Home topics small-business-resources sales-and-marketing Marketing Public Relations Starting Marketing The link between realistic client expectations and healthy business relationships Phoebe Netto February 20, 2012 Setting realistic expectations early promotes healthy business relationships . It discourages clients from expecting too much of you and being disappointed when you can’t deliver and also gives you more chances to exceed their expectations, especially when your product or service has a lot of promise. I recently went to a very busy food court that was full of stores offering pre-prepared sandwiches and day-old sushi rolls. Amongst all the fast food I noticed a new store. This new store was offering “fish and chips, pasta and freshly cooked steak” but it stood out, not just because of the aromatic food the chefs cooked right before your eyes, but also because of the growing line of impatient and disgruntled people waiting for their steaks to be cooked. Most of these foot-tapping, watch-checking customers had family and friends sitting at nearby tables who had purchased pre-prepared food from other stores in the food court. These friends and family members were already eating their food, and the foot-tappers did not seem to like this. How inconvenient, they were thinking, I should have just got a soggy sandwich! We all know that steak takes longer than one minute to cook, but that information hadn’t been conveyed to the foot-tappers. If the new store had advertised the steaks as “15 minute steaks”, would its customers have been this irritated? I’d