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Welcome to Shiny New Clients, the marketing podcast that helps you attract shiny new clients to your business. We'll talk about social media, what makes people buy, how to go viral, and marketing psychology all in 20 minutes or less. Whether you're a coach, a stylist, or a wedding planner, if you've got a service based business to sell, this is the show you need to fill your calendar. I'm Jenna Warner, your new marketing coach and this is Shiny New New Clients. Fire your clients. What a sassy title. Was that too far or did you come here because you're so curious as to what I'm going to say? I cannot decide if this is my most irresponsible episode or something somebody out there really needs to hear. But I think this is an important lesson in having a service based business. My whole job is helping service providers. You get clients, namely from Instagram. Okay, so people see your posts and they come in to work with you. So one of the first things I tell my new program members and magic marketing machine is let's identify who is the perfect client so that you can call in more people that are like them. And I think a lot of times, and even I myself earlier in my career didn't realize that we need to be super specific when we're talking about who this perfect person is. And specific and specific speaking to them in your posts. All right, you want to aim for the most perfect people. And when this premise is new to you, a lot of people get really stressed about it. There's a bunch of different reasons. You know, people get scared to niche. They get scared that some people aren't going to feel comfortable signing up to work with them. They fear that if they're leading for the most perfect people, then other people aren't going to work with them and then they're not going to have enough clients. Like, it's all valid fears. But let's jump forward. Okay, let's jump forward to you. At your maximum number of clients, let's Click call that 20. Okay, I don't know your business. Everybody's different. But let's say you can handle 20 clients a month from a marketing perspective, you're going to find those people faster if you use a marketing strategy designed to speak directly to them. But we're not even talking about marketing right now. We're talking about a different reason why it's important that you are working with people that you like working with. So we fast forward to this world where you have 20 clients, you're at your max capacity, all your Systems in your business are getting stressed. All the systems you put in place so that you could serve all these people because it's not just the time you spend with them, it's the admin, it's the deliverables, it's the email correspondence. So you are maxed out, you're making lots of money, which is great. We're happy about that. And then one of these people is not perfect. Person number 19, she's not perfect. You don't really get along with her. She pushes your boundaries. She's asking for things that are out of scope so much that you feel drained by consistently reiterating your boundaries and having to say no to her. So, so much. Because she's asking for so many things that are oscope are stressing you out. You sent her deliverables, she didn't like them. She gave you some feedback that actually hurt your feelings. Things are not going well with number 19. Okay, so you close out an email from number 19 and then jump onto zoom with perfect person number 20. What kind of a mood are you in in that moment? What kind of a mood are you greeting person 20 with when you've just been dealing with person 19 who had you at your wit's end? You're not showing up as perfect as you can. So now, perfect person 20, are you keeping up with me on these very creative nicknames that I've given the characters in this story? So person number 20 is now not getting the best you because you're drained from person 19 or you're spending so much extra time on administration. Maybe person 19, she's late to pay her invoice. She's late. And now you're spending extra time stressing that she's not going to pay an installment and creating a follow up invoice and sending that out to her and checking on your bank to see if she paid it because you don't want to work on her project until she pays it. And now you're spending all this extra time on your squeaky wheel on the problematic client. And where is that time coming from? That time is coming from all those other perfect people who you love working with. And now you're catering to this person who's causing you problems. So do I actually want you to go out there and fire your clients like no man? We need to. We all need to make money. We all need to grow our business. But what I want you to know is it's not a selfish move to fire a client when things aren't going well or when they're taking away, directly taking away from you, delivering the best of you to everyone else. So it is in your entire roster's best interest for you to be working with the people you love working with for the price you love charging. Letting go of a client. I don't like calling it firing. I mean, I did just say that a lot of people call it firing a client. And I think it's meant to make people feel more empowered. Like, you're the service provider. You don't work for them, you're in charge. I don't like that language because nobody wants to get fired. But, you know, being laid off is. Is better. Going their separate ways is better. Having a candid conversation with somebody you respect is better. So I'll tell you about a time very, very uncomfortable situation. I had a client and we didn't like the way she spoke to us. And I don't even mean that she was a bad person. She wasn't a bad person. But we. Every time she spoke to us, it felt. What's the word? Like an attack. You're saying the word out loud in your car, aren't you, right now? Hostile. It felt hostile every time she spoke to us or, like, asked for something or even when she asked a question to the point where my team was afraid to go on Slack. And they told me that, like, one of my team members was like, yeah, I've been scared to open Slack because I'm worried that she's going to be there and she's going to say something to me like, yeah, that's fair. And like, again, this person, not a bad person. Were we maybe just perceiving her. Her texts as hostile and she just sounded angry in writing and she wasn't actually angry, maybe. Sure, all those things can be true, but at the time, we had a lot of other clients that we needed to serve and. And I also don't want to be traumatizing my team. Right. I've hired wonderful people. I trust them. I know they're good at what they do. So if they're having a problem with somebody that I don't blame my team, I don't think it's their fault. And there were a lot of reasons why I felt like we just. We ultimately were not a good match for this person. And I knew that it would be better if I ended ways with her. And in this conversation, because, like I said, she's very candid. In this conversation, I don't use firing. I was, like, telling her how I think that there's Somebody out there that would be better for her, for X, Y and Z reason, and that she could probably even find someone who cost less money than me. I think I might have even said that. And she said, are you firing me as a client? Was her response. So I couldn't even dance around it. I was like, I am. I don't remember what I said. I just really think that you would get what you need from someone else. Which is true. It's true. It's better for her, it's better for me, it's better for my team, and it's better for everyone else on my roster who's also paying for me and who I have to. Who I wish to prioritize. I wish to prioritize the service to these perfect people who are going to stay with us for years and we're going to love serving. And let me tell you, actually, I'm going to add. I'm going to add more nuance to this. I was not always regulated. I was not always a good communicator. I did not have boundaries at the beginning of my business. So there's a lot of clients that I had when I was first starting out who I wish I could go back and apologize to and be like, hey, just so you know, I got better. Sorry things weren't good. Because when you don't have boundaries and you are doing more for people and you're happily going out of scope and you don't know how to say no when people ask for things and you let people communicate with you all the time in every way and phone you and all of that, and you burn out. That was me. That was my fault that I burned out because I wasn't running things in a streamlined way. So I can't blame the clients, you know, I can't blame them that things went south. That was on me as the service provider. Before I tell you to go run and fire all of your clients, know that there is a journey here of learning how to communicate with people and learning how to set boundaries and having a ton of clarity when you start working with somebody new so they know what they can ask for and how to ask for it and all of those things. And that takes time as well. Right? And you're going to keep getting better and better at that. By the time I was a few years into my agency, we were super clear on how our clients could contact us and when and did that in a way where we had rules around it, but they got everything they needed and then some. And I know that because I would offer one on one calls and they'd be like, oh, I don't even need it. And they wouldn't even take me up on them because they had what they needed, they had the communication they needed, but it was within bounds, like via Slack or really specific ways of commenting and sending back edits or whatever. So they had what they needed in terms of communication without me saying, it's a free game. Call me whenever you want. And we even taught our clients how to give us feedback that was most helpful so that we could all get to point B as fast as possible together. Right? They need to be told how to give us the most helpful feedback. And all of that took time. If I would have gone into the first couple years of my business with the idea of like, yeah, just fire anyone you don't get along with, then that would have been a problem. I would have not had any clients. But later on in my business when things were really, really thriving and we were really full and I was very clear and, you know, I was doing my job to support my clients energetically and with my own personal boundaries and my own personal ability to regulate and all of that, then we made the switch to, okay, we need to have perfect people in here, otherwise they bring the whole thing down. So there is nuance here. I hope this helps. This is the type of stuff that I learned the hard way, a lot of it, while I was knee deep in mud throughout my career. So I hope this helps you. I hope this finds you when you need it. And I'll see you in the next episode.