Christie JungeA Plus Solutions Inc. · CEO | Profit First Professional

Under The Covers- Firing Your Customers

15 Jun 2020 · 0 min

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In this brief dialogue, Speaker A explains the concept from the Pumpkin Plan of "firing" customers that are a poor fit for a small business. They argue that some customers, despite high‑quality work, remain perpetually dissatisfied, creating emotional strain and diverting attention from the business’s best clients. Moreover, serving a heterogeneous mix forces a company to be a generalist, diluting its ability to excel at a single specialty. The speakers advocate for the courageous decision to remove such unfit customers, noting that while the immediate revenue loss feels painful, the long‑term benefits of specialization, higher effectiveness, and stronger focus on ideal customers far outweigh the short‑term hit.

So let's see what we've got today. Is this garbage or good? What's the question?
So in Pumpkin Plan, you talk about firing customers. Why would I fire a customer?
You have some customers you want to fire. You run a small business yourself. There are some customers that we cannot satisfy. Like no matter what quality work you provide, how focused you are on serving them, they can never be happy. Those customers have an emotional toll to them, right? We just worry about them and get frustrated, and it detracts from serving our best customers. But the other thing too is sometimes customers aren't bad people, they're just a bad fit, and it dilutes our company's ability to become exceptional at one thing. So if you service a large mix of customers with different needs, you'll be forced to be a generalist. So we need to fire or remove customers that are a bad fit over time so we become more and more specialized and more and more effective at our one thing. It's probably the most courageous thing a business needs to do is get rid of a customer because I know the immediate loss of revenue feels devastating, but the long-term gains so— gains, so, thank you, you would have busted my chops. The long-term gains so far outstrip the short loss that you should fire unfit customers. All right. Perfect. Back under the covers, which is so creepy.