There is a place down the road which sells tea and coffee, as in beans and leaves.

It has many types of tea and coffee and they are all in bins and stuff. Surrounding the bins are shelves, and every single spot on the shelves is crammed with glass tea cups, tea pots, strainers, plungers, percolators and all kinds of knick-knacks. The rest of the shop is similarly full – you really have to be careful as you edge past the display cabinets and cake stands, and so on.

There is no counter. The counter is covered with tea cups and cake forks. If you want to buy and pay for anything, it is all hand to hand – you hand the salesperson the money, they hand you the packet with whatever in it and they hand over the change. You cannot slap your cash down on the counter since there isn’t one.

I hate the place. It is named after a bird that is very exotic and seldom flies, and that, I think, typifies the place’s trading style. I do not want to have to trail an assistant around the shop to have to get and pay for something. A counter is needed – something over which I can trade, separating buyer and seller. If it chips me off, it must chip off at least one other and thus the trade the place may get is reduced, even by a small amount.

Purchases of the nature of coffee and tea, if they are of quality, are very important since, in effect, somebody is saying that they are taking some of the money they have earned and are exchanging it for something they value, compared with something they need to survive or be comfortable.

Thus, to some extent, the actual price of the article becomes secondary – its value is in a perceived worth. If the coffee shop owners grasped this, they would make the shop open and wide, with plenty of space for goods and a good counter top on which you could lean while deciding what to buy. In short, all the qualities of a Transkei trading store – uncluttered, wide range of goods, measured pace . . .

In the engineering profession, you meet lots of clients (well, hopefully, anyway). In meeting them, you soon get an idea of what their business is really like. You quickly grasp if you are there to just give them some ideas about a project (which they have little intention of executing), if you are to give them some advice they will grudgingly pay for, having bargained your fee down to near nothing, or if you are there because they regard you as they regard themselves – a provider of sound advice and thorough thinking of reasonable value.

If it is this last, then you are like good coffee – they will pay a bit extra because value costs a little extra. We all want only relationships like the last one with our clients but it is never going to be. What we should think of, if our business seems to be doomed to deal with fast-buck merchants and tight-fisted Charlies, is . . . why?

Does your business look like the overstuffed coffee shop (offering so many items that the client gets squeezed out) or is your business the Transkei trading store (well established, welcoming, not too pushy, good value for money)?

Often engineering businesses never consider any aspect of how they look and sound. Not always – the older consulting practices were all a bit ‘Transkei trading’ – Ninham Shand, VKE, WEVS (now all gone). The newer, recently established businesses all seem to have income, profit and turnover as their masters – seemingly forgetting that the most important aspect of the business to an engineering client is not how fast and how quickly the work can be done but, like good coffee, how well and how long lasting and whether there is perceived worth.

One can take all these analogies too far but they do stand up. If your engineering business is not going well, think about it. Do you move too fast to get things done and forget your clients? Do you give your clients space? Do you provide a welcome?