Diane GardnerFounder, Adept Business Solutions · Profit First Professional

Under The Covers- Firing Your Customers

15 Jun 2020 · 1 min

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1:21

In this brief dialogue, the host (Speaker A) explains the rationale behind "firing" customers as advocated in the book The Pumpkin Plan. The argument is that some customers, despite high‑quality work, will never be satisfied and impose an emotional toll on the business owner, diverting attention from the best customers. Moreover, mismatched customers force a company to be a generalist, diluting its ability to excel at a single specialty. By deliberately removing these poorly‑fitting clients, a small business can specialize, become more effective, and achieve greater long‑term gains that outweigh the short‑term revenue loss. The conversation emphasizes that this decision, though courageous and initially painful, is essential for sustainable growth.

Chapters

So let's see what we've got today. If it's 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, 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.