The usual way to start this topic will be “for any organization at some point of time they will have to decide how to deal with growing demands from existing clients and the need to expand and acquire new clients” Anyways, we are also facing it. I thought of writing down what we decided about it.
Its so happening that we are putting all our might after fine tuning an e-commerce portal we are working on but now we are facing page load time issue, and on a dead-end on the SEM platform we are developing for a client due to technical glitches from the APIs of the 2 search engines competing for second position & the third project from our first client – angel – need more resources. At the same time our cloud IaaS team is starting to work on couple of exciting assignments. To make things worse we are on an aggressive marketing mode which is bringing in new enquirers every-other day which needs a lot of attention.
What we do ?
Before things getting into such a situation, we had a discussion. We wanted to win new projects & increase revenue stream, hire new people & achieve the dream of becoming a 100 member team providing the best in the class solutions by 2011. But, wait. I thought about the angel who got hooked with us more than an year ago and waited for us to increase capacity, the other client who sang happy birthday for me from other side of planet earth over a cranky phone connection we had then, and various other things happening around us.
During the discussion I had 2 examples in mind which is given below.
We have a place where they sell chicken dishes which resembles Arabian dishes. The outlet is in a prime spot on the highway, there is enough parking space, its near a college with may be 2000 students etc. I used to go there occasionally as they used to open till mid night when I finally find myself thinking about dinner. Besides all the good things like a prime location and all other favorable conditions, they never had customers. The quality of the food was bad, the customer service and focus was not existing. I still keep going as I had no choice and the last I went was few months back when they kept me waiting for nearly ten minutes just to collect the bill.
I can’t really write about the second case, but its something like this. The provider is a monopoly and nearly everyone uses them. But whenever people need proactive service, they choose a new generation alternative. So people keep two service providers and the old provider is slowly loosing business and it will be loose its business in few years and the restaurant in case one will be closed in few months.
I sounded bit affirmative than usual in the discussion and finally decided that we will not be spending even a second of attention on new clients unless the existing requirements are met. The existing clients have not only made us what we are now but they trust their future with us. We are 100% confident that we will deliver our best & come out of this. Let this post act as a record.
I send a mail to the angel to hear his opinion on resource allocation & ended it as follows:
You are an angel for us & angels/existing-clients gets the best attention than new clients !
everything else will follow.