While searching for new clients look for more than financial stats. Search for a deeper understanding of the services you are providing, a good management, a professional approach to your business relationship, chemistry and others.

True story: at some point we gained a new account, a very influent company in a fast growing domain. We made an one year deal and started working. We’ve implemented a new website, with some never-before features like an intelligent search engine that would register user’s preferences and recommend offers that would match these preferences, an easy to use layout and state of the art newsletter engine and many others.

We’ve done such a good SEO job that in less than four months the main categories would rank among the first three search results.

We’ve run a successful blogvertising and rich media campaign that helped the website gain exposure. The AdWords campaign was as efficient as it gets and users would spend more than 7 minutes on the websites, looking for offers and contacting sales representatives.

Overall the new business brought in by the website had grown from less than 5% to almost 50%. The traffic grew by more than 1000% and the newsletter registrants doubled. I would call this good interactive advertising.

But…The principal was a man that didn’t quite understand this “internet mumbo jumbo”. So, when the recession stroke he decided to cut the internet spending, although he was warned that this move would cut new deals by almost half. He did it anyway.

Among other great decisions was the layoff of other important members of the company that dared to disagree with him. As we were asked to do things that would harm their company we disagreed and closed the account.

We had one last invoice to collect and as I phoned the CEO last week he too resigned his position and was now currently with another company.

So you see…you can’t make silk purses out of saw’s ears. Focus on working for people that have the business ability to distinguish between personal choices and professional ones.