I was reviewing my book of business at work a couple of weeks ago while planning my series of meetings in Miami this week, and it suddenly dawned on me that despite being in a customer facing role, which is oftentimes looked at with a lot of disdain given how many headaches you can deal with when you have unrelenting and demanding customers, I’m actually pretty happy with my customer list. I look forward to spending time with them, to helping them, and to visiting them and having lunch with them, even discussing things that are completely unrelated to work. The vast majority of them I actually like as people and think are genuinely smart, well-meaning, fun people. And frankly, before I came to this company and took on this role, I could never say that in any other customer facing role I’ve had in the last 11.5 years of full-time work. Especially when I worked at an agency doing search engine marketing or social media, I really thought my customers were the ditziest with the least amount of common sense.

I’m really lucky in this sense because I know that most of my counterparts do NOT feel this way about their books of business. They really envy me with my customer relationships and my customer travel to see them. I’m in an enviable role with an enviable book. I do have it pretty good and have little to complain about on the customer front.