What are YOUR clubhouse rules?

Back in the old days, children would create clubhouses for themselves and their special friends.  Membership was by invitation only, and—depending on who “owned” the clubhouse—highly coveted.

In a way, things are not that different today for adults who have become successful entrepreneurs.  The scrap-wood-and-tar-paper clubhouse may have become a brick-and-mortar storefront or a virtual place of business, but one thing hasn’t changed: Business owners who do the best job of serving their clients and creating a gratifying business for themselves know that not everyone gets to become a member of their clubhouse.

Why is that?  Why does it make sense to intentionally exclude some people from your pool of prospective clients? Several reasons:

• You’re not the right solution to every problem, and you don’t want to create bad feelings, bad results, and bad karma by trying to be.
   
• Even if you can do a good job for the client, they might not be the sort you really love to work with—and life is too short to intentionally hang out with people who don’t totally jazz you.
   
• Even worse, there are those prospects out there who flat-out qualify as what a friend of mine calls PITAs, or pain-in-the-ass clients.  Not only will you not enjoy working with them, but there’s no way you will ever satisfy them.

What all that means is that you get to identify and stick to selection criteria as a way of creating the client base that grows a business you can really enjoy.  To give you an idea what I mean, check out some of the rules for playing in my clubhouse.

1. You take responsibility for your results, but you don’t beat up on yourself when those results are not what you wanted.
    
2. While you occasionally get bummed out, you typically come from a place of positive self-talk and positive expectation.
    
3. You’re curious and willing to explore new ideas.
    
4. You can’t remember the last time you said, “Yes, but…..”
    
5. You don’t spend money like a drunken sailor, but you do willingly invest in resources that provide tools or resources you currently lack.

So what about you?  Have you identified the demographic and psychographic characteristics of people you’ll allow into your clubhouse?  Let us know what they are; we might want to adopt some of them ourselves!

By the way, thanks to studiobeerhorst-bbmarie for posting her image in the Creative Commons section of Flickr.

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