Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy. Hey, Jonathan here. I've got a really interesting question from Kay. It's a little long, but bear with me because it's kind of fun. The question is, I have a question I reckon you haven't been asked yet, Mr. Stark. What if there's a consulting job for a client that you've had a really good back and forth on and you're deep into closing the sale after a few calls over the past months and you think you could really help and would be a great fit, except they've just hired someone into their internal team who you've worked with before and they were your ex-manager when you were more the junior and you know you have trouble working with them because they were a bad leader? Let's just leave it at that. No bridges burnt per se, but it wasn't a great experience. Do you just walk away or try to go through that relationship again, but this time as their senior? Is that weird? Is it worth it? I think I may know your answer to walk away or to question the relationship, but let's just say the young Padawan found himself unfortunately under a Sith Lord at the time, so he left to become a Jedi master. What do you do? Okay, so this is obviously incredibly specific, but it's so specific it might seem like an edge case, but it's not totally uncommon because of the way business relationships work for you to swap roles with someone who maybe you used to report to, then they report to you. It's happened to me in full-time sort of traditional W-2 employment scenarios. It's happened that I've had clients who I was the project contact with at one customer go to another customer and bring me in over there. So these relationships, they can last a long time and it can be a small world if you're in a particular niche and you're focusing on a particular kind of skill set and all these sort of six degrees of separation, it's going to follow you around. So there's a couple of things to point out here. One is that it's never cool to just completely flip out on somebody or just do something completely unprofessional and just think, well, I shouldn't say never. I mean, some people are just toxic and you would be happy to burn that bridge. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think whenever I have not been professional for some emotional, personal, political reason, I always regret it. I always regret it. And it's not that I don't, you know, it's not that I don't decide not to work with people, but I still would want to do it in a professional way. So you see the difference? It's like, it doesn't mean that you have to work with everyone, but doing something in an unprofessional way is just going to reflect on you poorly forever and ever. People are going to remember it. You know, the stomping out of the office type of thing, you know, take this job and shove it. That's not good because that's going to follow you around. So my first answer to this is, whatever you do, be professional about it. If you don't think you can maintain professionalism with this new person and they're going to be involved in the project, then you might want to pull yourself out if you don't think you can do it. But if you think you can be professional with this new person and sort of maybe address the old relationship, maybe say, oh, isn't this, you know, a role reversal? Isn't that funny? That sort of thing. Maybe they won't be a Sith Lord when they're not your manager. Maybe they were just a bad manager. And maybe as, you know, if you are, you know, in a management position over them or in a consulting position over them, maybe they won't be as bad. Who knows? But definitely I would, I would be on my best behavior. Not best behavior. What am I trying to say? I'd be on the lookout for the desire for me to fall back into an emotional reaction to this person. That's the danger is that you'll get sucked back into your old status roles. So if you think you can keep yourself out of that and maintain professionalism and, you know, and do the work, then I would probably go forward, especially if your project contact, who clearly is not this person because they're new, if your project contact has been working, you know, working to close this deal with you, they perhaps have a fair amount of time and energy invested in this relationship. Maybe they've been reporting to their boss about how the sales process is going and the deal is going to close. And then if you just be like, oh, you know what? Nevermind. I changed my mind. They're going to ask why. And then you'd be like, well, you hired this person used to be my boss. And it feels, it feels very high school to me. So I think assuming

believe that you can maintain professionalism working with this person who you didn't love working with before, then I would probably go forward and just be on high alert for any kind of situation where I felt myself getting sucked into any kind of gossipy, emotional, unprofessional behavior. That's really what it would boil down to. Because even if, let's say this didn't happen, let's say this person who you have this past history with, this baggage with, let's say they weren't on the project and this had nothing to do with it. But you close this deal, you start working with this client, and there's someone on their team who's trying to sabotage you. This happens all the time. When you're a consultant pulled in from the outside, there's all sorts of politics to navigate. Lots of times internal employees are scared that their job is on the line. They're scared that you're going to create some software solution that's going to replace them. They're scared that some position that they've held for a long time and defended, you're going to come and say that's not a smart position to hold. We should do this instead. There's all kinds of politics that happen in a consulting relationship anyway. This just has a little additional baggage that you know that you didn't get along great with this person in the past. But there could be strangers that you don't get along with great on the project anyway. And maybe it's useful that you do have this history with the person in the first place. It will help you navigate the situation maybe a little bit better, as long as you can maintain your professionalism. So to recap, as long as you feel like you can be the bigger person and maintain your professionalism, I would probably go forward with this because in a certain sense, you owe it. I feel like you kind of owe it to the contact that you've been working with to close the deal to go forward. If you don't think this is a deal breaker, and since you're asking the question, you obviously don't think it's a deal breaker, then I would probably keep going. And if nothing else, use it as a growth experience for your ability to navigate a consulting engagement with non-perfect team members because you're always going to have that. There's always going to be someone who's not perfect on the team. And you getting better at sort of shepherding the process from beginning to middle to end in a successful way, that's a general consulting skill that you can always get better at. So I would say probably go for it. And hey, report back. I'd love to know how it goes. All right, I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question for me, hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and we'll add it to the list and get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the Pricing Seminar. Pre-registration starts soon, and you can sign up to be among the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at thepricingseminar.com. That URL again is thepricingseminar.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.