Keep Your Business Friendship Close

　　First: Hold your friends close. My approach has been to bond closely and at a level of true friendship with our client contacts. I want them to know I value their friendship—and I truly do. As a firm, we continually offer our support, encouragement, and professional and career counseling to these individuals.
     If they run afoul of politics in their organizations, we offer advice. If they find they need to look for opportunities elsewhere, we help in anyway possible.As a result, these client contacts offer support to us, slash through bureaucratic and organizational obstacles, do internal "marketing" on our behalf, and, should they move on to other pastures, they take us with them if at all possible.But we don’t do this out of tit-for-tat. We do it out of a sincere and genuine interest in these people as people and as friends. The quid pro quo approach that many take in business relationships is, in my opinion, beneath contempt. And it doesn’t even work.Whether you work inside an organization or as an external consultant or adviser, there’s much wisdom in all three of those maxims.
   They have guided me as an external consultant in building strong relationships within client organizations; being brought by client contacts to their new organizations when, for whatever reason, they sever their relationship with the original consulting client; and in navigating the often treacherous waters of the politics within a client organization.I’d say, from the standpoint of business relationships, LBJ was right on both scores.
    But there’s a piece I think LBJ missed that is key in business relationships today: Hold your friends’ enemies close, too.