Eric Siu and Neil Patel outline five reasons to fire clients: abusive behavior toward your team, constant scope creep, unethical practices, unrealistic expectations, and strategic pivots. They cite Moz and Distilled as examples of companies that dropped clients when shifting from agencies to software products.
Welcome to another episode of Marketing School.
I'm Eric Siu. And I'm Neil Patel.
And today we're going to talk about when you should quote unquote fire bad clients. And Neil, I think just to make it clear, when we talk about bad clients, we're not only just talking about agency-type clients, I think we're talking about customers as well. Neil, how do you think about this?
I think about clients— most people think about bad clients as ones that aren't profitable. And I'm like, well, they're not profitable because you sold them wrong. That's your fault. But the big reason we like— I would consider firing a client is if someone's rude to my team. We've had clients who are really mean, and I'm not going to name any. We've even had some that have told us, I want a man on my account or a male. I don't do well with women and I don't care to deal with them in business. I'm like—
Ew.
And they were in a really traditional old-school industry. I don't know, like manufacturing and something like that, but like old school, right? Like 100-plus-year-old business. And it was funny, we had the request and they were just saying that, no, we don't want to end up dealing with women. We don't like women. And that was just too direct, not even direct. That was just against what we as a company would do. So we're just like, this isn't going to work out. Yep.
So I think Probably the biggest one would be the no asshole rule, whether it's sexist, racist, whatever. So there's that scope creep is probably another one. So whether you have a software business and you're managing the software for them, or you have an agency type of thing, if they keep asking for more stuff, maybe the first time or the second time you do it for free. But if they keep asking for more stuff and they keep pushing, that is kind of a sign of being an asshole as well, because you're we're delivering we've delivered more than you've asked for, and you're asking for even more. Without paying us. So what does that say about you as a client, right? So a little bit is okay, but too much and making it a habit, scope creep is a big problem.
The other thing that we fire people for is if it's unethical. Like we were doing marketing for someone and they were like, yeah, let's get a lot of traffic. And they didn't care what kind of product they fulfilled or even if they fulfilled it. They just wanted to keep the money and make a killing, which to me is a little bit illegal. You can't just charge people for stuff and not care if you actually give them what they're paying for. So it's like clients like that. And you'll see that once you scale up, you'll see that what people tell you and what they do are totally 2 different things. And actions speak louder than words. So if someone's going to do something unethical, why deal with it or why work with it?
Yeah. I think the final thing from my side is kind of related, but it's, we're talking unrealistic expectations, right? If we started a campaign and we were aligned on goals, and then maybe next week you tell me that the goals are to triple those or quadruple or 10x those. We're not aligned, right? So we should actually fire ourselves because you have reset your expectations and we don't think we can hit them. Or if the goalposts keep changing, because that actually becomes stressful for the team. And you want your team to be able to feel like they can wake up to something that's not stressful. So assholes make things stressful. Unrealistic expectations also make things stressful as well. Neil?
And the last one I have is if you decided that you want to go in a different direction in your agency. So let's say you have, and they may not be bad clients, but let's say you guys want to focus on e-commerce or your software service or anything. If you want to just focus on one segment, e-commerce, moms or kids or whatever it may be, and you have customers that aren't in that segment, a lot of times you do better as a business if you can niche down, focus, and specialize your service you're offering to that one group. And if you have a few people that aren't in that group, let them go. Be nice about it though.
Yeah, actually similar to that. If you're planning to change your agency to a software business, you're probably going to have to fire your clients at some point. What we've seen with a lot, most companies, let's use Moz as an example. They started as an agency that became Moz. Who else started as an agency and became a software company? Do you remember?
Distilled has a software now, but they're still—
They sold their agency and they just focus on the software now.
Oh, they sold it?
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
Anyway, that's another good example as well. But anyway, that is it for today. marketingschool.io/pro for $1 trial for 14 days. Ask me anything, exclusive content, private community, and all the goodies to help you grow faster. And we'll see you tomorrow.
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