As business owners, three most important things we need to master early on are getting clients, optimizing productivity and protecting our time. The fourth thing might be how to protect our business from energy sapping toxic clients. While I would guard clients like a hawk in a time like this, unfortunately, I had to let go of two. Not out of pride, incapacity or ignorance but out of the sheer need to protect the firm’s resources and keep up morale.
This pandemic has brought out the best and worst in people. And clients are humans, just like the rest of us. While we’ve been raised on a healthy diet of “customer is always right”; sometimes one has to take a tough call to protect one’s productivity and sometimes even sanity.
The vast majority of Morning Star BrandCom’s clients for business advisory are amazing, respectful, straightforward, enthusiastic, passionate and truly vibe with our collaborative approach. Infact, one of the pre-conditions of signing up with us for coaching and advisory is that the client must commit to honesty, discipline and courage – this is something I learnt from my teacher and mentor Michael Beale.
These last 12 months (of the Covid pandemic) have been increased work load for our business advisory department because it caters to entrepreneurs, SMEs and family owned businesses. Sales process re-engineering, marketing budget optimization and business coaching were services most sought after. And during this time, we met two new clients we’d rather not have signed up in the first place. Thankfully, before the red flags became loud sirens, we respectfully parted with these two clients.
Firstly, one needs to understand and differentiate a toxic client from a petty annoyance. They can seriously impact the quality of your work, lower your productivity, affect your ability to meet deadlines, and can even keep you from securing new business.
For the benefit of our readers, fellow consultants and business owners, let us look at how toxic clients can affect a business like ours and why we should protect ourselves.
- Defective Communication: Too much, too little, or just plain difficult client communication can carve a serious dent in your productivity and profits. You might end up losing time on unnecessary Zoom calls or micromanaging your client’s inability to provide you with all the inputs and support you may need to do your job well.
- Slippery Scope: When a client regularly tends to slip in more work or pull you into directions that were not part of the original scope of work, you end up frustrated, short on time and manpower almost always. It can throw your resource planning completely out of the window.
- More is not merry: When a client is not sure of what he wants or if there are multiple decision makers who don’t see eye to eye or worse, when a client just keeps wanting more value for their money, they can get you stuck in a revision loop. This kind of toxic behaviour can again cause time and resource issues, lower team morale and create self-doubt because nothing seems to get approved.
- Do or die: A client may have top-down issues internally or they might just not be great planners. This can result into too many last minute panicked requests for urgent assignments (which, they say, if not done will almost always result in a crisis or someone getting fired). This can give you anxiety and acidity (personal experience!) and truly affect your productivity and energy levels
A relatively tiny percentage of the whole, these toxic clients can chew up resources disproportionately, sap your energy and draw you away from clients you love. So, like any other relationship, don’t ignore the red flags in the beginning, they will be the very reasons for the breakdown of the relationship.