Bad clients can ruin your business.
But only if you let them.
A few years ago we won some new business, and we were thrilled: A branding + website project with a major, internationally-known cosmetics firm. It was a smallish project, but we were certain it would lead to more work down the road, and did I mention it was a huge brand name?
(Because let’s face it: When you’re a small marketing consultancy, it doesn’t matter how much revenue you’ve generated for B2B or smaller clients. Potential clients are really only interested in whether you’ve worked with brand names with which they’re familiar.)
The project quickly went downhill: The overall goals, which seemed clear at the outset, suddenly got suspiciously murky; the client team seemed to change every 2 weeks, whereupon the whole project would change; we kept having to fly halfway across the country for meetings which never seemed to go anywhere; and their head office, which was located in another country, took 3 weeks, 10 emails, and 4 phone calls just to approve a URL.
The project was giving us indigestion. But it was a big-name client, our bills were getting paid, and we were a small company – we couldn’t afford not to do it. Could we?
Sometimes, a client is costing you more than you think.
On the surface we weren’t really losing a lot of money.
But between all the flying back and forth, the endless meetings, having to request information/feedback/approvals multiple times, and the fact that the goals had turned into unknowable quantum particles, we were losing more than we thought:
- Sure, we were getting reimbursed for the cost of flights and hotels, but our time was part of an overall project fee. So the ‘downtime’ associated with flying across the country was costing us more than we realized
- The revolving cast of characters on the client side meant we were never going to build the long-term relationships that would lead to additional or referral business
- The lack of strategic direction meant we weren’t going to get to do good work, so our dreamed-of case study was going to look anaemic
- The whole thing was making us feel demoralized, which wasn’t good for our other projects – in marketing you need to maintain a high level of enthusiasm at all times
- We weren’t able to take on other clients, because this project was taking up too much of our time
So one day, after yet another pointless meeting, we called the client and – politely – said that we couldn’t work with them any more. They seemed surprised – I think their big brand name meant that no one had ever broken up with them before.
You may agonize about it. But 99% of the time, you won’t regret it.
Client relationships are like the other relationships in your life: Most of the time, if it’s not working for you, it’s not working for the other party, either. (In our case, we learned later that some of the new members of the client team thought they should have hired a local firm – even though we’d been hired because the original goals called for someone on the ground in Toronto – but didn’t know how to tell us that.)
The whole thing limps along, no one is happy, and the results – if you can even get that far – are spotty at best.
In the 10 years of StayAwake, we’ve only fired a handful of clients – and every single time, we agonize over it, because it always seems as dumb as quitting one job before having another one to replace it. But every single time, we realize afterward that it was the best thing we could have done for our business: We’re able to focus on more successful, profitable, and enjoyable projects; we have fewer headaches; and we’re able to do better work in the long run.