My biggest mistake: Emma Bowyer, owner of ICSMA

Emma Bowyer has been involved in the events management industry for more than 17 years, and has been managing director at ICMS Australia (ICMSA) for more than a decade.

In her time personally managing events — some with more than 6000 individuals in attendance — Bowyer has had to learn how to build relationships and ensure client policy is delivered and satisfactory.

But as Bowyer tells SmartCompany Plus, sometimes having a mindset of ‘the customer is always right’ does far more harm than good.

The mistake

Bowyer says her biggest mistake occurred about 10 years ago, when ICMSA was working with a “very difficult client”. Bowyer can’t legally name the client, but she does tell SmartCompany Plus the contract was worth millions of dollars.

“I had total confidence in our team; I had really good people working with me from our side,” she says.

“But no matter what we did, we couldn’t keep this client happy.

“They would do things antagonistically and almost sabotaging [us] to get along, and some of it was really extreme,” she adds.

At one point, the client asked her to get the president of a country into Australia without a visa.

“I sort of just said yes to a lot of things, because I thought it was important to the relationship,” she recalls.

“As the requests kept coming up, I would think to myself ‘well, that request isn’t as bad as the previous one’. But it was still pretty bad.

“So my biggest mistake was saying yes.”

The context

At this time, Bowyer was ‘working her way up’ to her current position as owner and managing director of the business.

She had just been made general manager, and admits that is probably why she felt the need to continuously say yes and figure out a way forward.

There was a multi-million dollar contract at stake, but Bowyer also believes her compulsion to say yes to all of the client’ requests wasn’t just because of the financial aspect — it boiled down to the company’s global reputation as well.

“No one had said no to them before.”

The impact

Continuously saying yes to this client “didn’t do the business any good”, Bowyer admits.

She “can’t legally disclose” how she got around the problem of getting a president into the country without a visa. There were a lot of other “very extreme requests” that came through during that time — requests she also can’t disclose the finer details of, due to their nature.

“This went on for around two years, and at the end of the journey we’d all lost a little bit of our souls, maybe — because when you’re saying yes all of the time, it suddenly becomes as though you can’t say no anymore,” Bowyer says.

“What was the line here? There was actually no line.”

She can see clearly now in hindsight, but looking back she doesn’t think it was the right thing to do even at the time.

“We lost some good staff because we were just literally burnt out,” Bowyer says.

The energy exerted on this one client also “took away from other clients”, she adds.

The lesson

A decade on from the mistake, Bowyer finally sees it as a “practical” lesson to look back on.

There wasn’t a quick fix in the moment, except pledging that when the client’s contract ended, ICMSA wouldn’t be working with them again.

Once the client was gone, however, she got used to saying ‘no’ — and it “literally changed our business”.

Now Bowyer is able to explain why she’s saying no; she’s able to be kind about it; and she’s able to teach younger people in her team not to be afraid of saying no themselves.

“In a service-based industry, it gets drilled into you that the customer is always right and all of those things,” she says.

But that doesn’t always benefit the business, the staff or even the customer.

“At some point in time, you have to learn how to say the word.

“You have to learn how to say no.”