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What You Don’t Know Can Help You

A true professional keeps learning new things and proactively shares ideas with clients before he asks, “What’s your budget?”

The older we get, the more we realize how much we don’t know.  Do you remember being a teenager and thinking your parents were not very smart?  Then one day, they became geniuses.  That was an epiphany, wasn’t it?  It’s actually good to realize that there is plenty you don’t know.  We believe it’s taking a major step towards wisdom.

Afraid to admit we don’t know something
Too often, we see young people in business who are afraid to admit to themselves or anyone else that there are things they don’t know.  We believe this hurts them, professionally and personally, which we’ll talk about below.

As a professional, you can see a client’s ‘standard builder entry’ is problematic. Enlighten them to their options before you take an order.

Your role as the owner and manager of a landscape company involves knowing all kinds of things, and teaching them, too.  You educate and enlighten your clients, and you teach your employees many things.  While you’re expected to know your business, no one expects you to know everything, but that’s where the trouble starts.

We know what we’re good at and are comfortable with the knowledge we have. We call this “What you do know.”  So we need to also be truthful with ourselves and identify the things we’re not good at, and what we don’t do well. At the Kinman Institute, we say this is identifying “What we know we don’t know.”  The next important step is to respect those things we don’t know. Think about this.

Learning takes us out of our comfort zones
The wise person realizes his or her knowledge is limited and that they need to keep learning more.  The not so wise, or unconfident person will ignore that and try to bluff their way through a situation.  This can kill your professionalism with clients in an instant.

The foreman who learns how to install a sidewalk in his first year on the job, then continues to do the very same thing for 30 years doesn’t have 30 years of experience.  Rather, he has 1 year of experience, repeated 30 times.  He hasn’t learned anything new or tried a different approach.

Likewise, each of us needs to learn new things every year, and in the process, we also learn that there many other things we haven’t learned yet.  For instance, when you learned basic adding and subtracting, did you have any idea that algebra or calculus even existed?  But you’d never learn either without the first step – arithmetic. 

Your expertise as a designer and builder shines once the client sees your work in progress.

By acknowledging we’re not an expert in everything we gain the wisdom to move on in one of two ways – either learn that new thing and become an expert in that, or rely on the knowledge of another expert when you need them.  In other words, we seek out those experts to fill in our gaps of knowledge. It makes more sense than stumbling into something blindly.  That only shows ignorance.

It doesn’t end there 
As soon as you realize the things you don’t know much about, you realize that there is another area that is even more infinite.  We call this “Information we didn’t know we didn’t even know about.”  In our younger years, this was called “Ignorance is Bliss,” but unfortunately, as a Design/Build Professional, you can’t afford to be ignorant. 

That “bliss” will blind-side you one day on a project!  It could be finding out you’re liable for extra taxes due to one of your business practices, or it could be finding out hidden costs on a project, or something else.  Admit it —we have all been there. This information we never knew existed often comes out of the blue to surprise us.  Once we master it (or find a master for it), we’ve learned at a new level.

How do we apply this to our clients?   
Our clients are coming to you — the Design/Build Professionals — and by doing that, they are humbly admitting they don’t know how to take their need for a landscape and build it. Clients come to us expecting professionals to provide the information and knowledge they don’t have. 

Sadly, our industry’s typical practice is to handle this moment of the first client meeting by asking, “What is your budget?”  If you pay attention at this point, you may actually  feel the moment when your potential client realizes you’re not the expert – they expected you to tell them what they need and instead, you ask them.  It’s an awkward moment, and you may have had it yourself when you’ve asked a professional for information and they only ask you what you need in return.  You probably don’t even know what you need!

In the case of a first-time client meeting, if you see there are landscape needs or potential problems that must be corrected and you fail to enlighten the client, you’re not showing them your professional value and knowledge.  By going straight to the question, “What’s your budget,” you’ve just become an order-taker.  “Tell me what you want and I will take your order,” you say. 

The finished project solves problems the client might not have realized, and highlights your professional value and expertise.

Let’s use the example of a client with a sidewalk you know will be problematic now and in the future.  You have two choices:  You can enlighten them to the potential problems of this sidewalk and what those solutions will help them achieve, or you can ask them what they want (in this case, they want bushes along the sidewalk).  A more effective communication tool you could use might be to ask them if they are happy with the pedestrian accessibility, instead of asking what is their budget.  This question identifies the clients’ true problem, before you start plopping shrubs on top of their problem.  

Order-taking is not showing your knowledge or experience or value.  You’ve given them a solution before you’ve discovered the problem or enlightened them about it.  That makes you look foolish. This practice immediately de-values what they thought you were supposed to “know,” because your first actions told them you didn’t know either.  If you really don’t know what you need to know about providing that sidewalk solution, ask other experts to help.  In this case, you’re showing the client you proactively find solutions for them, as well as the right experts for the job. 

Then, you’ve stayed within the realm of those things you do know, and offered to find experts for those things you don’t know.  This shows your value to clients and gives them what they were seeking.

Get respect as a professional  
You must become a professional with standards and methods, instead of giving clients everything they tell you they want.  You need to take the time to enlighten clients to everything that is available first.    

This can only happen through an effective “Design Program and Process,” like that we use at the Kinman Institute.  If you don’t have an effective “Design Process” in place to help you do this, now is the time to seek out other professionals with standards and methods who can help you continue to learn and grow, and also realize your strengths and limitations. This “Process” will make sure you enlighten your clients first to their options before you jump into the budget discussion.   Any other way of doing it devalues your work, and why would you want to do that?  We once had a wise person tell us, “This is like telling the driver to go faster when they are already going in the wrong direction.”

©2009, The Kinman Institute