Gee I know that sounds harsh, but sometimes it is necessary. Some of us have clients that literally suck the energy from us. They are usually the small client that buys little and demands a lot. We are afraid to let them go because they do bring in income or maybe they have been with us for a while or maybe they are a friend of a friend. I challenge you to evaluate some things about those “troubled” clients.
1. Evaluate ROI: How much time do you spend a week/month with the client making them feel better, handling conflict, thinking about them, resolving a problem, giving a refund or return, following up to abstract questions they have, apologizing to other clients because they are disrupive or taking all of your time.
2. Figure out how much your time is worth - $25/hour? $200/hr?
3. Once you know how many hours it takes in dealing with this client and what your time is worth, multiply those two numbers together and you get how much that client COSTS you.
4. Determine how much revenue they bring in.
5. If the amount of time it costs you in dealing with them is MORE than they bring in for revenue, time to think about firing them.
6. Maybe the cost for handling them is LESS than the revenue. Then you need to decide if it is worth the gray hair, stress and angst that goes along with having them as a client.
The benefit to being self employed is you truly get to CHOOSE who you do business with. I had a client as an office tenant in one of my shared offices who thought he was superior to all humans. He was an inventor working on the next coolest solution to save the planet. My other tenants included sales reps, consultants, entrepreneurs, etc. He said to me one day that he needed SILENCE; he was working on something that none of us could ever understand and it was far more important than anything that any of my other tenants were working on. In the past, I appeased him – I would go knocking on the loud sales guys’ doors and ask them to keep in down. Until this day……
I got a call from the wife telling me that I needed to do something about the noise in the facility and the receptionist – she let a call go through to the inventor before screening the call which was a HUGE no-no. I decided at that moment – without doing the ROI, that life was too short and I was highly annoyed. So, I told the wife that I had a solution. I had researched my competition and the names and numbers of three other executive suite offices that were in the same price range and in the same area that would be a great fit for him. The wife gasped and said “are you firing us? You can’t do that!”. I told her that it was clear that we were not able to make them happy and that perhaps this was not the ideal environment for an “inventor” to be in. She immediately conceded and said that perhaps they were over-reacting, that they loved the staff and the location and was so appreciative of the help I had given, etc.
End of the story is that they ended up staying with me and taking on more offices when his invention came to reality and he hired more staff. He also kept to himself and cost me very LITTLE time and energy after that.
Sometimes we allow our clients to control us. There are too many energy vampires out there and life is too short to spend any time with them. I don’t care if they are your best friend, spouse or in this case a client – get them OUT of your life as soon as possible. Better yet, challenge them and maybe they will change. In this case they did.
So today, go through your client base and see if there is any one client that is sucking up your time, resources, energy, money and confront them TODAY!
Then, go have a fabulous weekend. Tweet
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