Many years ago, Erik made an agreement that ended up killing his old company. The agreement was an exclusivity clause and it really came back to bite him.
Fast forward another 10 years or so to where we are today: Erik has developed an aversion to exclusivity. Basically this is a client asking you to reserve your services just for them. There’s different ways to define exclusivity but the problem is you’re locking yourself into this agreement and locking yourself out of other opportunities.
Any time a client asks for exclusivity, I generally tell the client that we don’t do that. But there may be situations where you do want to agree to exclusivity.