Hi, Coach Friends.
Someone asked me how do I fire a client?
How do you fire your client? Great question.
Here’s what I’ve got, because I’ve been thinking about this.
It’s really hard, first of all. So, if you’re struggling with it, I get it. And actually, yes, you can fire a client. I don’t care how long you’ve been in business, even if it’s for 1 second or 10 years, if you find that you’re not meshing with somebody, then it’s time to end the relationship.
First of all, I thought about how do you not even get into this situation where you have to fire them? Number one, vet your client. Meaning before you start working with them, make sure they’re a good match. Make sure they’re committed. Make sure you’re committed to them and that you like them and can work with them.
I do that through meaningful pre-work, so I send out a pre-session questionnaire, confidential, of course, a Wheel of Life, confidential, of course. But these are little things that can gauge commitment on the part of your client.
The way in which they respond to completing those documents and getting them back to you is a really good indication to you of several things. How busy are they? How committed are they? How in to this are they? Where are they putting this on their priority list, etc? So, that’s one.
Two, set your expectations very clearly in your discovery session of what it means to work with you. And I’m not talking about being a jerk or an asshole about, “You Must Do This By This Time, or we don’t work together anymore!”
No.
What I’m saying is just be clear about the fact that it’s a dance, that there’s two people that give a coaching relationship power, and those two people have to be committed and come together in order for it to work, like a marriage. It’s a team thing.
So, that’s the beginning.
Then, I think Shanti Zimmerman (or maybe it wasn’t her, I don’t remember who it was), but somebody said instead of firing a client, maybe you need to look at firing yourself. So, that’s a good thing to look at and say, “You know what? Maybe I’m not doing a good enough job here, and so I need to talk to my client about the fact that I think I’m done being of service for what they came to me for.”
A really good way to do that, I believe, is to just sit down with something I use in the beginning called the Primary Focus, so I have them list the five areas they want to cover during their coaching session.
Then I have them create benchmarks, so where are they right now and where do they want to go? That way we know we’ve not just had a bunch of really nice conversations about their live, very soulful conversations about their life, but that we actually are making progress over time with where they want to take things.
I will often, when I am feeling like I’m kind of coming to the end with a client, I will pull that Primary Focus out and I’ll just say, “Look, you know what? We’ve done this one. We’ve done this one. We’ve done this one. I think you’ve got what you came here for.”
I’ll honestly say to them, “I think we’re complete here unless you’ve got things you want to add to this list.”
That might be one way to do it, is just to say to your client, “I think we’re complete, and unless there are other things you want to cover, let’s go ahead and schedule our final session.”
If there are things above and beyond that, like the client isn’t paying and you need to fire them, to me, that’s a simple policy and procedures sort of thing you can point to by saying, “You know what? I would love to continue working with you, but I just can’t until we get your account up-to-date, or bring it current.”
They’ve got to understand that, right? And again, I say all this knowing that I’m really bad at all of it. I’ll tell you right now, I’m really bad at all of it because I want to help people. But, we cannot be of good service if we are helping people that either don’t need our help, don’t want our help, or aren’t really reciprocating for our help.
That’s my two cents on how do you fire a client. If you have more questions or want to continue the dialog, please let’s do that below because I would love to hear what you have, too.
Happy Friday! Bye!
Leave a Reply