If you have been in business long enough, you know the value you bring to a client does not simply boil down to pricing and time.

Most of the value you offer often comes from the relationship.

Some clients are easy to work with and will happily pay you what you are worth because they can see the value in a relationship with your company.

But there are also those clients who will grit their teeth and make sure you know how unhappy they are to be paying you anything.

Clients who are easy to work with can be far more valuable than even the highest paying difficult clients.

It is all about working with the right people. The right people are not as focused on transactional details as they are focused on the value you offer each other.

In his book 80/20 Sales and Marketing, Perry Marshall describes this tension as:

“Selling to the right person is more important than all the sales methods, copywriting techniques, and negotiation tactics in the world. Because the wrong person doesn’t have the money. Or the wrong person doesn’t care. The wrong person won’t be persuaded by anything.”

Because we have discovered the importance of working with the right people, when we meet the wrong people, we are OK to let them move on and search for other answers.

At Kahuna Accounting, we devised a method of finding out what clients would be a good fit for us. Here are three key factors we have determined to be important in defining whether a business is a right client fit for our company.

1. Growth

This sounds vague because everybody is looking for growth. To be more specific, we are looking for agressive growth.

Like, “Buckle your seatbelts this is going to be a wild ride” growth!

Why? Because when a business is growing fast we are more valuable to them. A fast-growing business absolutely does not have time to deal with their financials.

And they don’t have time to put on the brakes so they can hire someone to deal with it.

Additionally, a fast-growth company has a hard time seeing where they are going, which is one of the most important parts of growth! Decision-making is vital as you are growing, but how do you make informed decisions when you are flying blind and can’t see your numbers?

We love working with fast-growth companies, and they love us.

2. Focused on the Future

It’s also great working with entrepreneurs who can look forward to the next 90 days. Many cannot, and that’s understandable, but when that is the case the client won’t get as much value from what we do.

The reason why is because someone who is looking only one day at a time can always keep applying band-aids to whatever processes they have in place.

Someone who is thinking about the future is thinking of scalability and loves getting a solution in place they know they will never outgrow. They also love the ability to forecast into the future with their financials to think strategically about their business.

3. Determined to make an impact

At Kahuna Accounting we take our mantra very seriously. “We achieve our victories through the victories of those we serve!”

That means we want to see our clients achieve victories. We take great pleasure in that.

Our team gets even more fired up when our clients have bold, audacious dreams!  We are excited to serve them, knowing we are playing a small role in what they accomplish!

In a practical sense, this is important, because the entrepreneur who is trying to make a meaningful impact understands their time needs to be spent on big picture activity, not day-to-day financial tasks.

Entrepreneurs who treat their business more like a job, are often not a great fit for us, because they are constantly trimming costs, or finding ways to DIY.

That’s fine for short-term cost savings, but not so great for making a long-term impact and therefore it’s not as a good fit for what we do.

When we find an entrepreneur or company that is focused on growth, focused on the future and wants to make an impact, we know we have found the right client fit and look forward to a great, mutually-rewarding relationship.

What about you? Have you taken the time to break down what the right customer looks like for your business? How will that impact your messaging and marketing if you do?