I want to talk about a time when I let 15 of my clients go and ended up making more money, despite losing their regular monthly payments and how you can do the same.
Have you got a client that when they call, their name comes up and shivers run down your spine?
Maybe they’re tight with money or maybe they call you at all hours?
I remember one nightmare client who was a famous author who emailed me and called me on my wedding and honeymoon and had to be told by his wife to leave me alone.
These types of clients drain your energy and focus but worst of all they trap you into thinking that they are your only option.
Maybe you’ve only got 2 – 3 clients and they’re all nightmares, but because they provide 100% of your revenue and you’re terrified to leave them.
And besides, aren’t you supposed to be grateful for the work?
Can you imagine how cocky or arrogant you’d have to be as a business owner to fire your clients?
So how can we attract higher paying, higher value clients?
Let me take you outside to my runner beans.
If you grow anything in your garden, like vegetables, none of this will be a surprise to you.
But to me, this was a revelation.
Clients are cultivated relationships that are supposed to be beneficial to both parties.
Growing vegetables is the same.
They want to grow, suck up water and sunlight and in return, they’ll make tasty vegetables for me to eat.
But what I’ve learned about growing beans is that only 20% of the plant does any of the actual growing.
So every day I need to check the health of the plant and remove anything that looks unwell, damaged or covered in bugs.
But what that allows is for more of the energy to go into the healthy, thriving parts of the plant that are growing delicious vegetables.
If I don’t trim the plant and cut back what isn’t growing, it can spread to the whole plant.
I knew with my nightmare client that I had to fire them.
The stress, sleepless nights and verbal abuse just weren’t worth the money.
But what if I fire them and don’t find another client to cover the costs?
The key here is to change what you’re looking at.
Rather than looking at the gap it might leave, let’s try focusing on the progress we’ve already made.
If I just focus on what I’m cutting and pruning, it looks like I’m killing the plant and throwing away valuable growth.
But instead, if I look at where I’m already growing vegetables, I can see where I’m better off spending my time and energy.
In my case, I went through my list of clients and broke them into two lists.
Growers and slowers.
I said “slowers”.
Growers were the relationships and clients that I wanted to cultivate more.
In my case, out of 30 clients, I only had 7 that I wanted to really focus on.
At first, this was pretty upsetting.
But when I looked closer, these 7 clients were responsible for almost 80% of my revenue.
I was so focused on my nightmare clients that I had no idea that I could fire them and the financial impact wouldn’t be as massive as I thought.
Slowers was the list of clients that I thought was actively slowing my business down.
This was about 15 clients.
These were clients I thought were actively slowing down the growth of my business.
Some of them paid well, by the way. And it’s not to say that the revenue drop didn’t hurt. Of course it did.
And it was scary.
But I knew it wasn’t going to get better.
It wouldn’t fix itself and they were never going to change.
So I fired them.
And within seconds of letting them go, I started to feel better.
More focused, more energised.
And even better than that, I could now spend more time with my other clients.
The ones I wanted to grow.
So after a few calls and emails to my Grower clients, I had booked new projects with them.
I had given myself the capacity to cultivate more growth, because my energy wasn’t being wasted elsewhere.
And what if I needed more leads?
Well that’s simple. I had a KILLER lead generation system that I use (still to this day) where I generated tens of thousands of leads PLUS they paid me to join the email list.
