Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This season, we are talking about consulting advice and specifically today, what I wanted to cover was, if you've ever been out with some colleagues and have found yourself venting, let's say maybe not complaining about a client and you've heard them say, wow, you should fire that client. Well, today's episode is for you because we're going to talk about what you need to do to make that the least horrible experience for everyone involved.

I got the idea for today's podcast, first of all, from a client who emailed me and said, how do I fire this client? And there are two other things, one is that I wanted you to know that you can fire a client. You're not stuck with them, or trapped in a terrible situation, if we want to be miserable and stuck with things, we want to stay back at corporate, right? And there are ways that you can fire clients, that you can do this whole process that can really minimize the damage and make everyone leave feeling really good about everything.

So that's what I wanted to talk to you about, I've definitely had this experience and my clients have been through this just numerous times. I have to disclaim that this is not legal advice, there are many states where you're going to need to look at your legal documents and you maybe can't get out of an agreement and things like that. So I'm not a lawyer, if you take legal advice from someone who's not a lawyer, you get what you pay for.

So in this case, I also want to remind you of really just the premise of my work at profitable, joyful consulting, you know, the whole idea is based upon working with perfect clients. Our work is so joyful almost always because the people with whom we work are perfect, what exactly what they need is exactly what you do they bring out the best in you, they are joyful to work with, you look forward to them all the time. A lot of times they will become your actual real life friends and they're profitable to work with, so the time you spend with them is efficient, well spent. And then best of all, they refer you to their other colleagues who are just as wonderful as they are, they give you testimonials and they get really good results in their work with you so that you can use case studies of them in your marketing to attract more people just like them.

So perfect clients are the be all, end all and sometimes in our work we end up in a situation where it just didn't go as we expected. It's important to me that we know in the intake process what we're going to deal with, so we're always looking for this perfect client and sometimes, you know, if you have a difficult client in the intake process, you're going to know that really fast and so a lot of times you can avoid this situation before you get anywhere near it. If they're egregious, you probably wouldn't be working with them. So these are going to have been on the line somewhere, you know what I mean? They're going to have been, like, good enough to pass through and maybe they seemed really great and there's also certain situations, for example, in which your primary contact has changed your person got fired or promoted or went away for whatever reason and who you're left with at the client is not someone that you want to work with. That has happened before for my clients and then they have to deal with, you know, can I still make this work? It was so good before I had such high hopes and now here's what we're left with.

So in your intake, always keep an eye out for your own future happiness and only choose to work with perfect clients and if you see that they are difficult in the intake process, they are not going to get better, it is not going to get better. And the screening that we do is basically like a job interview, I know other people are going to ask you to do a sales consultation in which you're going to push and persuade and cajole and convince them to work with you, that's not how we work. What you're going to do is you're going to invite them to have a conversation with you about their potential and their future and during that time, you're going to vet them for their initiative, are they people who work hard to get results for their responsibility? Are they self responsible that they take responsibility for their own success, for their own actions and for their fate? Like what happens to them? Are they just people that you can get along with, reasonable adults, communicable, all these communicative, all of these things that we want our clients to be? And you're going to use it much more as a job interview to make sure that they are, as I say, sometimes tall enough for this ride. Do you know the sign at the fair on some of the rides that say you have to be this tall to ride this ride? Well, that's one of my parameters for my clients, they've got to be this tall to ride this ride.

And sometimes I'll talk to someone and I'll think, you know what? Either they're not ready like this isn't a good time or I just feel like I don't know that you've expanded enough as a person to be somebody that I want to work with. So be super discerning for yourself, because, again, a lot of our work that I'm teaching you about is based on transformational engagements, and that means long term work. So if you're working with a client for one to four years, or more, you really want to know who you're getting into this relationship with, and sometimes that's going to take more than just a half hour conversation and sometimes you'll have gotten into that work relationship, you'll be a few months in several months, and then you'll find this can't go on, we've reached an impasse, I don't think this is going to work. And if that is your situation, then first of all, I want to acknowledge you can fire the client, you're not stuck or trapped and so the important thing for you to do is ask yourself this question. My favorite question to ask, when dealing with difficult people in my life, difficult clients or difficult situations, because we can always bail and run away from them but the key question here is, does this situation or person expand me or is life too short for this? So sometimes I'm dealing with a difficult person or difficult situation and I can be, you know, suffering and agonizing but I'm thinking to myself, you know, they're revealing maybe areas where I need to grow they're revealing to be my limitations of my leadership or things I hadn't thought of and even though it's uncomfortable, I feel that I'm being expanded by this process. I'm having to step up my leadership or I'm having to work harder on my intellectual property and bring my ideas forward or whatever, your expanded by certain situations and certain clients.

And then there are those in which you feel like life is too short for this. I do not need to tolerate this I don't need another single day of learning this lesson from this person, I've got it. And now maybe the lesson is, can you remove yourself from the situation in a way that's going to be graceful and not too painful for everyone involved? So if your question is answered by, yes, I'm done with this and I'm ready to move on, then that's the next piece that we can look at. How can you extract yourself from an uncomfortable, difficult situation with the least damage possible?

So what I want you to do here is look back at your agreement, you probably have some contract agreement or something in which you said, I'm going to do this work and you're going to do this payment. Ideally, you would have joint accountabilities that say if you don't do these things, I'm not going to be able to do this for you. A lot of projects will run aground because you're waiting on the client to do their part, and that just goes on forever and they never can get you the materials they're supposed to get you are they approvals or they just get distracted and the project becomes no longer a priority and you're just like sitting around waiting and it's never going to end, so that's a really good time to fire a client, it's a pretty obvious one but you want to look at your agreement and make sure that you don't owe them any work and they don't owe you any money. So you want to try to find as clean a place to put a brake as possible, so if you, for example, need to finish a few more things to achieve a certain milestone and then get a milestone payment, then you could do that and then bring up the idea of like maybe we don't go any further or sometimes, you know, nothing is moving and you just have to sit down and say these are things that I that I owed them, but they never did the work so that I could do my part and so I can't reasonably go any further in my work. Or the only thing they owe you is like a final payment or next month's payment or something like that.

So if you have a nice clean break, then that's the time to take action. These kinds of things aren't necessarily messy, so I hope it will look nice and tidy for you and that you can just stop, everyone leaves you, put your pencils down, don't do any more work, they don't have to make any more payments because whatever they paid you so far is fine and then you just go our separate ways.

So the next thing to do is we want to break up not by text or fax, like some famous actors, we want to break up in person. So what I would do is I would call a face to face meeting, whether that's a zoom or in person and I would just basically say, here's the situation, as you likely see it as well, we've done our best on this, I'm sure you've done your best on that and our work is at an end and we can't continue. So your proposal is that we end our work right now and we don't go any further.

What is important is if you've decided that you're absolutely going to stop and not do anymore, that you really stand your ground and that and don't negotiate, don't get convinced to come back in and, you know, be sucked back in unless the situation will be the way that you needed to be to work ok, so you're going to explain your terms of I think that we've come to a stopping place in the work. I don't think that continuing to work together is going to be of mutual benefit and so I'm going to propose that we go ahead and stop right here.

A thing that you can do is recommend a colleague. So, for example, you know, I do have a colleague who I think could come in and help with these things like that if you'd like the referral, just let me know. So that way you don't leave them hanging in a lurch if that would potentially be that situation, what you're looking for is and I always speak to this in terms of in a sales process in every all of our working together process is hiring an employee, firing someone, it should be in the highest good of all concerned.

Everyone involved should be respected and benefited by the thing that happens and so if you're in a situation where you're tormented by the client, either, you know, the situation has changed and it's just no longer conducive to getting any work done or you feel like there's just too many delays and we can't do anything or you know, the client is just terrible and difficult and you don't want to work with them anymore.

Concluding in a way that really honors everyone and takes the high ground is really the best way to go. So practice that language before you meet and be sure of what you're willing to do next and what you're not willing to do so that you can come away from that. Again, if you have achieved most of the milestones according to your agreement, then you deserve to be paid for the milestones you've achieved. It's possible, though, that to extract yourself from the situation, you might need to sacrifice a future payment unless you can negotiate that as part of the divorce of your work from them.

And my last reminder for you is if you are sure that you just do not want another day of this client, then don't let them negotiate you and suck you back into the work, cool? In rare cases, having this kind of conversation can actually pull it out of the fire, the client is like, oh, my gosh, I didn't realize that, you know, you might like, walk away from us so ok, we'll do things, which is, you know, happens all the time whenever people see, like, the threat is real, then sometimes they'll get their act together but a lot of times you can just really let them go.

Many people advise and a lot of the financial types will advise you to every year call the bottom 20% or so of your client list. Most of the money is being made by the 80 20 rule, by the top 20 clients and you have 80% of them on there which are not bringing in as much so you can definitely cut the bottom of it. Most people I know don't have that many clients on their roster so that they can't do that but I do think that what that shows you is not to be precious about the clients that you do have who are no longer a fit for you. Like if you keep in mind that the least profitable client on your list should probably be being eliminated every single year so keep an eye on that, not because we don't love them, but because you want to be joyful and profitable and very often a client who isn't profitable also isn't joyful ok, so just keep an eye on that factor.

I hope that you have gotten some ideas and permission to let go of those clients who are not serving you and you're not serving them anymore and if you do need to fire one, that you can do it in the least painful way possible. With that, I'm wishing a profitable and joyful consulting business.