I have been thinking about this for a long time: working with clients is all about building trust. Then the clients will need to induce trust to their clients. But they cannot do it without trusting us first. Because trust creates confidence, confidence that the project will succeed, that all obstacles will be overcome.
We cannot build the trust without the technical knowledge, and most importantly the business knowledge. When we start a project, we go out of our way to assemble our knowledges, including longer hours. We’ve got to: the client needs to trust us, and that can be difficult to gain at the start.
Once we have the knowledge base and the trust of the client, we can go back to our normal way of working, but not before; and always keeping in mind that the success of the project is the most important aspect of our relationship. If the project succeeds the client and their client in the chain will be happy, and so will we.