I don’t want your kickback. I want you to do a bloody good job.
Referral fees might look like easy money, but they can come at a much bigger cost: your client’s trust. Here’s why Safety Forward won’t take a cut for making an introduction — we’d rather recommend people who do a bloody good job.
Want to know what I discovered when I got under the hood of the B2B world? Everyone is clipping the ticket.
Okay, maybe not everyone…….but money changes hands for referrals far more often than most people realise.
We work with all sorts of providers with and on behalf of our clients: software companies, professional services, other WHS professionals, etc. and it is incredibly common for those providers to try to pull us into their sales network as a “referral partner”.
Sign here. Send your clients our way. We will give you a cut.
In the early days of Safety Forward, I thought “Brilliant, another revenue stream. Money for making an introduction I was probably going to make anyway? Why wouldn’t I?”.
Then some of those providers failed my clients, spectacularly. Thousands of dollars poured down the drain……and suddenly the referral fee didn’t feel like clever business. It felt icky.
It wasn’t until I found myself on the other side that I really understood the ick. I worked with a business coach who helped me enormously in the early stages of Safety Forward. I would not be where I am now without some of her insights.
She also steered me towards providers, services and ways of setting up my business. I took those recommendations as independent advice. I thought she was pointing me in those directions because they were genuinely the right options for me.
It was only afterwards that I realised she was receiving a kickback from many of those recommendations. In some cases she was receiving a share of revenue from those providers.
And fuck, that changed things. I had unknowingly followed a one-size-fits-all playbook that cost me a fortune and that I am still, in parts, unpicking. Ironically it was the exact predicament many of our clients find themselves in when they buy plug and play WHS systems.
But the damage was not financial. It was trust. Because I started looking backwards and questioning everything. Would she have recommended the same systems if there wasn’t money in it for her? Was this really the best setup for my business? Or had I been funnelled through a handy little network where everyone got a slice of my pie?
That is the problem. Once I knew money was changing hands, I couldn’t unknow it. Even the good advice started to feel compromised.
Recently, I was looking for a specialist service for one of our clients. I spoke with someone about what was needed and without hesitation they immediately offered us 20% of whatever they billed the client. 20%? For connecting my client with the right “who” to help them solve a problem?
Now, let’s not play. I like money. I run a business. Cash is quite important.
But I know, any kickback money is no “free parking”. The cost is the tiny seed of distrust it could plant for my client. It is the personal emotional and cognitive load I will wear if the provider doesn’t serve my client well.
No thanks. Our clients trust matters to me more than any kickback.
So here is our line in the sand: we will not accept kickbacks, commissions or referral fees for connecting our ongoing clients with other service providers.
Sometimes we recommend someone because we know their work and believe they are the right fit for that client. Other times, we help a client find a provider who is untested, and we are honest when that is the case. We won’t vouch for someone we haven’t worked with or tested, regardless of how much kickback they offer.
Our recommendations haven’t bought access to our network. They haven’t been promised exclusivity. We don’t get a cut of their invoice.
We recommend people who do bloody good work for our clients.
Because our clients are not leads to be traded around a B2B sales network. They are incredible leaders and business owners trying to make good decisions in a world full of excessive information, sales pitches and people telling them what they supposedly need next.
They let us under the hood of their businesses. They show us the messy bits, the gaps and the things that aren’t working. They trust us to help them make good decisions about what, how and who, they need.
We care about our clients. We care about what happens after we make the introduction. We do this to make impact.
So, to the service providers we work with or who may potentially reach out to “partner”, we don’t want a cut of your invoice. We want you to look after our clients and do a bloody good job for them. That is worth far more to us than any referral fee.
