[thelist] losing irritated / arrogant customers off my books

[Joel D Canfield]

> It seems that to get to the good clients you have to wade through
> 1000's of utter failures along the way, failures of both myself and
> failures of them

Change your process.

Different marketing. Different client interaction. Something.

If you feel like a salmon swimming upstream just trying to make a
living, *you* need to change something about your business methods.
(I've been going through the same process the past nine months, so this
is me preaching to me, as much to anyone else.)

If you're a one-man shop (in our case, we're a one-man, one-woman shop,
'cause Best Beloved works with me nearly fulltime now) your primary job
is marketing. Not coding, not accounting, not customer relations, but
marketing.

Marketing is not just how you get new business, it's how you get *the
right* new business. Read every book Seth Godin has written and really
learn how to sell the right services to the right clients.

It *has* to work, or I'm in big trouble . . . 

joel