Including A Mutual Fulfillment of Responsibilities Paragraph in Your Contracts

We're in a 3 part series on how to make our client agreements smarter. Our goal is to clarify our client agreements and better support the relationship we desire with our clients.

You can see our first article, “A 90-Day Scope Check Clause”, on adding a 90-day scope check clause to our agreements. This second installment in our series is on adding a clause to your agreements that clearly defines the responsibility your clients hold in a relationship with you and your firm. First, let’s be clear - you can only serve your clients well when they partner with you to provide good service. A client who says, “I just want to drop off my stuff and have you do it,” is not partnering with you to serve them well. I’ve heard this sentiment from clients before, and it is our red flag to move away from this client before ever adding them to your client base. 

Why would we move away from this type of client? Because they are displaying an expectation that high professional service is a one-sided commitment. This wrong belief looks like this: the client hires you, walks away, and then you need to provide service without bugging the client. Professional service doesn’t work this way, and it’s up to us as the professionals to educate our clients that this is not how high-end professional service goes.

A Mutual Fulfillment of Responsibilities Paragraph

To offset these wrong beliefs from the client, we’ve added a paragraph that lays out the client’s responsibilities in a relationship with us. And we’ve actually removed clients from our client base based upon them failing to uphold their part of the engagement. 

Here is what our paragraph looks like for our clients:

Your Responsibility - your responsibility will be to remain responsive over email, provide the logins we need to manage your online software accounts, give us appropriate documents when requested, and/or show up for required meetings when scheduled in advance. You will do this cordially, with patience, and you will assume the highest motive of our firm. 

We may never enforce this paragraph, but it’s important to have it as a go-to when you need to speak to your clients about their responsibilities in the relationship. It’s equally important that we state our own responsibilities in the contract as well. 

Here is how we word our side of the responsibility:

Our Responsibility - our responsibility involves leading you in the fulfillment of the services you have purchased from our firm, as detailed in this contract. Some examples of our responsibilities are scheduling appointments promptly, requesting the appropriate documents we need to fulfill our services, and/or meeting compliance deadlines promptly. We will do this cordially, with patience, and we will assume the highest motives of our client. 

At times, we have failed to uphold our side of the relationship. We’ve had to apologize, have difficult client meetings, give refunds (when appropriate), and tighten up our team’s work and processes. The point is that both sides need to be held accountable. Unclear and confusing agreements don’t hold our and our client’s relationship together very well. As we all know, professional relationships can fray if they are not maintained, cared for, or led with written (and signed!) clarity.

You Lead the Client

One reason confusion can be a part of a relationship you have with your client is because you think the client leads the relationship. They don’t. In fact, firms should choose their clients, as opposed to letting clients choose them. You are the professional, and all firms should be actively vetting and choosing their client base to work with. If you put the leadership of the relationship in the hands of the client, you will be frustrated and unable to provide real value. You can only provide solid value in a professional relationship when you are leading. 

What are some practical ways you can lead your client?

1. Provide agendas: When you are leading the client, it means you are the one who says what will be discussed in a meeting with a client. You will ask the client what they want to discuss too, but the fact that you send or prepare the agenda solidly puts you in the leadership position.

2. Send meeting requests: Your contracts should determine when you plan to meet with the client and that you will call them to the meeting when it is time. Of course we plan those meetings around when the client is available, but we are the ones that call them to the meeting - and it's based on what we planned to do to serve them, per our contract. 

3. Share your screen: Another obvious way to be the leader in the relationship is to share your screen and share your agenda. This shows that you are the one leading everyone through the meeting and, ultimately, the relationship. Sharing your screen is a basic and practical way to maintain the lead in your client relationships.

It is an act of care to lead your clients, to take away all confusion, and to help them understand that you will move the contract through to completion (not the client). The client can only purchase the outcome from you, they can’t dictate the process by which you provide the service. Don’t hand over the ability for the client to take over and force their own preferences into your service with them. Counterintuitively, that will hurt the client since they don’t actually have the power, resources, or expertise to know how your service should be delivered.

Do your clients a favor and begin leading them. A great act of care is to lay out where they are responsible for their side of the relationship, and for you to take a strong stance of leadership in the relationship. You can do this by putting obvious and overt paragraphs about yours and the client’s responsibility in your client agreements.