In an effort to bring on a new customer, I had emailed the owner a couple of questions and was trying to set up a preliminary meeting for a new website build partnership for his company. I had talked personally with him before and felt we were on the same page. Boy did I miss the boat on that one.

Instead of getting the questions answered and confirmation expected I received an unexpected response and I quote; “I want you to take this off my plate Chris! If I had time to do this I would have built it myself with a free template!”. Hmmm… There are just so many things wrong with that statement it’s hard to know where to begin.

I responded with some “enlightenment” in an effort to explain how this project would in fact take some participation on his part. That there was no one better to help with explaining what his business does, his differentiators and future directions. Registrations, content, graphics and approvals would need to performed. It truly would need to be a partnership.

I never heard from him again. Ugh. Where did I go wrong?

Here are three mistakes we made on our website build partnership:

Did not see much value in my offering.
Somewhere along the line I obviously hadn’t made it clear what the advantages and worth of what I do was to him and his business. He really didn’t understand the value of my offering and ultimately the value of a website in general. All he knew was that others had told him he needed a website to be viable in today’s market.

No concept of what was needed for a website to be successful.
He thought somehow a website would appear and traffic would come without any participation on his part. He didn’t understand it just doesn’t work that way and why. I had not set the expectation level upfront properly with an understanding of the work that would be involved.

Content would be created from thin air.
I have written content for others for years. It is necessary for the author to get into the head of the business owner at some level to write powerful content for their site. This business owner simply didn’t feel the time needed was warranted.

I have always taken the approach of learning from my “failures”. I have learned plenty from this unfortunate experience. The business owner was not being reasonable and had some responsibility in this not working out. As he had a services business I doubt very seriously he would of worked with someone without a partnership of information and action. He should have known I couldn’t have either. Regardless, I could have been a better communicator upfront and just might have saved some grief and made a deal. Lesson learned.

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