In this episode, I'm going to tell you how

you can handle when your clients have too much success with you and it's

time to flee the nest. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business

strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the Weenie cast.

Squirrel. One of the coolest things about starting a

business based solely on work that you're passionate about

doing and being super conscious about developing

a niche that attracts people who are not only your

ideal client, but are just your ideal people.

Like, they are the people that if you bumped into them in the real

world, if you weren't running your business, you would probably become

friends with them. It is one of the greatest joys

in the world, because not only are you making money doing

what you love, you're making money working with people who

you genuinely enjoy spending time with. And you're not just

working with them, you're helping them transform some

element of their life. It is one of the

greatest gifts that we can give ourselves is to start a

business where we get to do that day in and day out.

But it does have its dark side.

When a client starts to work with you, they're gonna work with you for a

bit, and there's gonna come a moment where they're done.

Your work with them will end. And I can tell

you, as a coach, there's, like, a certain sadness. There's a very specific

sadness that comes along with completing with a client.

Mainly for me, it's I get sad that I'm not going to get to talk

to this person every week. You know, I get really close with my

clients, and oftentimes we continue the friendship beyond our

professional engagement. But as a business owner, when a client

completes with you, there are some other things that go into it. A,

you no longer have that income coming in, so you then have to start thinking

about backfilling that client. B, there's also this element of,

oh, my God. Like, was I good enough? You know, you can start getting imposter

syndrome because they don't want to work with you anymore. Even if

they're done working with you, because they reach their goals, it's super

easy for that voice of doubt to pipe in and be like, oh, you weren't

good enough. They're done. They don't want to work with you anymore. They probably never

want to speak to you again. They're probably just being nice because they don't want

to be rude, because they don't want to, like, leave this uncomfortably. They

want you to feel good. But like they're going to tell everyone that you suck.

And see, once you get over that imposter syndrome,

one of the things you want to prioritize is getting a testimonial from this

client. So I want to walk you through how you can set up an off

boarding process that is going to work really well for you and

really well for your clients and have you ending those relationships. On a really

solid note, I'm also going to walk you through what my philosophy

is when I complete with clients. So you can kind of see how I put

it into practice and how I use this philosophy to really

help me strategize my whole business.

So how you off board clients actually starts with

how you onboard them. One of the things that you want to design

with them, either verbally or in your agreements,

is what it looks like to complete. So let me give you a couple

examples here. So if you're doing contract work where

they are signing up to work with you for a very specific amount of

time, you're starting with them in January, you say that you're going to work with

them for nine months. So that means at the end of September, your

contract is going to come to a close. And that is where they have the

option to either finish the work or sign

up for, for another contract. You want to know that going into it. And

of course, your client's not going to sign up not knowing that, so it's really,

really necessary. You can also have it set up in a way where

clients just sign up with you and they pay you monthly until they're done. This

is the retainer model. This is the model that I find works really, really

well. If you are charging less than

$1,000 a month. Once you start charging more than $1,000

a month, that whole model of it continues forever until you say you're

done. Gets a little squirrely. Clients have a kind of a hard time

sticking with something when you're charging that much. But if you do

have that retainer model where it's just continue until you're done, you do have to

explain to them how they ask for cancellation,

right? Cause remember, it's awkward for you. It's awkward for them. When you're

working with someone and you're paying them, you're aware that you are making up part

of their income. And it's one of the hardest

things to say, hey, I no longer want to pay you for this thing.

Even if it's coming from a really amazing place, even if it's coming from

like, you've helped me reach my goals and I'm so happy for you. To make

this a positive experience for everyone involved, you have to be the person

who lays all the cards on the table first. And you need to be very

specific about, here's how you do it, and here's how you notify

me, and here's the conversation we're going to have, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah. And as you're imagining this, you're going to

get really squirmy, right? You're going to get really uncomfortable because

this is going to be an uncomfortable conversation. And that's

okay. It's okay for you to get squirmy about it. It's

okay for it to feel unsettling for you. But

the more you lean into it, the more you're open about it, the more you

talk about it proactively with your clients, the less awkward

it will actually be when it happens. I want you to think about talking

about money. For instance, say you just started dating someone and you're trying to get

to know them. You think everything's like pretty aligned and you're getting

serious and you're thinking, okay, I really want to create a life with this person.

If you guys have never talked about money

ever in the relationship, but that's one of the things that you

need to know, like what is their approach to money? How much debt are

they caring? How much savings do they always have? What are their

financial goals for the future? Because that's really important for you to know when you're

partnering your life with someone else. If you've never brought that

conversation up before, and it's never even been referred

to talking about it, bringing it up when they're high

stakes is really uncomfortable for everyone.

So when you start off talking about those things earlier on,

it makes it easier for those big topics to come up when they matter

most. It's the same with your clients

and the whole cancellation process.

So when your client comes to you and they express their

desire to complete working with you, your job is

now explaining how this goes. All right? And of

course, it's different for every business owner depending on what kind of work you

do. For the kind of work I do with my clients, one of the things

that I always like to address is amazing. I'm so proud of you for getting

to this point where you feel like you do not need support from me anymore.

Here's what I want to do in our final few sessions is

I want to make sure that any questions you have about what's going to happen

in your business in the next six months, we cover. Now,

I also want to hold you accountable to completing any

of the projects that we have started, kind of gotten halfway

through and haven't completed yet. And if I can't

hold you accountable to finishing them by the time we complete our work

together, then I want to make sure you're walking away with a

plan, knowing exactly what you need to do to bring it to

completion. If you're doing more consulting work

where you're doing some stuff for your client, then of course you're

going to have deliverables that you want to make sure you're handing off to

them. Say you've been doing their social media marketing

for a year and a half, and they've decided at this

point that like, maybe they're going to switch to an ads model

and they don't necessarily need to be creating as much organic

content, and they just want to kind of reuse what's already been created. At

that point, what you're going to do is you're going to transfer over

all of the assets and content that you've done for them and make

sure it is all nicely organized and ready

for them to take the reins with. And you want to make sure,

especially if you're handing over assets, that they understand

where everything is, that they understand how you have it

organized, that they understand how they're going to take ownership over

these computer files. Right. If they're in a shared drive, do they need

to download those files by a specific date? I can tell you that

people that I've worked with in my business who've done this well, I refer business

to, even if I'm not working with them anymore, they are

my go to. Like, I'm so happy with what they did. Even

if they no longer fit my business, I want to send more business to them

because I know how professional they are. I've had one

really bad experience where I had a

fractional COo. It was my first fractional COo in my business.

And when we transferred everything over, she actually didn't transfer

over. A lot of the training videos that I had for some of my programs

and where we were storing them for my

courses wasn't working. Like, the whole system just never

worked from go. And unfortunately, she lost

everything. So I had to re record everything. And

that was super frustrating. It left a terrible taste in my

mouth, and I think you can bet I'm not referring business

to her. So this is the importance. Like, you

handing everything off in a really professional, organized manner

can make the difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth

of business, depending on how many people this person could refer

to you, depending on how much you charge

and so many other factors. So you really do want

to do this. Well, and the last bit,

I know it's awkward. I know it feels like you're fishing for

compliments, and who am I to ask them to say nice things about me?

But you do need to ask for testimonials. I'm terrible

at this. I'm so bad at this. I know my podcast

producer is always on me to ask you guys to, like, go

onto Apple podcasts or whatever, to review

this podcast and say, if there's anything that is specific that you like about it.

And I feel super awkward and cringe about it. Even though I train on

this, it's always funny when a client

completes with me, and I've trained them on asking for

testimonials, and they're like, Katie, aren't you

forgetting to ask me for something?

And I laugh and I'm like, yeah, yeah, I absolutely do want a

testimonial from you. Thank you so much. I'll send you some questions. Asking

for testimonials a. It's awkward af. The reason it's

awkward Af is because you're not a

sociopath, you're not a narcissist.

Congratulations. You're safe to be amongst

other people. But it also means you're gonna get really weird when you're asking for

testimonials. That's the downside. Asking for testimonials is

one part of the hurdle here, getting over the fear of it and being

comfortable with it. But you also have to understand that most testimonials that people give

are really bad. They're not helpful for other people who are considering hiring

you, it may sound really nice for someone to write a testimonial saying, oh,

my God, tim was so kind. I really enjoyed

every single one of my sessions with him. He was super helpful,

and I just really appreciated all the support he gave. What

the does Tim do? You have no idea. Like, who is this

person? Where did they start from? What did they accomplish while they were

working with Tim? What's the result that they're getting now

after they've completed the work? What made Tim stand

out more than anyone else? That made them choose to work with him? When

someone's looking at a testimonial of yours, yeah. They're doing it to make sure

that you do what you say you do. And that you're a good person. But

more than that, what they're looking for is, is this person who gave the

testimonial like me, was their life like mine when

they signed up for this? What are they saying about how it was to work

with this person, and what's the result that they got?

So one of the things that I have found super helpful, and I train my

clients on this, is to send them a very specific

list of testimonial questions. Some people love this, some people hate

it. I had one client in my BYOB program who, when I trained him

on this, he was like, this just sounds like, so

formulaic and cold, and it's like, cool.

Then this doesn't have to be your process. But when you do ask for testimonials,

you want to give people a little bit of direction, because if someone's going to

write a testimonial for you, they want to write a testimonial that'll actually help you

get more business. I can't think of a

single Yelp review that I've written that was positive about a

restaurant that I wrote because I didn't want them to get more business. The

reason we give testimonials is because we want to promote this business that

has had a positive impact on us. So set your

clients or your former clients up for success so they can do that

effectively. The other thing about asking for testimonials,

and this is true across the gambit of any favor

you are ever going to ask of anyone, ever, in your life,

how a lot of people treat asking for favors is.

Is. Here's a hot potato. I'm just gonna throw it at you. Ow. Now it's

your problem. Now you have to manage the hot potato. You have to make

sure it doesn't burn your hands. And if you drop it, then that's your

fault. As someone who moved 16

times in nine years, because the real estate situation

in San Francisco Bay area is fucking miserable, I can tell you I moved a

lot, obviously. And when you move, unless you're

hiring movers, I mean, there are times in there that I couldn't afford to hire

movers. Cause I was in my twenties and I was bad with money. So I

had to ask people to help me move. You know, I had to ask the

friend who has the truck, and I had to ask the friends who I knew

were strong and wouldn't hurt their back, and I had to arrange all

these things. Now imagine if I asked someone to help me

move, and they said yes, and I was like, great, and

then never communicated something else to them. Didn't tell them

where to come to help me with my stuff and where we're going or

what time or what day. Didn't give them a heads up on, like, the kinds

of stuff we were moving. Like, if we're moving a grand piano, that's something they

should know. I don't play the piano, so I don't have one, in case you

were wondering. But when you're asking someone for a favor,

it's your responsibility to remind them. It's

your hot potato. You're the person who has to

communicate the details. You're the person who has to remind them

of, hey, just want to touch base. I know I asked you for help with

this. This is the date. Does that still work for you? Do you need

reminders? Do you want me to call you at 05:00 in the morning? Cause we're

gonna be doing this super, super early to wake you up. When you're asking other

people for a favor, the kindest thing you can do is to

carry as much of the mental load of remembering to do it

as possible. So when you're asking people for a

testimonial and they say, yeah, absolutely, I want to do that, you're going to say,

okay, amazing. What I'm going to do is I'm going to send you some questions

that you can answer. And I know you're really busy, so

if I don't hear back from you in a couple days with answers, I'm just

going to send you another follow up email. Because I know what it feels like

when you offer to do something for someone or you agree to do something for

someone and then you forget and then you start feeling bad, and I don't want

you feeling bad. And also, if you decide you do not

have time for this, or you've decided for whatever reason, you don't want to write

a testimonial for me, no bad feelings at all, just let me know so I

don't pester you with it. Without that design, if you're reminding

them, without you explaining that upfront, you reminding them can feel

like you're chasing them down and pestering them and annoying them to get

this thing from them, and it feels really gross. But when

you design that and you say, hey, listen, I'm gonna do all these things to

kind of manage the mental load for you because you're doing this

incredibly kind thing for me, it takes a weight off of their

backs. It allows for them to keep living their

lives and also do something really nice for you. Small caveat

here. If you did not like working with this person,

don't get a testimonial from them. Don't use a testimonial from them.

Words carry energy, and when you use the words of

someone whose energy did not match up with yours for whatever

reason, guess what kinds of people those words are going to attract

more of? That's right. You're going to attract more of that kind of

person. So you want to be super hyper specific about the

kinds of testimonials you're actually utilizing in your business, and you

only want to use the ones from the people that you really enjoyed working with.

I also want to name that the people who give you testimonials and the people

who give you some of the best testimonials you might be shocked

about. I had this one client about three years

ago who started working with me because she wanted to start a coaching

business. And we worked together for half a

year, and we had these amazing sessions where we planned what she

was going to be working on and how she was going to

really hone in on her niche and start marketing and doing

sales and all the things. And I trained her on a ton of stuff that

she would need when she started the business. And every session I'd say, cool. What

did you accomplish from last session? Nothing. No, I just. I didn't

get around to it or it just. I don't know. I was resistant to it

for some reason. And at the end of six

months, she was like, I want to write a testimonial for you. And she

hadn't started a business. Like, she hadn't gotten a single client. She didn't market

anything. And I was like, oh, okay.

Yeah, absolutely would love to have a

testimonial from you. And I'm like, oh, my God, what is this person even going

to say? They're probably going to write a testimonial about how they didn't get any

results. And she wrote one of the most beautiful testimonials that I've

ever seen that made me feel so good about my work

that she had signed up to build a business and

that when she signed up with me, she thought she wanted all these

things. And through our work, she didn't necessarily get what she thought she wanted. She

got what she needed that she didn't realize that she needed from

our work together. She also named that she'd been in an MBA

program, I'm sorry, an NBA MBA.

She'd been in not the National Basketball League or

National Basketball association. Whatever. I know sports.

Absolutely. I also know acronyms. This is honestly

why I can never work for another company, is I can't handle

acronyms. Is because I can't handle acronyms.

I can't even pronounce the f word. Also, as I'm

recording this, I'm really sleep deprived, so just don't mind me right now. I

apologize. I will be better rested for the next episode, I

promise. What was I talking about? So she even

explained that she had been through an MBA program. She

was trained in business, and she named that she learned more about how

to start a business and get clients and market yourself and do all the

things from working with me for six months than she ever did in the whole

two year program she was in. You will be shocked. The

kinds of positive impact that you have even when your clients don't

necessarily get what they signed up for. If you treat your business a little more

professionally and you don't, you don't pursue friendships with your

clients, one of the things that you want to design with them also is,

what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find

out. But first, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.

If you treat your business a little more professionally and you don't, you don't

pursue friendships with your clients, one of the things that you want to design

with them also is like, a six month check in,

just to check in to see how they're doing for you as a business person.

A, this helps you kind of check in to make sure that they're doing well

and that you can speak authentically about their success.

B, if you get to that .6 months from now and they've decided that

they want to, like, start working with you again, that's that natural

conversation for you to have where you're discussing picking the work back up.

What I run into with my clients is, you know, I become friends

with them, so I have to design with them. Hey, now that

we're not working together anymore, still call me,

still stay in touch. Just because we're not in a

professional agreement anymore doesn't mean we

have to stop talking. And I'm so glad I do this because I've made some

of the most incredible friends in my life through working with

them. So that is your offboarding process. Those are all the things that you have

to consider when clients complete with you.

Now, I want to share with you a little bit about what my philosophy is

about my clients and how long they work with me. And them coming to

completion at some point, and I wanted to name that. There are

some business models out there that are reliant, right?

So my relationship with my podcast producer,

Neil, I'm not going to do any of the things he does for me.

If he and I, for some reason stopped working together, there just

wouldn't be a podcast. I'm not learning how to edit,

okay? I'm not figuring out how to upload things to

places and have other stuff go

on. I don't even know the things. I don't wanna know the

things. What I like about our professional

relationship is I get to show up sometimes with an idea. I get

to talk into a mike for anywhere from an hour to 2

hours, and he turns it into an episode and does all the things

and I don't really have to worry about it. And all I have to do

is have incredible conversations with people who book sales

calls with me because they want to learn about working with me, because they listen

to my podcast. That is what I love. So that's a reliant

relationship. That is, you know, Neil in this case, is

not building independence in me because I don't

want it. I'm sure if I did, he would find a way,

we would design a package for him to train me on all that. But no,

thank you. I'm good. My philosophy with my clients is very

different. I'm not working with clients so that they're always going to

be dependent on me to grow and run their businesses. My

ultimate goal is that a client works with me from

wherever they're starting from and throughout our work, however long

we work together, be it six months, a year, three

years, my goal is to see them, to reaching their

goal, whatever that is. And absolutely,

I have clients who've worked with me for years and years and years,

and who are committed to just continue working with me forever until they

hit that goal. And I love them. I will always have

space in my business for those people. And also I have

clients who work with me. They might join BYOB beginner

for a year and get their first, like, five high

paying clients and really understand, like, the simple ways that they can market

and sell their services and realize, cool, this is good

enough. I don't need anything else. I have clients who will go through the

BYOB advance program. Program, and we'll get all the infrastructure

built in their business, from their websites, their email marketing,

to creating lead magnets, and understanding how they can do webinars

and so on and so forth. And once we have all that set up.

They're good. They don't need to continue working with me,

and that's my goal. My goal is to

create a self sufficient business owner

who knows that they can do it on their own in some instances. I'm

also not the right coach to continue with them. I had a client

a few years ago who just this incredible coach.

We worked together for nine months. She did this beautiful job of building her

business and establishing multiple different revenue streams for the

work that she did. But when we came to the end of our nine months,

you know, one of the things that she was struggling with was she was the

mom of two small children and her husband had a very time

intensive job. So she was really struggling with how to manage her

time, how to balance the demands of her new business that was

doing really well and the demands of her

two beautiful toddlers. And I'm not a mom. I don't have

toddlers. I spend time around kids very rarely, if my

friends have kids, those are the kids I'm spending time with, but I'm not

taking care of them. I'm not managing their lives. I'm not dealing with them when

they're, they're sick. I'm not liaising with their preschool. I have no idea

about that stuff. So, for this client, you know, she'd gotten to this really beautiful

point in her business, and what she needed next was

a coach who could help her work on balancing

motherhood and business ownership, and that wasn't

me. And so it was a natural conclusion for

her to move on to someone who really fit her needs for that time. When

you approach your business with this kind of philosophy, it becomes a lot less

scary when people compete with you. It becomes a lot less

imposter syndrome inducing because you've made it about them getting

to the point where they need to be. I've bumped into several

business coaches out there in the world who,

when you start, like, being in their world, they start trying to

set that expectation that once you hire them, you're always going to work with them.

Once you hire them, you're going to be with them for decades, and

often not always. These coaches will play on

the insecurities of their clients to sow fear that they can't

do it on their own. And let me tell you, if you're starting a business

and if you're looking for support to start and grow this

business, stay away from people like that, because what they will

create is reliance in you. They will so doubt that you

cannot do this on your own. They will give you just enough to help you

with that next little problem that you have or that next little goal.

But they won't set you up to be able to tackle the whole thing on

your own, or at least to understand who you need

to hire to help you tackle the big goal. Cause hopefully, if you have really

big, massive dreams, you're not doing it all your own. Hopefully you're

hiring someone to do your social media. Hopefully you're hiring someone to do ads

and to do some pr and to get you booked on stages and to

liaise with your literary agent for the third book that you're gonna be

publishing this year. But as a business owner, you

ultimately can do that on your own when you have the confidence

and the know how. When I work with clients, my number one

goal is to build that confidence and to establish that know

how. The

clients who it really makes sense for them to see stay working with me

for an extended period of time are the ones who are

starting from absolute scratch. They know that they maybe

want to do coaching or they want to do consulting, but

they need to first figure out, like, what their niche is going to be, what

their offer is going to be, how much they're going to charge, how do they

market it, how do they sell it. But, like, that's just the

beginning of their journey. Like, they. Yes, they want to,

you know, have some clients and they want to make a lot of money, but

the clients who tend to stay with me the longest are the ones that have

the biggest dreams. They're the ones who look out in the world and

know that if they stick with this, if they're

deliberate and they have the correct strategy, they're going to be the kind

of person who is Oprah's life coach. They're going to be the

kind of person who gets paid crap ton of money to

be a keynote speaker at major events and conferences.

They know that if they have the

right action plan, that they can launch themselves

into the stratosphere and become famous, not

just for the sake of being famous, but for the sake of

bringing their wisdom and their gifts to the world. Because

they know in their bones that they

have this deeper gift to give to the world and they feel a

duty to deliver it. And those are the clients

that I will always make space for in my one on one practice.

Because I can't tell you the pride at seeing

someone grow from making $0 a year in their business

to hitting their 1st $100,000 a year, to

hitting their first hundred thousand dollars

month, to getting booked on stages, to

writing their book, to doing all these things that they

only ever dreamed of. But because they were brave

enough to put their money where their mouth was and brave

enough to actually get to work and stop being a weenie about it,

they actually make it true for themselves. Those

are my people.

If you really struggle with that fear when a client completes because

you're worried about backfilling them, then one of the things that you really need to

start working on in your business is consistent marketing.

Without consistent marketing, you're just constantly going to have

a artist boom and bust cycle happening. And if you want to learn more

about what that is, then I want to point you to episode 74, where I

talk all about what that is, the impact it has on your business and

how you can avoid it. But essentially, you want to become

so consistent in your marketing that even when you're at full capacity

with clients that you have inquiries coming in. Right. And

the only way to do that is to be ironclad

in your consistency. Squirrel. Squirrel. If you're ready to stop being

a weenie and actually run a business that makes money, then go ahead and

book a generate income strategy call with me by going

to weeniecast.com

strategycall. On this call, we will talk about your goals,

your dreams, and your frustrations in getting there.

And if it's a fit for both of us, then we can talk about different

ways to work together.

Boom. I got excited about the word smorgasbord.

Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.