ABSTRACTThis paper examines the proposition that a business executive's attitudes towards the service quality delivered by suppliers will be shaped, in part, by the experience of dealing with the firm's own clients. In this regard, retailers, with many hundreds of customers, are likely to evolve different expectations of service quality and are likely to react differently to a dissatisfying incident than businesses with less numerous clienteles. The paper examines these propositions with business respondents in their role as clients of legal and accounting professional services.