I wanted to send out a quick post to say one thing:
No matter what, you deserve the best.
The other day, I was listening to a podcast and heard an interesting way to think about clients, and I wanted to share it with you.
Basically, rate your clients, whether you have ten or ten thousand. To simplify the idea a bit, identify your top clients and your bottom clients.
What makes those top five or so the best? It might be things like:
- Industry
- Location
- Willingness to work with you
- Punctuality
- Income
- Demographic
- Their personality
The irony comes when you take those same standards and apply them to your bottom five clients.
Seriously. You should do this simple exercise, and then?
Take it one step further.
Fire the bottom five.
You’ve undoubtedly heard of the 80/20 Rule, and in this case, your bottom five clients are likely taking up a tremendous amount of your time (and NOT making you any more money) so what have you got to lose?
In reality, you can ALWAYS get some more crummy clients, right?
Quit tolerating them.
Now, I understand that a lot of small businesses might not be able to simply fire clients willy-nilly, but there’s no rule or law stating you should tolerate them. If you’re pushing back at me in this idea, let me ask you to do one more little exercise…
Using the Top Five and Bottom Five, document how much time each of them demand of you and your team, and the amount of money this generates for you.
I can virtually guarantee the Top Five represent “easy” income while the Bottom Five represent a lot of “do-overs” and multiple calls, emails, and kid-gloved conversation. Stop tolerating them. Hold YOUR time and the time of your team to a higher level, and, to put it bluntly, take the garbage out.
You’ll thank me for it, and I’d welcome the opportunity for feedback on how your “ranking” exercise goes when you implement it. I’d go so far as to add this – you should be doing this exercise at least once a quarter – even sooner if your business cycle allows it.
Keep us in mind and share your results!
Sincerely,
