Performed poorly or made a big mistake on a client engagement?

Own it, 100%.

In our early agency days, there were some rough client engagements where our communications with the client was shaky and we didn't do a great job managing expectations.

The work would trudge on and we'd finally get to the finish line. We could tell the client didn't enjoy the process. They'd pay and that'd be that. We made no effort to talk to them, and in many cases, we'd never hear from them again.

We were too insecure at the time to ask for feedback. I knew we could've done better and didn't want to hear about it.

This type of stance probably cost us dozens of relationships. Impossible to build up a reputation and client lifetime value.

It took years of coaching and reading the right books to change our approach (check out Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles).

Feedback from clients could be valuable information to directly address our shortcomings.

Owning up to any inconsistencies or mistakes in our service could actually lead to increased trust.

Running away from clients that we felt were disappointed was cowardly. We owed it to ourselves to get clarity, to find out what they really thought so we could make things right.

If we performed so poorly or messed up so badly that they felt they had to replace us, that was fine, but we could say that we tried our best to repair the relationship and make it up to them. This effort alone could go a long way in protecting our reputation.

An example of this in action from our Barrel Holdings portfolio:

Barrel CEO Lucas Ballasy wrote about a situation where the Barrel team mistakenly left on a discount code on a client site that cost the client thousands of dollars in orders. What did he do? He proactively owned it, apologized, and offered to make it right. The result? The client appreciated the response and it only deepened their trust in the agency. Furthermore, it's led to additional QA steps being added to the process to prevent this in the future.