I think my superpower is making friends of clients." 
Andrew Curtis, owner Fuel VM

I want you to recklessly hopelessly believe in other people. My business model fundamentally changed as soon as I realized if I just poured into my clients and sat side-by-side and step-by-step with them over the course of time instead of just giving them projects. Guess what?! It was better for all of us! What this meant is that I didn’t have any clients, instead, I actually developed everybody into friends.

Check out the first of my three-part chat about relationships and the value of personal connections to maximize how you do business. Listen or read the transcript below.

Andrew: My name is Andrew Curtis. I own a creative agency called Fuel VM. But I'm not here to talk about my company today. This is really about a personal situation and how it evolved.

I live by the axiom to recklessly, hopelessly trust in other people. So again, today isn't about my company. Today's really about talking about relationships. But I got to talk about my company real quick.  I own a digital brand marketing company and we really shifted our business focus to be about retained relationships rather than just doing projects. What we really did was realize, hey, we're, we're so much more powerful if we stay on with clients rather than just giving them a race car, hey, we would help them drive it. And that was what really shifted and changed how deeply we could get into relationships with people.

To me, the whole point was, yes, the length of the relationship helped, but just having a human connection, you know, really understanding, um, and I talk about this all the time. I think my superpower is making friends of clients. And I cannot separate those things. It's just what happens. And it's not intentional, but that's just, how it evolves.

I have to get emotionally involved with people in my business world like they are friends, because that's going to motivate me and my team to do better work. Nine times out of 10 what happens is it's a much better relationship because there's a level of trust there. There's give and take instead of just thinking about it as hey, here's my order, and here we're going to support our order. That's ridiculous. You got to have a relationship. You have to have trust two ways to be able to get to the best product and the best solutions and the best results.