When Do You Fire a Client?
Imagine a day, when you wake up and feel so excited about your business. Your clients are paying you the big bucks on time, you enjoy every minute you interact with your clients. Your clients also keep on referring more clients that also pay the big bucks. You see your bank account grow day after day. You feel so lucky and blessed that you have a thriving business that provides you and your family with the lifestyle you want. It’s never been this good ever. But wait! No one gets to this level of success by accident. It takes time and effort to build up your business to reach this type of success. Choosing your clients is one of the most important things you need to undertake to move your business towards this direction, you need to build up your good clients and fire those that won’t help you move to the next level.
5 Reasons Why You Should Fire a Client
Reason 1: If a client is a pain in the butt, and they keep on complaining or whatever you do is not quite enough. Or if you made a mistake and they don’t let you fix it and also they make you regret it. These are the type of clients you don’t want. It will just demoralize you over the course of your relationship with them and make you grumpy. And sometimes your other good clients will sense your grumpiness and you might end up losing those good clients in the process. It’s hard enough to get really motivated and inspired if things get really busy, you don’t need additional negativity from clients in your business to pull you down. You want to find those clients that when you work with-will energize you and will make you feel that you really love your job. These types of client will really make things easier for you to move forward.
Reason 2: If a client requires you to do something completely different from your core competency.  Sometimes it is wiser to say no, the reason for this is that you cannot create effective systems if you try to serve different clients with different needs. If you do wedding photography and someone asks you to do product photography, it’s going to become a stretch, your photography equipment might be good for wedding photography but not good for product photography, you might not perform very well and sometimes end up tarnishing your reputation.
Reason 3: If a client doesn’t excite you to work with them and they just drag you down emotionally, they might be a candidate for you to fire. There would be clients out there that you encounter will just clash with your personality, it happens, that’s just how the world works. These are the clients where you really get frustrated working with them. Maybe because they are unprofessional, or they don’t respect your time, or whatever it is, every time you work with them you really get so frustrated.
Reason 4: If a client doesn’t have a potential to bring you more revenue in the future or if they don’t have the potential to refer other clients to you. Yes, money matters in business, with no potential growth your business will suffer. This reason typically comes into play when you are choosing between two clients, always look for a client with future potential revenue, whether your client tells you or not. You need to find out who your client is, who they are connected with to make a sound decision.
Reason 5: if a client doesn’t pay on time. One of the most important things in business is getting paid. If your client doesn’t pay up, your business won’t survive. So if they don’t pay, don’t provide any more services to them. Say they pay late-they are already a candidate for being chopped as a client. Find out if they fall into the other reasons listed above. If it warrants it-fire them!
All these reasons give you a way to qualify your clients, chose your clients wisely, fire them if needed and your business will thrive.
The main idea to remember is, sketch out your ideal customer. Make every effort to find and qualify your client, provide a world class service to these clients, create systems that will help you serve these ideal clients better. And over time, happy good ideal customers will refer other similar customers if they have a good experience with you.
