What is your process for firing bad fit clients?

Posted January 19, 2021 in
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Connor DeLaney

"If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original."

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I hear a lot of owners talk about this topic, but I know so often people fall into the trap of "they give me headaches, get rid of them" A.K.A. being too trigger happy. 

My question is, what steps do you go through BEFORE deciding to fire a client? What conversations, tactics, or solutions do you have for ensuring everything is done to give that client a chance before firing them? Also, what does that timeline look like? 
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Karolos Tsiligkirian
Raise prices
Connor DeLaney
Karolos Tsiligkirian  wouldn't that mainly frustrate clients? I guess the heart of this question is how do you stop working with them without burning a bridge? 
Brad Oliver
It usually takes a few months to get to a point where we want to fire a client.  It's not something we take lightly and the decision is made only after they've established a consistent pattern of undesired behavior.  

When we start detecting trouble we usually clearly spell out what we need from them (in writing).   In general, we've found that a client is who they are, and will rarely change their habits based on anything we say, but we do give them a chance.

As far as the mechanics go, depending on the situation we may raise prices or reduce our availability (or a combination of both) but in all cases, we try to present them with another solution (agency or person) that we think is a better match.
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Connor DeLaney
This makes a lot of sense  Brad Oliver , we handle things in a similar manner. We have a pretty rigorous sales process which typically allows us to know if a client is committed and we start with what we can do better, but if that doesn't seem to garner results, we take a similar avenue. 

Have you ever had a challenging conversation with a client about these> Would love to hear your experience from this! 

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