357 Overcoming The Fear Of Firing A Tricky Client

You know, so much of, like the day in and day out is just executing on the things that you know you need to do, the things that you're pretty sure will make your life better. And if you stack up all those hard things and like the latency there is between the time you realize you got to do it in the time that you actually do it, and you stack up that leg time, for most of us, that amounts to years. Like, it's a huge amount of time. So today, let's get just hyper, hyper practical. Going to run through an exercise to help you get over, like a blocker that almost all of us probably have right now. It's one of my favorite exercises from Tim Ferriss. We're just going to do it beginning to end, because you probably don't need one more idea about another thing to do. You probably just need to do the thing you already know you need to do. Okay, come on in. Let's do it. Okay. Tim Ferriss Fear setting framework. We've talked about it here before. I'm going to link a little worksheet for it down in the show notes. You don't have to do it. I'm kind of going through this as a mental exercise with you. But if you wanted to do this on your own time, that worksheet is there. Okay. Most of us have one of those tricky clients where for a number of reasons, you may have a hard time letting go of them. Now to kind of zoom out on the reasons to fire clients. Because whenever I talk about firing clients, a whole bunch of different rationale get piled onto maybe why we're firing them. So reasons why we need to fire clients, They're a jerk, they're mean to your team. They're just not good to work with. That's always a reason to fire a client, but it's far from the only reason to fire a client. Other reasons that client is not on maybe the same trajectory that your firm is on. You're headed in a direction and they're headed in a direction of their own. And like your two business interests no longer align, that's almost inevitable for any type of client engagement. In fact, I don't know, like, it's. It's naive to come into serving a client and think that until the end of time, the things that you do will align great with the things that that business is trying to do. It's probably just not going to be the case. And that's, that's a scenario where if you don't let that client go, you're holding your own business back because you're not able to go where you want to go until you've cut some of that stuff loose. Oftentimes it simply boils down to, like, you're no longer excited about serving that client. And I find this is most often the case with the very first projects that we pick up. When you are first hustling for anything and everything and you're collecting a weird combination of just stuff that'll pay the bills when you are three to five years down the road, maybe even less than that, and maybe you've specialized a little bit and you've got kind of. You got into, like, your pocket of what the good recurring work is, the stuff that you're excited about. And then you look back at the things that you still have that you started with, and you're like, that kind of stinks now. And that. That should be the case. That means you're growing. Like, that's. That's actually what you want to be able to look back and be like, that's kind of cringe. Not in an actual sense, but in like, is that good for my business? Is my business proud of that anymore? Probably not. Like, that's not the sort of thing that is pulling us forward. That is a good thing. That that means that you're growing. And so it's only natural to no longer have the same level of excitement to serve those people as you once did, which means you're not going to do as good of a job. Stop telling yourself that you will. Like, so much of what we do is energy led, and like, boils down to how much of your attention span does that person have? But in our heads, we're like, oh, no. But we know when we're at the best of our best, we're capable of this up here. And we can project that across all of our clients to be like, well, we're the best for everybody. Because I've seen myself when I'm at my best. But how many clients are getting your best? Not many of them. And if you're perpetually in that, like, you know, grease in the most squeaky wheel sort of situation, where you're just putting out fire after fire like that people just aren't getting your best, and you are doing them a disservice by fooling yourself into thinking you are the best thing for them. So send them packing in the most tender, helpful way possible to someone who they will, like, get their best from, who's at a different stage. Last note I had on on like considerations around reasons to fire clients. They could be absolutely great. Um, I think, I don't know if this is like earlier, early on in your firm running journey. Too much of this is tied to are they good people, are they bad people, are they jerks, are they not jerks? That is a whole separate collection of considerations to do they align with my business goals. They could absolutely be great people. For me, while that's almost like a willingness to pay your bill, if somebody wants to be on the client list, they have to pay the bill on time. That's. That's not a reason to keep them. If somebody's not a jerk, that's a requirement to be on the client list, not necessarily a reason to keep them. Now this gets into the whole rabbit hole of like serving the community, quote unquote and that sort of thing. And I. We may do it. We may do an episode on this. I may. I don't know. I feel like I've railed on it quite. I feel like I've railed on it enough lately and it's kind of a sore wound because, boy, this was a big trap for me. Feeling like I'm helping people and helping my community by doing discounted work. Low bono work. Helping, you know, helping the person who can pay $600 for. For a tax return, but paying $800 for the same tax return would drive them to financial ruin, surely. And we frame this as helping the community. That's just, that's just not helping the community. There. There's a whole lot of people that have nothing to pay that need your help. Those, those people, even if they are nice and even if they were with you from the beginning and all those things, those stories that we tell ourselves that as like, rationale for why to hang on to them, loyalty, whatever you want to call it. I don't want to, I don't want to diminish those traits and the value of those traits, but you're either going to give those people your best or you're not. At the end of the day, you're running a business. In my opinion, the better way to help people is charging top dollar for your work. And then you have the space, the time, the money to. To help even more people that need help even more. Like the barbell approach, maximize profit. Help the people who have nothing to pay. So this notion of like, are they nice? Yes, they have to be nice to be on the client list, but the fact that they're nice and the fact that I like them doesn't necessarily mean that what their business is doing aligns with what my business is doing. So this fear setting framework, it is incredibly valuable usually the way that you do it. And if you're gonna tackle this, it's a great thing to do just generally, maybe once a month to sort almost like a mental journaling exercise. What we're doing here is it specifically around a certain issue. And so if you're blocked on a certain issue, could be worthwhile. But normally how you would do this maybe once a month is you first define what are all the things that you're afraid of right now? Because in our head we have all these unresolved ambiguous things that stress us out that are like just these little threads, but we don't actually pull on them to see how legitimate they are and see if there's easy solutions to them. And as long as they remain in that ambiguous state, they're not serving us in any way. Like they're just, they're just blocking us. So first step is, is to define what are the fears right now. Next is how could we prevent each of those? Is there a way? And the goal of this exercise isn't to prove that the fears are not legitimate. In fact it's, it's really to define the ones that are and how we, how we handle them and the ones that aren't. So we can kind of compartmentalize those and not let em get in our way. So first we define the fears. Next we, we explore is there a way to prevent them? Third, is there a way to repair if that fear came to a head, if it actually did happen, is there a way to recover from that? Next you consider what might be the benefits of an attempt or of a partial success. So if it doesn't like go swimmingly, what are the upsides? Because we, it's easy to fixate on the downsides, right? But oftentimes we can be a little more blind to the upsides. Last, what is the cost of an action? Emotionally, physically, financially? What's that cost? Over six months, over a year, over three years. If you have to make a hard decision, doesn't matter how much that hard decision sucks, if the cost of doing nothing sucks even more. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. They just shipped Live Flow dashboards. And, and if you're looking for a little way to gussy up the monthly reporting that you do for your clients, this is pretty nice. They're like modular. You put your own commentary in, not a, like giant reporting suite. Not something the client has to go log into. In fact, if you're looking for like how to wade into more valuable advisory conversations with clients, oftentimes you can only get there if you're giving them information that they can understand and sending them a couple of PDFs of financial statements that is not likely to lead to advisory conversations because they don't know how to make that stuff actionable. The more that they can understand what you're sending them, the more likely it will lead to valuable conversations. Lifelo's got a bunch of templates you can swipe to get started. Like even a PNL dashboard that's pretty cool, a daily cash movement report. A lot of stuff that if your client saw it, they'd be like, oh, I would like to have that. And from there you then go from just churning out financials to being irreplaceable their buddy. And these days we all need another friend. We all need more buddies, right? I think so. Everybody else, everyone in the room is nodding their head in agreement. Learn more about LifeLoad. Check out the link down the show notes this episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub, who I recently named one of my top practice management system recommendations heading into 2025. But according to Client Hub, when it comes to picking a pm, it comes down to the four C's capabilities, client experience, clarity and community. Today we're talking client experience, the biggest blocker to like getting stuff out the door with clients waiting on them, them not following through on what I need. Which is what makes ClientHub a really unique client experience. It's basically like a two sided task management system. You're doing your work over here, client's doing their work over there. It actually looks largely the same the two sides of that system. This isn't like a portal that they bolted onto a task management system after the fact, which is what most PMs are. Client Hub was built for the client experience from the ground up since that's what's going to make you more productive. A better client experience. If you've been unhappy with that side of the systems that you use today, ClientHub might be a great fit for you. Learn more about that one. Check out the link down in the show notes. So let's run through this scenario where you've got this client that for maybe cause there's a personal connection there. Maybe because they're a figurehead in the community, one that I had in my firm. I won't get that specific. Wipe that out. A really common one. I'm gonna run into that person at soccer practice, I'm gonna see them at the boat launch. I'm going to see him at church, whatever it is. And that being a rationale to not fire someone because you're going to see them and it's going to be uncomfortable, whatever it is. That reason why that one client is really hard to fire. And it's probably not because he just cussed out a team member. That's probably an easy one. This is that sticky person where, you know, you need to let them go. And so how do we overcome that? So we're going to go through this fear setting exercise for specifically that person. So let's start with defining exactly what those fears are. Because in our head, it's not like nicely filed, nicely organized. It's kind of this ambiguous fear. So we're going to call our client Steve. What exactly are the fears? Maybe disappointing Steve. I don't. Maybe. I don't know if this is a. If it's. I can only say this is a male thing. Oftentimes there are folks that you look up to, folks that you respect, maybe folks that are like a shadow of maybe something that's missing in your life or in your childhood or something like that. And you project that onto this other person that you want to impress. And that can get in the way of doing what you need to do because their opinion of you is so important. That's probably actually a really big one. Here is the impact that it could have on that other person's opinion of you. Second, potential fear leaving Steven a lurch. Like hosing him. Like him not having a solution. Again, as you're going through these fears, go for volume. Don't go for accuracy or legitimacy. Like, go for volume, because what's in your head is volume. It's not a bunch of legitimate stuff. Third, Steve not respecting me. We kind of touched on that. Fourth, things being uncomfortable with Steve going forward. And then fifth, Steve speaking poorly of me to people whose opinions I care about. Seen this one a lot of times where you get into a little niche, but you have some problematic people within that specialization, and they might be even influential within that specialization. The notion that you are then like, you just have to serve that person because they are such a figurehead. And if you don't, well, they're gonna badmouth you to all those other people, right? Well, you know, like, you have to put yourself and your business first. So how do you navigate that? So list those fears out, whether they're unfounded or not. The goal is just to list as many as you can. Now, I'm gonna go through each of those and consider how would I prevent these things from coming to a head? So the first fear we had was disappointing Steve. How could I prevent that? This one probably boils down to, like, did I have that conversation in a conscientious way? Did I help him understand the context of the decision that it's not because I don't like you, Steve, it's because my business is doing this and going this way. And the reality is, like, you're not going to get us at our best as a result, but there's somebody else out there who is at a different stage or a different type of firm who you will absolutely get your best from. And I want to help you find that person. If you're working with a landscaping business and they decide they're not going to do landscaping anymore, they're going to do window cleaning, are you going to take that personally? I sure wouldn't. That's kind of the framing that we're looking for here. Like, if it's. If that's genuinely what it is, different business priorities, you're going to go do something else. That's more analogous to the way I want to frame this up for the client than we've made the hard decision to no longer. We no longer want to work with you? Like, that's just. That's not specific enough to help them to understand why he came to that decision. So I think the prevention of, like, disappointing Steve, I think that one's probably pretty easy if you give him a good explanation. How do I prevent Steve being left in a lurch? Well, help him find somebody better. Build out that network so that you can leave him with somebody that will take great care of him. But this could even go as far as, like, checking in with Steve and the new accountant midway through their next engagement to see if there's anything that you can do to help her to make sure that they have everything that they need. That, honestly, would probably go a long ways with them if this was, say, an annual tax client. And Steve normally gets his stuff in. In February, the next February or March or whenever. It is just like putting something on your calendar to send a little message to say, like, hey, just want to make sure that you guys have got everything that you need. You are genuinely following up to make sure Steve hasn't been left in a lurch, but maybe more importantly, making them feel like, oh, wow, like, they actually did want to make sure I was going to get taken care of going Forward. Fear number three, Steve not respecting me. How do we prevent that? I think we probably already have like that conscientious explanation of understanding our business is going this way. And this is why I think that probably ticks that box. I think we also have to be careful of separating the business relationship from the personal relationship. It is okay and honestly a good thing to do to communicate those in kind of different ways. The whole fear of like bumping into them at the grocery store I would say is a symptom of not adequately separating that business and personal relationship. If your businesses are working together, it's not because you like each other. It's because there's a mutually like beneficial arrangement to be had there. If you like each other, you hang out on the weekends. If your businesses work together, it's because you're going to make your businesses better. It doesn't mean you can't have both. But if your businesses are no longer a fit, it's completely okay to move on and not be personal. Okay, Fear number four, things getting uncomfortable with Steve going forward. How do we prevent that? I may do the old end around on Steve. Take more of an interest in what he's got going on. Personally, the hardest version of this is usually like within a small community. Like take an interest in Steve. There's nothing wrong with that. If there is a genuine interest there and what he's got going on like beyond work, then I don't think you have to be afraid of that being uncomfortable going forward. Like if you, if you go out of your way, it's, it's honestly like probably that first conversation after it happens. If you can get that out of the way as quickly as possible or even try to orchestrate that first encounter post firing the client post, disengaging after that is probably a non issue. So rather than doing like the big scary sort of impersonal firing and then being afraid to run into them, consider when am I going to see them next? I'm going to see them at this thing or that thing. I will make a point to go hang out with them and go say hello. Even this to a degree feels like, I don't know, pandering to that fear, which isn't a legitimate fear because we're talking about a business relationship. But if that's a really hard thing for you, I would think ahead as to how will I make that person feel important and continue to take an interest in them so it isn't weird. Last fear and how we prevent it. Steve speaking poorly of me to People whose opinions I care about keep taking an interest in Steve or in his business. In fact, maybe there's something you could even do to help out his business that has nothing to do with the services that you provide to Steve. Is there somebody that you could refer to him? I think you've probably solved for this by navigating this in a conscientious way and depersonalizing it. Steve not referring other people to you is probably a good thing, because a lot of the worst clients we take in are referrals where we feel an obligation to say yes because we're kind of flattered and we feel appreciative that somebody would refer something to us. But for letting Steve go, in all likelihood, most of Steve's friends we probably wouldn't want to hang on to either. So not, not that we, like, don't care if he speaks poorly of us, but in the process of. Of disengaging, and it's worth having an understanding of, like, if Steve has sent you a bunch of clients in the past, do you want him to continue to do so? Whether or not he should ought to be made evident by you explaining the direction that your business is going. Maybe Steve is a minister and you're doubling down on farmers, or maybe it's the other way around. If you don't burn Steve, I have a suspicion if he does have friends that still do the thing that you do, I have a suspicion that's not necessarily going to stop them from referring to you in the future, especially if you, as, like, a good business person, can still be helpful to them and their network because there are things beyond tax and bookkeeping. Right. Other ways that you could support them. Now, this part of the exercise is the hardest one for me, where how do you repair if something does go sideways? So let's say we did everything that we possibly could to avoid these problems. How do we repair it? So if we did disappoint Steve, how could we repair that? Honestly, it's just a matter of, like, getting on the phone. In fact, there's so many problems in our firms that are just solved by getting on the phone and having a rational conversation with the client. At the end of the day, when it comes to the stuff that we do, usually people are perfectly happy if you can just point them to a solution that they will feel confident will take just as good a care of them. What we do is usually not so personal as to where they're going to be devastated if there isn't somebody else and, like, waiting in the Wings to do the same thing. Like, if they can see the path to that, they're not going to be super devastated that their accountant is changing in most cases. Now, what if Steve is left in a lurch? What if he gets hosed somehow? I mean, this is the value of having a good network, having people that you can refer him to that won't leave him in a lurch. But in all likelihood, if he does get left out in the cold, you've probably got more people you could potentially send him to. In fact, you can even tell them if it doesn't work out, let me know. I've got some other people I could connect you with. How do we repair if Steve doesn't respect us, if he gets super mad? I mean, one solution here is caring less about what other people think about you. Because if you have actually approached this in a conscientious way and explained to him the changing kind of aspects of your business and he's still bent out of shape and he's. And he still has lost his respect for you, that might be more of a Steve problem. Nau problem. And that's a, that's a healthy thing to acknowledge, is if you are, like thinking through this and you're like, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, this is the right way to do this, and you still have a fear that on the other side they're going to be totally pissed or hosed and left out in the cold or something like that. There is only so much that, like, you ought to try to put on your shoulders for yourself in that situation. I think if you're doing right by them, not leaving them flapping in the breeze like with. With only a little bit of time to recover. If you have kind of spelled out what's happening in your business and the rationale depersonalized it, then it's kind of on them to take it from there. Like, I don't know that you need to carry that burden really much further than that. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Fin Daily. Man, there are like so many powerful tools now that can automate some adjacent services to what we do. I'm a big advocate of not being in the business of just selling more bookkeeping or just selling more tax prep, because that's usually where we're most constrained. It's the work that's the hardest hire for. Rather find a specific type of client with adjacent needs where we can build adjacent services that don't have this, like, commoditized value that's easier to hire for. That's easier to automate. Fin Daily. Fantastic example of just that. It's actually an app that I founded Later Soldiers that was built just to automate the cash advisory services I was providing to my clients. We started doing bookkeeping, then we got into bill pay. Then we learned that if we do bill pay, we had a great understanding of their cash and this cash reporting made all that other like work worth it. We can make more money on the cash reporting than all the other stuff combined and it was way easier to automate. I did that with Bin Daily. It's a super cool tool if you haven't seen it before. Learn more about that one at end the the link in the Show Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Mercury. Hey, you know where my money's sitting right now? It's sitting in a Mercury bank account. Look at me chilling the dog food that I eat. Mercury today is loved by over 200,000 customers. Does business banking that is transformative. Corporate debit cards, credit cards for expense management, free wire transfers. Treasury yielding over 5% interest on idle funds. But Mercury for accountants, that's you lean in their new accounting partner program which wants to get you your time back and drive client value. This is cool. They got this thing called Panorama. You can actually see a whole bunch of client accounts in a single view so you don't have to like drill into all these different things or log in and log out of umpteen different accounts. Panorama. That's right. That's. What a great name. Plus they get all the cool features that you do if you use Mercury banking. Bill pay, custom approvals, invoicing, document upload, GL code mapping, reliable integrations with QBO 0 Netsuite, everything you need to make those accounting workflows sing. Learn more about Mercury. Head over to mercury.comaccountants to learn more about the Accountant channel. Or check out the link down in the video, the show notes, the words under the thing. Now if things are uncomfortable going forward, how do you repair that? Just just like having a conversation, taking an interest in them, be friendly with them. Like be a person. That's, I think, another argument for getting out ahead of it and thinking like when am I next going to see that person and how do I go out of my way to to take an interest in them? You have that conversation once, it's not gonna be weird going forward. Last, how do you recover if Steve does speak poorly of you to people whose opinion you care about? I think you keep doing more of the same. You keep being willing to be A friend to Steve, you'd be willing to help his business in other ways, like within reason, unless he's doing something that's just ridiculous to where he shouldn't help him anymore. That's one of those things where I would only lose so much sleep over how somebody's going to react to me doing something that I think is totally reasonable. Right. There's, there's, there's definitely boundaries there. Okay, what are the benefits of an attempt or a partial success going through this exercise with Steve, it may help me. It may, like, force me to find better referral sources. That's actually a huge blocker to letting these clients go, I think. Is having people that you trust that you can hand them off to another benefit of an attempt or partial success. Better systematizing the, like, your entire approach to doing this, like, following up, you know, down the road to make sure that they have everything that they need. That, that kind of one year later example that we talked about. Is there a way to systematize, like, being helpful in another way to their business, making a referral to them even though they're not even on the client list anymore? Like, think of these really explicitly in terms of tasks. Who would own these tasks and when they would happen? It's absolutely going to give you better perspective for future conversations surrounding how to better separate the personal and the business side of things. Oftentimes what makes it hard is maybe the tone that we've established to date and how we've personalized it. Having to rip that band aid off and like, do the about face and go back the other way probably changes those conversations going forward that maybe are getting a little too personal. It should make firing future clients less scary because you have a more comprehensive approach for this. You could even, like, build out a little script to make sure you've got all the talking points covered that you wanted to get through. Continue refining that every single time that you do it. It's just like anything else where the more you do it, the easier it gets. Last, it makes it easier for my team to fire their clients as well, because we have a healthier framework for the responsible and right way to do so. If you don't have, like, if you're just. This is just like any other meeting that you take with a client or a new lead, like a discovery meeting, that sort of thing. If you have no process at all, it's entirely reliant upon that person's ability to deftly navigate a uncomfortable situation. But the more you have a system for it And a script for how to get through all the right talking points. The easier you make that on yourself, but also the easier it is to then delegate that to then have the rest of your team do it. And oftentimes accounting firm owners come in and like feel this, like, like this responsibility for firing everyone in their firm, even if they don't work with those clients anymore. When actually a really, really helpful thing is your account managers building the skill to be able to fire clients unless they like feel the entire lifecycle of the managing of that client. I think you oftentimes have sort of misaligned incentives when the person who has to do the firing is like, I really don't want to do this thing. So no, they're actually fine. I've seen this time and time again. I think it's why staff people oftentimes are more quick to fire than the big boss who's in charge of firing. It's. There's also a financial incentives thing there too. But honestly a lot of it I think is just emotional. If the same person that has to ultimately do that uncomfortable thing is the person who decides like what clients do, we let in the door. What is our framework for grading clients to decide who needs to get fired? Like, I feel like the person needs to feel the entire life cycle of that thing from end to end to totally be placed, plugged into the best way to do that. And if you have different parties doing different parts of it, some of that I think is lost. Okay, last, what is the cost of inaction emotionally, physically, financially, over a six month timeline? How am I feeling if I don't do this? I'm probably stressed at having too much to do. That was probably the original motivation for, for letting this client go. I'm not at my best for everyone else. As a result, it hurts my A and B clients. It prevents my firm from growing in the direction that I want to grow. Your firm's attention span, like the collective attention span of everyone there is a product of the things that you work on. And until you're willing to part ways with the stuff that you don't want to work on and isn't pulling you in a better direction, then your firm's attention span will be split. Like you won't be trending in the direction that you want to go. Now, cost of an action over a year timeline, I begrudgingly do another annual cycle with the client. You're kind of kicking yourself now, right? You're mad at yourself for doing it again in the first place. It continues to take time away from the clients that you're most excited about, which is even more problematic now if you're over capacity. And in the meantime, you probably brought in some more like clients. It could be great clients, but do they have enough of your attention span? And then you come straight back to where you are today. You finish that cycle of work and you go through the exact same worry again where like, do I do this now? And you kind of mad at yourself that you didn't do it last time. On a three year time horizon. You just wasted three years where someone else that was better could have been in that seat. And honestly, it's probably even harder to do now because you've gone through the cycle so many times now. You're almost convincing yourself there's part of this that's like if you give in to the notion that it was the right thing to do a long time ago, then you're admitting that you were wrong, whereas clinging to them. I actually think this is a big part of finding firing clients, especially clients that have been around for a long time. If you continue to clean to them, you don't have to make the admission that you were wrong. And that like, in many ways it makes, the longer you wait, it makes it kind of harder to do that thing that you know that you already needed to do. And it oftentimes takes somebody else coming in, having to be the bad guy to rip that band aid off. So what are the action items coming out of this that I think can make this as easy as possible for you? One, identify great places to refer these clients to. That's a big blocker. The medicine can go down a lot easier and you can feel a lot better about it if you know that there's somebody there that will take really good care of them. You're looking for a firm for whom this client would be an A or B client. Like, where they will get the best of the best, like the best of their attention, which they're not getting from you now. Second, write a script of the points that you want to hit on in this conversation. My business is changing and we need to part ways as a result. I'm not not firing you. I'm firing your business. Separate, personal from business. I appreciate you still value our relationship. Third, please let me know if the referral doesn't end up being any good. I want to know that. Fourth, let me know if there's anything else I can do to support you, like a specific business initiative of theirs that has nothing to do with the way that you support them now and try to frame this as like an opportunity, like this will be something that is better for everyone. Again, most people are not so in love with their quote unquote accountant that if they can see a vision for somebody else doing it just as good, they're going to be, they're going to be fine with that. There's going to be some inconvenience having to switch. But what I'm telling them is I'm trending in a direction that is less and less relevant to you. I have another firm over here where I think if you hit your wagon with them, they're trending in a direction to be even better for you. And framed that way, it feels more like an opportunity than you're getting dumped. Right. Last, just think about all the ways that you can develop systems for this, so how you can keep improving upon this script every time you do it. Having a process for following up to see how that referral went, did they actually get taken care of? And then a process for something that you can do for that client's business, like other ways that you can support them. I'm big on not burning bridges unless that bridge deserves to be burned. And there's almost nothing that will earn you more kudos and like brownie points than doing something for someone in a situation like that where you had no obligation to do so. Like, you know, somebody leaving with dignity in a, in a hard work situation where maybe the employer even made things difficult on that person as they were headed out the door. Like oftentimes there is the most pride to be taken in doing that thing the right way. And so how do you, how do you actually systematize that? So that's part of your company culture and something that happens every, anytime you disengage like that. Hopefully if you got one of those situations, you got a couple ideas here that take the blood pressure down just a little bit. That's. You want it down, right? Is that, I think that's the right direction. Again, so many things that we probably know that we need to do or if you sat down and you made a list of, like, what are all the uncomfortable things that you wish somebody could just take off your plate and would be done overnight that you know that you need to do, those are usually the things that are going to make your life easier as opposed to like the sexy fun things like, oh, tech change or a new tool or adding a new client or something like that. If you got any tips on how to manage this sort of disengagement. Also, drop that stuff down in the comments. These are, like, the stickiest, hardest ones to do. It's easier when they're a jerk. But the ones where they're like, they're. They're good people and it's more just an alignment thing. Those can be trickier. That's all I got for today. Thanks for coming and hanging.