Fire Your Bad Customers & Clients. Now.

Fire Your Bad Customers & Clients. Now.

I finally fired that client and left behind annoying customers to work only with the best.

Of course, this guy wasn’t trying overt verbal abuse – only one client ever tried that with me and a partner one day – a story for another time.

This person tried to be more subtle.

But the real reason we got here was that I had allowed, in a thousand tiny ways, bad-client-behavior creep.

I’d been dependent on clients, hostage, whether they knew it or not, to their next payments and the merry-go-round of hand-to-mouth, month after month after month.

He’s probably not a bad person, this guy, not in the big scheme of things anyway.

And he’s really smart.

And I hear he’s damn good at what he does.

But he had a habit of talking down to people he thought were not as important as he.

And he thought that about a lot of people.

I answered the phone one day and he thought I was an employee. Not even that I was an employee of any particular company, no, just that I was that label, a drone, a cog, but one he could get some twisted enjoyment from sneering down on.

What he didn’t know was that his string of assumption-powered patronizing frays would be broken today by a two-letter word.

No.

No, sir. No.
Not this.
And not today.

Not ever, but especially not with all the weary, grasping-for-sleep nights, the stress of BPL turning off the power for late payments, never seeing my wife outside of this 24-hour business I inflicted upon us, and then the dengue – the DENGUE, and the utter, complete breakdown after the torture of 15 days of the kind of pain that beats you til you fall out as a joke just to tease you into believing you could rest in sweet oblivion for just a few eternal minutes only to rake you screaming from unconsciousness to beat you some more, kinda pain. And the exhaustion. And oh, that ER doctor cracking jokes about you being a little less the colour of Kermit The Frog after they pump two litres of fluid into you. Being unable to work, to earn, to hope?

No.

NO.

Sir, don’ do it.

Who knows what triggered him or what excuse he’d make for it, but he was condescendingly educating me on how he was my boss (I’m sorry, whaaa?) because his firm, as a customer, paid my lowly salary, so give the respect, the deference, the reverence due.

In his mind he was talking to a lowly phone operator.

Here’s the thing – not only was I not one, but the mere implication that there was even such a thing was igniting my fight-or-flight response.

And I wasn’t going anywhere.

“E-x-c-u-s-e me?!”

Silence.

“We,” I said, “Exchange value.”

I couldn’t have told him any simpler.

He was stunned. Still it wasn’t long before he came back with “Are you the owner?”

I gave it a beat.

Then, “Yes.”

“Yes. I am.”

After his mumbling and his cursory “well this and that’s,” and his fumbling search for something to complain about in the service, and our obligatory parting words, the line went dead.

I wish I could say I was relieved and proud. Something good happened, but that does’t mean good-enough.

People like this are not to be accommodated, encouraged, nor rewarded – true.

In fact, when someone holds an axe over your head you never, ever, EVER give them what they want. What they want is power over you and I will die with an axe in my neck before I let the mere threat of one make me bow softly and whisper, oh, sorry, yes sir, yes ma’am, how can I ever make it up to you?

And still I didn’t fire that client on the spot.

I should have.

I was way more green and in a deep, tight spot with no light to show me the way.

I had held my ground but later I learned how to quickly get rid of them and even better, never have them again.

In Book Yourself Solid, Michael Port outlines a simple standard for freelancers which is applicable to anyone that wants to run a business instead of being enslaved by one, or worse, by its customers. It’s called the Velvet Rope Policy.

In short, there are some people you’re meant to serve and others… not so much.

In case you think this is not a problem for bigger businesses, or for retail, or manufacturing, et cetera, allow me to disabuse you of the notion.

Bad customers create operational drag and cost-increases. Period.

For starters they set your employees bonkers, leading to:
– Poor performance
– Increased turnover (how much does it cost you to find good people, onboard them, train them, and on and on?)
– And general disdain for your company as the place that tortures them.

The extra cost of dealing with unreasonable people via customer service means either hiring more customer service reps or feeding into the cycle above.

At the risk of beating you with a whole dead horse, they’re toxic. They poison your business, and that poisons you.

If running a poisoned business is somehow something you’ve been dreaming of, well then there’s no accounting for taste and you go ahead and you do you.

Otherwise, preventing or removing that toxic sludge of bad customers is, to be euphemistic, a recommended target for this quarter.

New year, new standards. Sweep the place clean.

If having things run more smoothly with more profit and less stress is your sorta jam, read on.

The extra good news is when you have removed them not only are they gone, but the ones that replace them are extra good. Yes, you’re not replacing them with mediocre customers. We have a Velvet Rope, remember?

How you build out this Velvet Rope filter is unique to your business but there are a few principles you can apply to your situation.

Some simple examples:

Luxury brands select for people who aspire-to… and thereby automatically exclude people who only care about function and cost.

Casual brands attract people who like to be laid back and automatically exclude people who prefer and promote the more formal approach to life.

You have to figure out who you want to be your customer and set that Velvet Rope Policy and not be afraid to enforce it.

Huge tip:
Prefer psychographics over demographics any and all days of the week when figuring out who it is you want to serve.

If I look forward to a nice mellow evening and a stiff scotch at your jazz club and you’re letting in loud drunk tourists in beach wear I’m never coming back.

Same if I’m looking for a fun casual night out and there are stuffy old people continually complaining about everyone and everything “these days”.

Who is it you’re serving?

It’s a crucial piece often left out of the well worn advice of creating a customer avatar.

It’s a crucial piece often left out in filtering your target market.

But now you know. And because you know you can apply it to ease the stress on you and your business. AND you can use it to help you get more customers as well.

You can pair this crucial piece with what Port, just a little later in the book, calls a Who & Do What statement.

A wut-now?

Yes, not the most graceful packaging but the statement is as big a boon to marketing and sales as you can get. You’re just saying Who you serve and What you Do for them.

Depending on the context you can make the statement longer or shorter and append not just how you help but the real meat of messaging, the benefits to them, the why-to-do-it.

I like to think of it as you connecting the Magic you make to the Market you serve.

To make yours answer these questions:

Who do you serve? (industry, vertical, profession, age, but more importantly, serious? casual? sense of humour? believes in…? values…?)
Where, when, and how can you reach them?
What do they want? (That’s what you do for them.)
Why should they choose you?

With these you can strike up a natural conversation anywhere or write the best ad copy or the most engaging content.

And it’s not going to resonate with everyone.

It’s not supposed to.

It will resonate with the right people, because you didn’t just choose a market. You defined who you serve and got a red velvet rope that only lets them in – an exclusive place for the right people, and for the others… not so much.

I did fire that client eventually.

More importantly I know how and when to do it now, and best of all I can teach and help other entrepreneurs and executives to do it too.

P.S.
If you want, I can send you a one-page framework for making your Velvet Rope Policy and creating your Who & Do What statement, just email me.