Last night at the Webbies Video Awards, Jennifer Daumler, Director of PR at Level3, asked me “what kind of clients do you look for?”
This is a great question. Shane has brought this question up many times. What type of client should we be looking for? Should we seek high-profile clients? Clients with connections? Perhaps we should seek diverse clients, organizations that span various industries as well as geographic locations.
My honest, intuitive, and slightly tipsy response was something to the effect of: “Jennifer, we don’t really seek clients as much as we listen to people and seek interesting problems to solve.”
In retrospect, I think that is pretty well exactly true. But I’d like to note some caveats.
1) We have made a business plan decision to seek clients that enable us to leverage work that we’ve already done and that don’t mandate that Shane and I personally do the work. Shane and I come from a background of doing the work ourselves. We are moving away from that.
2) As Shane so elegantly observed, we need to expand in the definition of “interesting problems to solve” to mean: “well-funded, interesting problems to solve”.
Clearly there can be conflict between these two points. An interesting problem is not likely to use technology that we’ve already built and is likely to require hands-on work. This is the fine line that we walk at Shane & Peter, Inc. Finding the correct balance is our perpetual challenge and a big part of what motivates us.
So really what I meant was: “We listen to people and seek interesting, well-funded problems to solve that afford us an opportunity to leverage our existing resources while also creating new ones.”
-p