This couple in their home in front of their staircase will tell us whether they want us to address those stairs or if there may be other areas of their home more pressing for them, and we will help them with their request.
Bottom-up focus
When people need improvements to enhance their lifestyle and safety inside their living environment, we can’t ask them to fit their design needs to our desires and budget. While we may have an effective plan for helping them, that concept may be too extensive or expensive for what they need or what they are willing to accept. It’s not that they wouldn’t benefit from our plan. It’s that we will never get the chance to find out because they won’t give us the go-ahead to proceed.
We have to fit what we create and suggest for them to their needs and interests. They may just want or think they need a simple tweak to what they have now, or they may request something more major with a larger budget. They may desire a minimal amount of interruption in their daily lives while we create the improvement for them. However, the cost of the upgrade may be less important than some of their other concerns. Still, we must meet them where they are emotionally, and not expect that they will enthusiastically accept what we are proposing if it does not address their specific concerns.
Maintaining our focus
While we should get a tremendous amount of satisfaction from knowing that we have addressed the client’s concerns, from simple to more complex, we are not attempting to showcase the great designs we can implement just to illustrate that we can do them. We just need to provide the client with what they have requested.
It’s the outcome that matters – and serving the needs of the ckient. We can take a very simple improvement – new flooring, a small repair, a coat of paint, or new hardware, for instance – or undertake a major construction project that is requested and do it in such a way that the client is impressed with what we completed, and we can be happy with our effort at the same time.
It’s important to remember that we are not completing the improvement in our own home where we have the final say in what it should include and look like. No, the client has the ultimate say in the budget, colors, textures, and scope of the project. Then, we execute it for them the best way that we can.
It’s the client’s decision
Regardless of what we get to do to help pour clients, it’s entirely up to them what it looks like and how much it costs. While we make suggestions and offer our help, it ultimately is their decision.
We seriously want to help people have a better living environment than they have when we meet them, but if they do not accept our help and invite us to assist them, they don’t get to benefit from what we could do. It’s their decision, so we need to position ourselves and our recommendations with this constantly in mind. They have to agree to what we want to do in order for it to provide any help for them.