George Kao draws on 16 years of coaching to explain how to keep client relationships and friendships separate. He suggests marking clear boundaries between paid work and friend time, steering conversations away from unpaid advice, and keeping pricing consistent rather than discounting for people you know.
So I'd like to talk about how do you navigate the boundary between client relationship and friend relationship? And I really am curious if you have any experiences you want to share with us below. And I've of course had to deal with this since 2009 I've been coaching clients one to one. And so over these 16 plans plus years I've had hundreds of clients, one on one clients and some of them have, I've gotten along very well with and naturally it starts to. Some of them start to become feeling more like friends. So I want to. I'll just share some quick thoughts here and I look forward to seeing if you have any thoughts below the first one. I think for me what helps me a lot is to have a clear policy of a boundary between client relationships and friend. Sorry, client time and friend time. If I find myself getting along really well with someone, I may pursue them in a friendship context. Like, hey, you know what, let's if you're up for hanging out outside of our client relationships, just as a friend, let me know. Be delightful. And obviously it would be a friend thing. There's not a coach client relationship. And actually I do want to say I feel like it is more appropriate for a service provider to pursue a client as a friend versus the other way around, which might feel a little bit muddy. Like for example, I have a, I live in Mexico, so I have a Spanish teacher and enjoy hanging out with this person. And I, you know, such a delightful person. It's like, wouldn't be great if I could hang out with that person, you know, outside of our Spanish lessons. But I know that if I do that there's going to be inevitably some parts of the conversation where like they're translating for me or they're, they're helping me like, oh no, it's this versus that. And they might be totally fine with that. But I'm like as a service provider myself, I'm uber conscious of all right, if I'm going to need this person's services, I'm going to book time, service time with them rather than oh, now we're friends and you're just going to help me in your free time kind of thing. So again, I think if possible, when possible, having the coach or the service provider pursue the client as a friend is, is a better thing than the other way. It's more clean, I think, than the other way around. So client time versus friend time. When I do spend friend time with someone who is a client or previously was a client, I try to be aware of the kinds of things we talk about and the energy exchange that's happening there. Because if the topics go into what I do, which is, oh, I'm now advising them about their business, about their marketing, about their productivity, and that's the kind of stuff I usually spend focused energy giving time to in my day to day work. I start to feel a little bit like a boundaries crossed. And I try to graciously steer the conversation back to say, you know what, listen, let's do that during client time. How you know, and then I try to change the subject to something that's more personal and connecting on that kind of personal friend level. And the last thing I'll say is special deals. Do you ever feel like you have to whenever you sell something, you have to like cut your friends a special deal? Like, oh, you have friends and family deal here. And of course I feel the same way too. But I've kept a policy over time in my business where I'm like, listen, I want to keep my business simple. I'm a solopreneur. I can't every time be sell. Whenever I'm selling something, I can't be looking at my list and go, who's a friend? Who's a friend? I don't want to feel like I'm selling them. Let me go reach out to them and go, hey, listen, you get a deal, you get a deal, you get a deal. It just complicates things so much. And over 16 years of being a full time business owner, I've kept it real simple to say, when I sell something, I sell something. That's it. Sometimes my friends buy from me and they pay the same thing as everybody else. I mean, if you think about it this way, as a friend, when I'm a friend to someone who is a small business owner, I want to support their small business. So I want to pay them just like anyone else pays them, right? Like I shouldn't be thinking, well, my friends, the small business owner, they should cut me a deal. You know, I understand when, but it's like I purposely see that impulse and I go, no, I want to support my small business owner friends, right? And so same thing. When I'm selling something, I just, everyone buys at the same rate friend or, or not buys at the same rate. And, and then if I feel like I want to make a special deal for this particular person who bought from me who's a friend, I might say, listen, I'm going to give you something else for my business. But it's, but at that point. I'm using kind of friend time, friend energy to make that decision. So anyway, I'm genuinely curious if any of this resonates with you, or if you have a different policy or different way of navigating the client friend connection, client friend boundary. I look forward to learning from your experiences below as well. So thank you so much for reflecting on this together with me and with others here. Peace. Blessings.
