Here's a common pattern: You're new. You're scrappy. You'll do whatever it takes to meet the needs of your clients, which means growth by any means necessary. If a customer wants to give your standard offering a slightly different spin, sure, you'll give it a try. Your effort is also known as customizing your product or service. At this point, there's such a premium on developing customer relationships that you're not thinking about how to pull this off in a profitable way. Instead, you're thinking about survival. If you can keep a growing number of customers happy, then good things are more likely to happen.

When these kinds of questions start to haunt you, it's typically a good sign. It signals a pivot from the kind of customization we just described to some level of standardization. The trigger for this switch is usually the realization that it's not sustainable to keep delivering one-of-a-kind, made-to-order service. Your margins can't take it anymore. Moreover, the complexity of maintaining a wide range of distinct offerings makes the business difficult to scale operationally.

Our point here is to not run your business by the comment box. It may feel good, at least at first, but here's the catch: customers typically don't understand the implications of their requests. It's your obligation — to them and to you — to put their demands in context, to evaluate the trade-offs of expanding your offering.

Here's a common pattern: You're new. You're scrappy. You'll do whatever it takes to meet the needs of your clients, which means growth by any means necessary. If a customer wants to give your standard offering a slightly different spin, sure, you'll give it a try. Your effort is also known as customizing your product or service. At this point, there's such a premium on developing customer relationships that you're not thinking about how to pull this off in a profitable way. Instead, you're thinking about survival. If you can keep a growing number of customers happy, then good things are more likely to happen.

Our point here is to not run your business by the comment box. It may feel good, at least at first, but here's the catch: customers typically don't understand the implications of their requests. It's your obligation — to them and to you — to put their demands in context, to evaluate the trade-offs of expanding your offering.