316 Training Tools to Navigate Tricky Client Conversations

I have built a client battler, a way to simulate those sticky conversations where clients get upset with you for training purposes. A helpful exercise to tactfully navigate those conversations, but also help you to think through the boundaries we need to be really explicit about and how oftentimes a lack of boundaries or a lack of clear service definition, like in the agreement.

We have with the client, can lead to some of these points of confusion.

And it's oftentimes when somebody gets upset about something that you're like, oh, yeah.

We actually do need to better define that when we scope our services.

So come on in. We're going to do it live. Let's battle some clients. We're going to jump right in, and then I'll explain to you how it works and how you can use it with your team. And this, unlike some of the AI.

Conversations we do on the pod, this is live. This is real time.

There is no way for me to fake it.

It is a real time back and forth, just like talking with an actual person. Right.

Okay, let's do medium difficulty.

The client is mad that their financial statements are taking so long, and let's assume this is a phone call.

Got it. Any more context on why they're so upset? Any specific reasons for the delay or previous issues I should know about?

We're past the Norma normal target monthly delivery date, but it's because the client.

Took a while to get us the information.

Understood. Let's jump in. What's the excuse this time? We're way past the deadline, and I need those financials now.

Hey, Jim, I thought we were on track.

We'll have things probably mid next week. Did something lead you to believe we'd.

Have it done sooner?

Oh, come on. We've been over this. I sent everything you needed last week. Why is this taking so long?

So the way that this usually works is, in your case, the target delivery.

Date is the 15th, which we're already passed, but that assumes you have all the information in by the fifth.

Since he didn't get us the stuff.

Until the end of last week, that timeline has been pushed back.

That's not my problem. I'm paying you to handle this, not to give me excuses about missed deadlines.

Well, if that's not a fast enough turnaround, we do have, I guess, more accelerated packages, if that isn't normally enough. But to be honest, I'd rather save you the money. And we just find a way to get that information rounded up by the fifth each month.

Save me money? I'm already spending plenty Here. Why should I pay more because of a little delay?

So tell me why you need the financials this week? As it is, we'll probably have them done mid next week. But is there. Is there any reason why you're in a. In a rush in particular this month?

I've got a board meeting next week and I need those numbers locked down before then. This isn't a casual request.

When's your board meeting next week?

It's on Thursday morning, so I need everything by Wednesday at the latest. No wiggle room on that.

All good.

We should have that by Wednesday. No problem. Since that turnaround is usually about 10 days to avoid this in the future, is there anything we can do to help you round that information up by the 5th each month? Any ideas there on how we can make that simpler for you?

Fine. Wednesday better happen. As for next time, maybe a reminder or some kind of checklist. It's always chaos here.

We do have auto reminders that go out beginning on the first of each month, and they go out every couple of days via email. Have you been getting those?

Yeah, I've seen those, but they get buried in my inbox. Maybe a call or a text instead.

If you got them over text, do you think that would make it more likely that you notice them or would you. Or would you eventually ignore those as well?

A text would catch my attention more. At least for a while. Easier to deal with in the moment, you know?

Okay, we'll figure out how to pipe those through text. You'll still get the email, but we'll have it send a text as well. Anything else in the meantime?

Just get me those financials by Wednesday like you promised. No more surprises.

All right, copy that. You see the Bears game on Sunday?

Yeah, I saw it. Another disaster. Why do I even bother with that team?

I tell you what though. Erken Lacker is looking strong, right? The. Maybe the best lead mid center back we've had in years.

Yeah, Erkin's solid. About time we got someone who knows how to hold the line. Might actually have some hope there.

Okay, Have a nice day, Mike.

Love you.

Right, talk to you later.

Okay, takeaways from that conversation and then I'll run you through how it works, how you can use it yourself, and then I've got a couple other scenarios to. To try out. Very common situation there. Maybe it's the 20th of the month. They're supposed to get it by the 15th. We don't have it done yet because they didn't get you the information. Or maybe a login broke so you couldn't get what you needed.

First and most important is the expected delivery time frame defined and usually with.

With month end closes, we usually try to define this. If you're doing tax work or more project based work. This is also important because of the dreaded status of update email.

When you have like a expected turnaround.

Time and you stick to that, you get yourself out from under those status check emails and it's only really once you get beyond that date that usually most folks will start following up.

Also just having a clear expectation for.

How long it's going to take, you'd be amazed. Like how what a massive spectrum of expectations people have. Like maybe you have somebody coming from retail tax prep where they get it same day or for whatever reason. Clients just come in with wildly different expectations. So it's worth saying that out loud. So first and foremost, like have an explicit expectation of when that thing will go out the door, whether it's recurring work or project work.

But then also worth defining is implicit.

Within that delivery date. What is the expected time frame that the client executes on any obligations they have for you to be able to do that work? Right, If I tell somebody, oh, this year we'll have your tax return done by July 1st.

Implicit in that is that they're answering.

Questions along the way, that they've gotten us all the information we need from them timely. So you kind of need a way to back into, well, we said this date and implicit within that assumption was that you would have everything to us by this other date or be able to respond to questions within, you know, 48 hours or something like that. Because in a situation like this, if the client comes back in the 20th of the month and they're like, why is my stuff not done yet? And we're like, we got to sell the stuff on the 13th, so we haven't had enough time. I need to be able to say in order to get it to you by the 15th, you need to have your stuff in by the 5th and be prompt on any questions that come up, like in that 10 day span. And that's something that I think any reasonable person can understand. This assistant is just kind of an a hole, which I didn't tell it to be that way, but all the testing I've done with it just kind of is. But that's fine. That's how people talk. Like I had good clients who would talk this way and they're just kind of severe people.

But the what I would encourage my.

People to do is like go a level deeper.

When they're upset about something, it's usually because that misalignment of expectations, like ran.

Up into some sort of thing where they needed something but they didn't have it.

And so I tried to go a level deeper into like, what's got you.

Needing this specifically right now? Because if we couldn't get it to them in the timeframe they needed, I would probably offer some sort of alternative. So in this case, he had a board meeting next Thursday. I thought we were going to have the financials done by then, so that was totally fine.

But say, way, say he had a.

Board meeting, you know, tomorrow or the next day, we could propose an alternative. And I wouldn't do this on an ongoing basis.

This is just like there was a misunderstanding here.

Let's get them through what they need that's worth doing. Just from a goodwill standpoint, say the board meeting was, you know, know on Friday and the financials wouldn't be done. I'd probably say, you know, why don't we pull your account manager in to the board meeting.

They can answer any questions in anybody.

That anybody has and they can actually go deeper on this information than a set of financial statements would even let you do. So have that person hands on to be helpful in the meeting.

Some sort of alternative that's actually maybe a little bit better could actually lead.

To like some other conversations around this. This might actually be helpful to have every month. Could we pull this person in and then you have a scope conversation.

So worth digging into.

And. And we are the same way when you're like, get like triggered by something.

It'S because there was some sort of.

Breakdown, but that breakdown led to some sort of bigger issue.

And that's why you come back to like, why does this breakdown always happen?

And maybe it's your fault for not being on top of it better and solving it earlier. So part of that anger at that kind of inflection point happening is I'm annoyed that I can't do this thing.

Now, but I'm also a little bit.

Annoyed with myself that like this issue is still lingering. Right. And it's kind of the combination of those two annoyances. And then the last note I had from this conversation, auto reminders to cya.

In anything that we do there is that lingering. Well, when did you get us the.

Information to do it? And like, no client is going to have this universal notion of what a reasonable way or amount of times to follow up and is.

And if we don't leverage software to.

Do auto follow ups. Then oftentimes the blame falls on you wrongly. When it's like, well, we reminded you three times, you didn't respond, but that was six months ago. And there hasn't been any conversation since then. They're like, wow, you went six months without following up with me?

And it's like, well, you ghosted us.

Before, but like, we've all been there before, right? And this is another benefit to me of using software to do auto follow ups within reason. Like, if the client's just being totally unreasonable and ghosting you, like, you gotta set rules for that as well. Where if they've totally ghosted you for three months, at that point you have a serious conversation and decide whether or not they're still gonna be clients.

But those auto reminders can be helpful as a cya, and oftentimes you'll have.

Clients say, well, that's not the best way to get a hold of me. And depending on your firm and how white glove you're willing to be, we would actually have situations like this pretty frequently where the client's like, can you text me this instead? And we'd figure out a way to. Like, we would use Zapier, something like that, to send them a text notification. Basically that notification email they would otherwise get gets routed to an inbox. That's the trigger. And then a client gets texted, they still have to come back to the same place to like, securely give me the information. So it's a little bit roundabout, but we would accommodate that.

Sometimes we also had people that just.

Wanted us to call them and we would just have to build that into the engagement. Like, it's a different level of service support for us to call them for reminders. They'd pay a bit more. They. They didn't always like that.

But then if they were, like, if they were still annoyed about that or.

Didn'T wanna pay more, I would usually try to put it through the lens, like, frame it through the lens of their business. Be like, somebody needs this from me. Like, what do you do? Like, what is my alternative? The bulk of my clients don't want or need me to call them for this thing. So it's also unfair that I charge everyone the overhead it would cost to do this thing. And usually they can understand that.

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Learn more about Teamup. Check out the link down in the show notes. Today's episode is sponsored in part by LifeFlow. Why run a big old fancy reporting suite when a spreadsheet will do? Arguably the spreadsheet. It's your natural habitat. No need to learn a new platform to get a get a PhD and how to use some big new FP. And a complicated thing when you can just plug your accounting ledger data straight into a spreadsheet. And if you've ever actually pushed reporting on clients, maybe your experience is different. I can tell you in my experience.

It was it's it is a enough.

Of a fist fight to just get them to open the email to look at attached PDF, let alone like train them on a whole new platform, get.

Them logging into a different place. But a spreadsheet.

A spreadsheet you can point back to every single month. A spreadsheet they can bookmark. It's got all the information that they need. Some that static, some that updates on an ongoing basis. Liveflow can do that for you and it's super quick and easy to set up. Integrates now with QBO with Xero with Excel, with Google Sheets. I see you, hipster accountant. Create that little report once and keep it sinking like forever. And you got one place for the client to come back to.

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Super easy to understand, to change. Even if it's just like pulling net income across all their different entities, it'll do a consolidations.

So even if it's like say a tax planning thing, we gotta roll up.

How much money have they made this year so far and is that on track with maybe how we projected taxable.

Income would be looking this year?

Bunch of different things that you can do with that. That from the comfort of your own home. A spreadsheet, PO Box A1.

Okay.

And if that's your happy place, check.

Out Lifeblow Link in the show notes. Now what is this? So this is a GPT that I created with a custom prompt and I'll.

Actually put a link to it down.

In the show notes. And if you have ChatGPT, I don't think you actually even have to be on a paid plan, you can use this, have these hypothetical conversations. You, you can either talk back and forth with it by like typing, messaging.

Or what we're doing here is using.

The voice functionality, the speech, like talking back and forth with it. Now you may have heard ChatGPT is getting some big upgrades on the voice side and we should actually have those upgrades in the next month or so where it's a vast, like massive improvement to the speech experience and talking back and forth. And it'll do things like talk faster and slower and use an angry voice.

And it's supposed to be pretty amazing.

They downloaded a few months back, it got pushed back, pushed back because evidently it could be abused to do various things. But we're supposed to have that new version in our hands pretty soon.

The underlying like things that it will.

Say will be largely the same. It will just be a much more engaging human experience. So I'm actually excited to circle back to this once we have that new speech model. So if you want to give this a try, check out the link down in the show notes and you absolutely can. I'm going to run you through a.

Couple more examples here to show you.

The type of things that you can do with it to define sort of different scenarios that you may want your team to go through.

If we can have some vulnerable like.

Training exercises like this with our team where we offer feedback to each other and we even do this in front of the rest of our team, or record some of these conversations, like breaking through that level of vulnerability is really valuable. I think that's an uncomfortable thing for most people if they haven't done it before. But doing it like breaks through a thing and, and drives some really valuable conversations where it's like, guys, this is, this is a business skill, everyone. Like, this is something we can all be, you know, transparent about and try to develop as a skill because it is a very real part of doing this job.

Okay, another common scenario here.

Let's kick this off.

Let's run this one on easy difficulty. The client is upset about there being.

A price increase on their annual renewal. And, and we're talking over the phone.

Got it. Is there any additional context about why the client might be upset about this price increase that I should know?

Yeah, I'm bad at running a firm and I didn't price myself appropriately before. And in order to save my marriage, I'm having to make some drastic price increases.

Alright, let's get started. Look, I'm really not happy about this price increase. It feels like you're trying to make up for your mistakes on my dimensions. Why should I pay for you not running your business? Right.

As a fair question, Gerald, I mean, I could give you the sob story about changing business conditions and how hard.

It is to find accountants and all that, but the reality is we are, you know, investing in our own technical capabilities and our technology and all that stuff, and we're doing more work for people than ever before, but haven't been good about keeping up with the fact that we may put in twice the effort to, to do things that are in your interest now that we wouldn't have done in the past. And we think like for a certain type of client, that effort is worth making because you more than get that back in tax savings or time savings or whatever it is. And we honestly were kind of lying to ourselves in the past about how much of that that we have added and now realize the reality is what we're delivering is much more valuable now and we have to account for that.

So you're saying you've been giving away more than you should have and now you want me to cover the difference? Feels like you should have figured that out earlier, don't you think, Gerald?

It absolutely would have been in my.

Best interest if I had had managed.

Things better from the start. Right. But that's not really my problem. Why should I pay extra now?

Well, I mean, there's a couple very.

Real examples of what we've done for you in the last year that has stemmed from these Investments we've made. We looked at R and D credits, which before we didn't really know was a thing for agriculture clients. And now that's looking like that's going to be a pretty good savings for you. That all stemmed from a bunch of technical sort of training we did with the team to broaden our awareness of that stuff. We got you through the employee retention credit stuff, navigated that. That was a lot of extra work, but something that needed to be done correctly. So it's really capturing some of these things that we've invested back into the firm that have made us, frankly, better and what we've delivered more valuable than it was before. And yes, we didn't do a good job of capturing that stuff along the way. But I would rather make the right decision in the moment and do what is going to be right by the clients and capture that like, as it's happening. Then, I don't know. Then I guess put up some big paywall upfront and. And I don't know, this is where we ended up. Like we're going to have to circle back and kind of capture some of this later. Oh, that wasn't good.

That was bad.

So you're saying I've already benefited from your new expertise and now I'm just paying for what I've already gotten for free?

Yeah, that's actually a pretty good framing of it. But you know, that education and that investment doesn't stop there. That's the way I see it is when we make investments like that in our business, it compounds because after that, we start investing in the next thing. And we want to make those investments mindfully only where they will benefit the right type of client for us. And right now, you still sit within that pocket. There's going to be clients for whom those investments we're making aren't worthwhile. And to be honest, we're. We're cutting ways with a lot of those clients, but we are trying to get more specific in being the best possible solution for folks like you. And we'll only make those investments selectively where it's going to be worthwhile for you.

So you're saying you're raising my price because I'm one of the clients you want to keep around? Feels like a bit of a guilt trip.

I hope it doesn't feel that way. I think of it more like we're doubling down on the folks that we're great for. And we are learning along the way that there's even more that we can do for you and you know, the R and D credits is a great example. You're going to see a whole lot more back from that than you're ever going to pay us for doing that work. But frankly, those are just the type of opportunities that, that we're looking for to ensure that you're getting everything that's entitled to you.

All right, I see your point, but how do I know these investments are really going to keep benefiting me in the future?

Guess that's the age old struggle.

Hey, Dave, how do you know what's.

Going to pay off and what's not.

Going to pay off? It's a good question and something that I think about every day. And you do your best to make the right decisions there, but I'd argue it beats the alternative and not making those investments. Oftentimes it's going to lead to hard conversations like this. But if I didn't do this, we wouldn't be able to make those investments that we believe will ultimately benefit you. And so that feels like the right trade off to me.

I'm sorry, but I'm having trouble responding right now. Please wait a bit and try again.

Okay, Chat GPT broke.

That conversation was coming to an end anyways. I've, I've fumbled a couple of those, I feel like, which is kind of the point of this is you could listen back to this and be like.

I kind of got stuck on this.

Question, got stuck on that one. Feel like I rambled on on one or two of them, you know, where like you get into that flow of saying the thing and you're like, this.

Is going to take longer to get.

Out than I wanted it to.

And so it feels like I'm like, anytime you feel like you have to.

Explain that hard, you feel like you're losing. Right. But a great, I mean, the cool.

Thing too about doing this in Chat.

GPT is you have the whole conversation log and you can go back and I can see some of the answers that were really long. You can go back through that and.

Even put it in front of your team. Like, the more you can do this as a team to support each other, the better.

I actually think that's really helpful and constructive. But you can go back and rethink like, what was the better, more concise way to communicate this.

And with each one of these conversations.

Frankly, it, it ought to help refine the way that you even communicate price increases to clients because the client's pushing back. And that ought to inform like, well, then how do we make the initial communication to Try to mitigate some of those ways that they may push back, or some of the ways they may misinterpret it, or the completely legitimate concerns that they may have. The more of that stuff I can address in the initial communications, the better.

This episode is sponsored in part by True Prep. If you are a tax pro, you know that your tax Software, I'm talking U.S. tax Pro, your tax software is a treasure trove of valuable information. If only we could pull helpful things from it. But whatever your platform calls it, data mining, like whatever your version of that is, where you can like mass export information, it is just about the clunkiest thing you could possibly imagine. Which means we've never had an easy way to access all the data that is within our clients tax returns, which is so frustrating if you think about that. Who else is going to like do useful things with that data when you are the only one that has it. Like you're supposed to be the pro with the tools to glean insights from that stuff, yet it's like stuck in these awful systems. Well, great news. Today's sponsor, True Prep, they've built the. I don't know, the simplest way I can frame it is like chat GPT for tax pros. Basically you put your client tax returns into the system. It extracts umpty seen different figures from those tax returns. And then with an AI assistant you can chat and say things like show me all of my schedule C clients.

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Existed in a helpful form.

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Pretty Cool, man. People actually doing meaningful things with AI to support tax pros. Imagine that. What a time to be alive. We did. We've done a sponsored demo day for True Prep on my YouTube channel as well. Check out how that works. We talk through security practices, what you need to be thinking about with tools like this there as well. And that's True Prep. Learn more Check out the link down in the show notes. Today's episode sponsored in part by Core V. I can tell you when it came to selling tax planning, as we called it back in my day, it wasn't tax advisory. When it came to selling that to clients, the tools that I had to do that work was just the regular plain old tax software or bna, which is just the most visually painful program you've ever used. And to present that to a client.

To be like, look at this smart scale stuff I've done.

I just, I couldn't get my head around that.

I think most of us can't.

Core V on the other hand, super, super good at this. It's basically they have like they say over 1500 tax strategies. So they will help you identify strategies for clients. But even as you hear that if you're a taxpayer, like what's a strategy? Do I really trust that? Here's the thing is, unless we dress it up, unless we can call those things out that we are capturing for our clients and they don't know that. They don't know the value we are realizing for them. And it may be table stakes for you, but does the client know that? They sure don't. And if you never tell them that thing that you did for them, they're not going to value you. But I know virtue signaling. I'm not going to spend a bunch of time beating my chest about the helpful things I did. Honestly, that's what Corvi's great for. Tax advisory visualizations that show all the things you've done for them, how much money you save them, even rolling year over year savings stuff as simple as entity selection.

Simple is not the right word, but.

Down to like where you're setting reasonable comp retirement contributions, all sorts of different things. You can do a gusta rule visualizing all those savings in one place because your tax advisory work gang, it ought to be the best paying work in your tax firm. I did this mental exercise on the.

POD the other day.

I think say you got a thousand dollar a year tax client and all you do is tax prep for them. If we can get that same client to pay us another two grand for tax advisory. So they pay us three grand a year. That tax advisory shouldn't be any more work than the tax prep itself. And if we can get clients onto that higher package, let's say we've got the same cost in the advisory work that we do in the tax prep work. Say you're running tax prep at 50% margin. That's 1,000 bucks in costs. 3,000 top line, that's 2,000 profit.

Now, you double the amount of work that client is.

But we 4x the profit while 2xing the work. So effectively, for time put in, we're making 2x the money. And for every one of those clients you get on that plan, man, you can cut one or you can go home to bed, take a nap midday, and never go back to work for tax firms.

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We actually did a demo day on.

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Learn more about them, Check out the link down in the show notes.

Okay, one more scenario we're gonna run through. And this is the granddaddy of them all, the one that keeps us all up at night. And I might just bomb this. We'll see. But it happens. And if you're the firm owner, this is usually the one that gets escalated to you, the big boss, and you hope your door is closed for it so that other people don't have to see you in your shame.

All right, let's do this one on.

Hard mode or maybe heroic or extreme, whatever the highest difficulty is.

What's happening here is the client discovered a mistake.

That's our fault.

And they discovered it as I was.

Sitting with them in a board meeting, with their entire board sitting there as well, watching on.

Got it. We're going with the hardest level. What's the mistake about specifically? And is there anything else I should know about why they're upset?

Maybe it was like a misinterpretation of a contract. And so we paid more than we needed to. And it was discovered when we were trying to make some cutbacks to save on cash flow. And then they found that we actually prepaid a contract unnecessarily and it was my team that did that.

Alright, here we go. So you're telling me that this entire time we've been bleeding money because of your team's oversight, right? When we're scrambling to cut costs. Explain to me how this even happened and why I should trust you with our finances moving forward.

Well, that's a, that's a good question, Gerald. Without all the specifics of seeing the contract and how the payment got made, I can't tell you why it got made at the drop of a hat. We'll definitely look into that and figure it out. And maybe there's even a better way to more transparently plan those contract payments going forward so that everybody's kind of signing off on what's happening there. But to get back to what do we got to tackle in the next 3:30 days, the good news is here that we can take this off the prospective cash planning schedule because it has already been paid.

Don't try to spin this into good news, all right? This mistake happened on your watch with your team's judgment. Now we're stuck with a cash flow problem because of your mess. I need guarantees, real guarantees this won't happen again. And I need to know how you plan to fix this.

Now, I don't want to, I don't want to go too far pointing fingers or, or sticking the blame on, on anybody until we've had the chance to look into it further. And I'd say after this meeting, let's go back and do it. We can break, break a crusty croissant and figure out what happened for the scope of this meeting while we've got Ted, Tina, Linda, and Brenda here. Does this change the agenda at all? I know we're trying to get specifically to a net cash flow figure. I think we're almost there. Can we, can we circle back to that? And then we'll, we'll do a, a post mortem on the contract issue after this circle back.

No, no, we're not moving on until I know how you plan to handle this and what's being done to prevent it. Again, the cash flow figure means nothing if you can't manage our contracts properly. Ted, Tina, Linda, and Brenda deserve some answers, not a sidestep.

Sure. So ways that we could better manage.

This, we take a look at all the vendor contracts we've gotten. We've got maybe 15 or 20. We've already more or less outlined the outlay by vendor as we expect it to play out. And you already have sort of a process for how you enter into these contracts, but it could be worth adding a couple steps after that where that goes over to the accounting team and we propose basically an expected outlay for each contract, but then that has to go back to a member of your team for approval. So it's Got another set of eyes on it. I suspect without digging into it here, which it's worth digging into it. So we know exactly how this went sideways. But I suspect giving getting another pair of eyes or two on it probably would have caught this situation. How does that sound for a more robust set of controls going forward?

Another pair of eyes? That's your solution? More steps and more delays for my team. I'm not interested in you pushing the work back on us. You should have had controls in place already. What's stopping this from happening again with your people? I need better than this half baked plan.

I don't know that we're going to get 100% there if we just use my people. Because your people are the ones doing the contract negotiations and so they'll come out of those talks with an expectation of what the cash outlay looks like. How about this? Why don't we get another pair of eyes on my team on it to confirm. And then the pair of eyes are the person that went through the contract negotiations to ensure that that outlay is what they were anticipating. And that ought to ensure that we've got that all planned out correctly. And if you want, after this, we'll circle back and make a list of all that contracts and all the contracts already in motion. And do that double check on everything that we've got in the mix so far.

Fine. But if I see any more surprises like this, we're done. I want that list by end of day. And I expect no errors. I'll be holding you to it.

Gerald, I don't like the tone that.

You'Re taking with me.

Tone? My tone is the least of your worries right now. I'm holding you accountable. Fix this or we're done.

Why does Gerald sound different all of a sudden?

He just de aged. Gerald, I'm doing everything that I can. And I think for everything that we've been through together, you ought to cut me some slack.

Cut you slack? After your mistake just cost us money we don't have to spare. Trust has to be earned back, not begged for.

I stand up, looking Gerald straight in the eyes. Gerald, why don't you and I go out in the parking lot and see if we can find some respect for each other, hmm?

Gerald's eyebrows shoot up, surprised. He lets out a low chuckle, then says, you think a showdown in the parking lot is gonna fix this? Respect isn't earned with threats. It's earned by taking responsibility.

What are you, chicken, Gerald?

I proceed to make various different chicken noises.

Gerald's face reddens with irritation, his jaw tightening. Really? This is what you've got? Clucking around like a fool instead of addressing the issue? If this is a joke to you, I'm done here.

I walk around the table and hold the door open. The door to exit the conference room.

Let's go, Gerald.

Gerald stands up slowly, his expression a mix of disbelief and annoyance. He glances at the board members, then back at you. You want to make a spectacle, fine. But it won't change the facts. Let's see where this gets you. He starts walking toward the door, his eyes locked on yours.

The other people in the conference room start chanting fight. Fight. Fight. Me and Gerald get outside. We take our we take our coats off and put our dukes up.

Gerald rolls up his sleeves, clearly irritated but determined not to back down. He raises his fists, his stance tense. Alright, if this is what it takes for you to take this seriously, then let's settle it. He squares up, eyes focused, waiting for your move.

Do it, Gerald. You got a lot of frustration pent up in there, I can tell. Take a shot.

Gerald's eyes narrow as he clenches his fists tighter, but he hesitates for a moment. He exhales sharply and mutters, you think this is about taking a swing? This is about your screw up, not my frustration. He doesn't throw a punch, but stands firm, still waiting. Proved to me you can actually handle something.

I put my fists down, breaking down as a single tear rolls down my my face. You're right Gerald. I didn't do good enough here. The disappointed crowd dissipates as it becomes clear that a fight isn't going to happen.

Gerald's expression softens slightly as he watches the tear fall. He sighs, lowering his fists and says, look, I just need to know we're not going to end up here again. Let's go back and see. Figure this out. Right? He turns toward the door, gesturing for you to follow, the tension easing just a bit.

I come in fast, hug it out and give him a big squeeze.

Gerald stiffens at first clearly taken aback, but then relaxes slightly, letting out a reluctant chuckle. Alright, alright, you got me, he mutters. But don't think this gets you off the hook. We still have work to do. He gives you a small pat on the back before stepping back, a faint smile breaking through his stern demeanor.

Got him. And that's how you beat the client battler on legendary difficulty.