Ep223: TrueSuccess Blueprint - Delighting and Growing a Healthy Client Base: The Secrets to Long-Term Success

Clients who are delighted become partners. In episode two of the TrueSuccess Blueprint, Mimi sits down with John Barrett and David Wheatley to unpack two core goals: delighting clients by delivering real, visible value, and building a healthy, diverse client base that sustains the business over time. They share how to meet clients where they are, evolve offerings based on feedback, make impact easy to see for sponsors, and avoid over-reliance on a few accounts. Expect practical moves, hard-won lessons from 2009–2010, and stories of tools that improve life at work and at home.

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Transcript

Mimi Mitrius
Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us for episode two of the TrueSuccess Blueprint. I’m Mimi, and today John, David, and I are talking about what it really takes to grow and serve an incredible client base. We’ll explore two TrueSuccess Goals: delighting clients by consistently delivering value, and building a healthy, diverse pipeline that sustains the business long term. Whether you’re a business owner or part of a team, there’s something here for you.

So John and David, what are some practical things we do consistently to delight clients?

John Barrett
Okay, Dave has given me the look, which I think means off you go.

In our previous session we talked about the greater good and making a difference. One definition we use is, “We increase the greater good by improving the lives of the individuals we work with and thus the people in the organizations they touch.” The primary place of impact is with individuals, in the context of their teams, families, and organizations. That is how we make a difference.

Now add the element of delighted clients. You can be making a difference, but if it isn’t meaningful and useful to the people who pay the bills, things fall apart. That doesn’t change how we work with individuals, but it does mean we do a few things.

First, we connect individual growth explicitly to impact on the team and the organization in real ways. Second, we are as user friendly and responsive as possible. Third, we make sure the impact is visible and transparent to the stakeholders who need to make decisions. If someone is making great strides but a sponsor upstream can’t see the impact, they can’t justify continued support. We need impacts to be real and visible so they are supported today and into the future.

David Wheatley
The warm piece for me is when someone uses a tool like the 50 DOs for Everyday Leadership or Red Path/Green Path from What Great Teams Do Great, and then comes back to a coaching session and says, “I took that home and used it with my family, my kids, my spouse.” That’s when people recognize the value. It gives us that good feeling that we’re serving the greater good. When you encourage it and support with more resources, people buy in because you’re helping the most important people in their lives. They bring that back to work because it worked at home. It becomes part of who they are.

There’s nothing nicer than hearing, “I’ve started leaving work before 5:30 to have dinner with my kids, and I’m getting more done at work as a result.” That is the power of greater good thinking.

Mimi Mitrius
Listening to both of you, it ties into financial security and freedom, not just for Humanergy but for clients too. If we make greater good choices at Humanergy, and our clients make greater good choices for their organizations and families, everyone benefits. It’s truly interconnected. It’s a beautiful system you created.

David Wheatley
We’re eager for feedback and responsive to it. We pride ourselves on taking feedback, building it in, and tweaking what we do. That’s how we get better next time. Some peers have a fixed product and just execute it. We have offerings, but they’re constantly evolving based on client feedback, so they stay relevant. As clients evolve by industry or size, we tweak our materials to fit. People appreciate that it’s not take it or leave it. It’s, “That’s a great perspective, let’s adjust this tool to make it more applicable to you.”

John Barrett
We use the word “delight” very purposefully. Think about restaurants. If the food is bad, you tell ten people not to go. If it’s good, you might say it was fine if asked. If you walk away delighted, you bring it up to people on your own. When you consistently delight clients, you almost don’t have to do business development. Almost.

For much of our first half as a company, we lived on word of mouth. Recently, with stronger business development and marketing, we’ve amplified that word of mouth. It still starts with delighted clients, which makes everything easier.

Delight is also in the eye of the beholder. We have to tune into the client. Meet people where they are. Often someone comes to us for a training. They’re not asking for a cultural transformation and may not think they need one. Unless the request is counterproductive, we meet them where they are and deliver. It may turn out the real need is deeper work with key leadership, but first we delight them and have an impact. Then we earn the right to have a more meaningful conversation about the greater good, the real need, and future aspirations. That leads to a progressive relationship: build trust, multiply impact, form real partnerships.

That has been a strength. We have clients we’ve worked with for 10, 15, even 20 years as extensions of their organization. Some refer to us as part of their extended family. We earned that by delighting them from a humble start and growing the relationship over time so we could make a larger impact.

Mimi Mitrius
For our listeners, the takeaway is: delight your clients, then turn them into long-term partners by delighting them consistently. Do you have other tips for turning one-time clients into long-term partners as an extension of delighting them?

David Wheatley
It’s the pattern of relationship building John mentioned. If we do a one-off and it goes well, we follow up with the person who booked it to make sure it hit the mark. Then we follow up consistently but gently. Ask, “What else can we do? How else can we support you?” We’re not the kind of organization that blasts your inbox once we have your email. Our follow-up is genuine and authentic. “How’s the team doing? Are you looking at this next year?” When you’re authentically interested, people often say, “Yes, let’s talk.”

Mimi Mitrius
I can attest, as the marketing person, that we do not blast emails. Our client base has shifted over 25 years. What are one or two lessons we’ve learned about maintaining a healthy and diverse client base?

David Wheatley
To paint the picture, in episode one I mentioned we started with three clients: Ford, Kellogg’s, and Michigan State University. For a while we existed on those. Then we realized if there’s a downturn in manufacturing, we take a big hit. A few years in, we redefined what a healthy client base looks like. At one point our rule was that no three clients together should make up 50 percent of our business. We used to say it and then laugh as we missed it, but we kept pushing. We focused on broadening who and what industries we work with.

Today our biggest sector is non-automotive manufacturing, and even that is diverse. The goal is to be safe from ups and downs so we stay stable. It’s good for clients too. If they have a downturn and need to cut back, they know we’ll still be around when budgets return because we’re not tied to a single industry’s cycles.

Mimi Mitrius
John, thoughts?

John Barrett
Our TrueSuccess Goal uses the phrase healthy client base. The explanation has two parts.

First, depth of long-term partnerships. That links to the greater good. We do our best work and have the greatest impact when we’ve been with an organization for a while. They know and trust us. We know them. They trust that we have their best interests at heart. We can dial into root causes of success, amplify what works, and help address what holds them back.

Second, a full pipeline and a broad base. By definition, a broad base includes shallower relationships. It might be a training or a short series. That is our investment in the future. Not everyone becomes a long-term partner, and that’s normal. A percentage will, and the broad base also reduces risk and creates sustainable success. That stability lets us be a reliable long-term partner. Clients can trust we’ll be around as long as they are, or longer.

David Wheatley
We have clients going back the full 25 years, others since 2016, and a series of long-term clients who keep coming back. Not for the same thing, but because we evolve together. Over time we become a known and trusted resource. Broadening the base has been an intentional effort. We asked which industries would balance others and worked to serve those.

Mimi Mitrius
Twenty-five years of repeat clients is impressive. It hearkens back to the greater good for both our clients and Humanergy. If we’re all evolving and moving forward together, partnerships stay strong.

David Wheatley
Sometimes it’s the company, sometimes it’s the individuals. Both John and I have worked with people who took us to three or four different companies. One leader I’ve worked with for over twenty years would call on day one of a new role and say, “I think I need a Larry and a Bruce,” which was shorthand from past work. We could quickly think about who to involve and what was needed. The relationship was built so that we were among his first calls as he stepped in as CEO or COO. We were a thinking partner. That investment in relationship shows up again and again.

John Barrett
To build on Dave’s point, it takes intentional, dedicated resources to maintain both depth and breadth. Historically we had deep partnerships, and for years we recognized we were vulnerable when 60 to 80 percent of our work came from a small set of clients. Every time we pushed to expand breadth, our deep partnerships would grow even faster, so we struggled to keep up and stayed concentrated.

We had a perfect storm in 2009–2010. Part macroeconomics, part changes in executive sponsorship. That 60 to 70 percent didn’t vanish, but it almost disappeared over six months. We had done enough on breadth to scramble and keep going, but it drove home that we had to invest in breadth intentionally, not “when we have time.” We may not feel the need today, but we will in the future, because we don’t control the world. It is all connected from today into tomorrow, and we have to pay attention to that.

Mimi Mitrius
For anyone listening, lean and scalable infrastructure is one of our TrueSuccess Goals. Stay tuned for episode four. I think that wraps our conversation unless anyone has a final add.

Thanks for joining us for Delighting Clients and Building a Healthy Client Base. These two goals are powerful on their own and even more impactful when aligned with the rest. Keep listening to the TrueSuccess Blueprint to hear how all eight goals connect and reinforce each other. Thanks, John. Thanks, David.

John Barrett
Thanks, Mimi. Bye now.