountain Forward narrowed down to just Automotive clients, we’ve really been growing. For those that aren’t in business, it’s much different than you’d probably think.

It’s easy to get caught up and excited as we add new clients, but I’ve been down that road before. In my experience, there’s really no reason to celebrate the contract being signed. 

The celebration should be after the first 12 months with that new client and them achieving what we agreed is success. As I see it, that’s when we can celebrate a little. 

Emphasis on “a little”. 

As it pertains to the title of this blog, there’s something I knew was going to happen as part of our growth but I really wanted to prevent the inevitable. 

Client churn.

I absolutely hate it!

On the front end, I do my best to sign clients that I know will be successful as long as all parties do their jobs. With that said, as we grow there will be things that fall through the cracks no matter how careful we are. Not to mention that if you raise the number of clients, you raise the number of clients that choose not to do the work but there’s only so much of that I can prevent. 

On our side, the side I can truly control, there are two things that I’m certain of:

It’s poor communication that creates churn. 

It’s cloudy expectations that create churn. 

I knew this was going to happen. I called it four months ago when we had a big growth spurt. I didn’t call it because I thought we were going to do a bad job, not at all. We even limited our growth to ensure quality delivery!

Is it a lot of churn? Not really. But that doesn’t matter. Any churn hits me right in the gut. 

As much as I hated being anxious most of the weekend, I’m glad we have the opportunity to step up. 

Just like I called that we were going to have churn, I’m going to make another prediction. 

I predict that I will read this blog a year from now and see our company stronger than ever because we went through some rough patches. 

I predict I’ll be in the same foxhole with the same soldiers beside me. 

It’s the guys in my foxhole that get me through.

Back to work.

-SJ