How to offboard clients who are TOO SUCCESSFUL WITH YOU!

Hey, new listener. Thanks so much for checking us out. And there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on. Don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. In this episode, I'm going to tell you how you can handle when your clients have too much success with you and it's time to flee the nest. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and welcome to the weeniecast. One of the coolest things about starting a business based solely on work that you're passionate about doing and being super conscious about developing a niche that attracts people who are not only your ideal clients, but are just your ideal people. Like, they are the people that if you bumped into them in the real world, if you weren't running your business, you would probably become friends with them. It is one of the greatest joys in the world because not only are you making money doing what you love, you're making money working with people who you genuinely enjoy spending time with. And you're not just working with them. You're helping them transform some element of their life. It is one of the greatest gifts that we can give ourselves is to start a business where we get to do that day in and day out. But it does have its dark side. When a client starts to work with you, they're going to work with you for a bit, and there's going to come a moment where they're done. Your work with them will end. And I can tell you, as a coach, there's like a certain sadness. There's a very specific sadness that comes along with completing with a client. Mainly for me, it's. I get sad that I'm not gonna get to talk to this person every week. You know, I get really close with my clients, and oftentimes we continue the friendship beyond our professional engagement. But as a business owner, when a client completes with you, there are some other things that go into it. A, you no longer have that income coming in, so you then have to start thinking about backfilling that client. B, there's also this element of, oh, my God, like, was I good enough? You know, you can start getting imposter syndrome because they don't want to work with you anymore. Even if they're done working with you because they reached their goals. It's super easy for that voice of doubt to pipe in and be like, Ooh, you weren't good enough. They're done. They don't want to work with you anymore. They probably never want to speak to you again. They're probably just being nice because they don't want to be rude because they don't want to like, leave this uncomfortably. They want you to feel good, but like, they're going to tell everyone that you suck. And see, once you get over that imposter syndrome, one of the things you want to prioritize is getting a testimonial from this client. So I want to walk you through how you can set up an off boarding process that is going to work really well for you and really well for your clients and have you ending those relationships on a really solid note. I'm also going to walk you through what my philosophy is when I complete with clients so you can kind of see how I put it into practice and how I use this philosophy to really help, help me strategize my whole business. So how you offboard clients actually starts with how you onboard them. One of the things that you want to design with them, either verbally or in your agreements, is what it looks like to complete. So let me give you a couple examples here. So if you're doing contract work where they are signing up to work with you for a very specific amount of time, you're starting with them in January, you say that you're going to work with them for nine months. So that means at the end of September, your contract is going to come to a close. And that is where they have the option to either finish the work or sign up for another contract. You want to know that going into it. And of course your client's not going to sign up, not knowing that. So it's really, really necessary. You can also have it set up in a way where clients just sign up with you and they pay you monthly until they're done. This is the retainer model. This is a model that I find works really, really well. If you are charging less than $1,000 a month. Once you start charging more than $1,000 a month, that whole model of it continues forever until you say you're done. Gets a little squirrely. Clients have a kind of a hard time sticking with something when you're charging that much. But if you do have that retainer model where it's just continue until you're done, you do have to explain to them how they ask for cancellation, right? Because remember, it's awkward for you, it's awkward for them when you're Working with someone and you're paying them, you're aware that you are making up part of their income. And it's one of the hardest things to say, hey, I no longer want to pay you for this thing. Even if it's coming from a really amazing place, even if it's coming from, like, you've helped me reach my goals, and I'm so happy for you to make this a positive experience for everyone involved. You have to be the person who lays all the cards on the table first. And you need to be very specific about, here's how you do it, and here's how you notify me, and here's the conversation we're going to have and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And as you're imagining this, you're going to get really squirmy, right? You're going to get really uncomfortable because this is going to be an uncomfortable conversation. And that's okay. It's okay for you to get squirmy about it. It's okay for it to feel unsettling for you. But the more you lean into it, the more you're open about it, the more you talk about it proactively with your clients, the less awkward it'll actually be when it happens. I want you to think about talking about money. For instance, say you just started dating someone and you're trying to get to know them. You think everything's like, pretty aligned and you're getting serious and you're thinking, okay, I really want to create a life with this person. If you guys have never talked about money ever in the relationship, but that's one of the things that you need to know, like, what is their approach to money? How much debt are they carrying? How much savings do they always have? What are their financial goals for the future? Because that's really important for you to know when you're partnering your life with someone else. If you've never brought that conversation up before and it's never even been referred to talking about it, bringing it up when they're high stakes is really uncomfortable for everyone. So when you start off talking about those things earlier on, it makes it easier for those big topics to come up when they matter most. It's the same with your clients and the whole cancellation process. So when your client comes to you and they express their desire to complete working with you, your job is now explaining how this goes. All right? And of course, it's different for every business owner, depending on what kind of work you do. For the kind of work I do with my clients. One of the things that I always like to address is amazing. I'm so proud of you for getting to this point where you feel like you do not need support from me anymore. Here's what I want to do in our final few sessions is I want to make sure that any questions you have about what's going to happen in your business in the next six months, we cover now. I also want to hold you accountable to completing any of the projects that we have started, kind of gotten halfway through and haven't completed yet. And if I can't hold you accountable to finishing them by the time we complete our work together, then I want to make sure you're walking away with a plan knowing exactly what you need to do to bring it to completion. If you're doing more consulting work where you're doing some stuff for your client, then of course you're going to have deliverables that you want to make sure you're handing off to them. Say you've been doing their social media marketing for a year and a half and they've decided at this point that like maybe they're going to switch to an ADS model and they don't necessarily need to be creating as much organic content, they just want to kind of reuse what's already been created. At that point, what you're going to do is you're going to transfer over all of the assets and content that you've done for them and make sure it is all nicely organized and ready for them to take the reins with. And you want to make sure, especially if you're handing over assets, that they understand where everything is, that they understand how you have it organized, that they understand how they're going to take ownership over these computer files. Right. If they're in a shared drive, do they need to download those files by a specific date? I can tell you that people that I've worked with in my business who've done this well, I refer business to, even if I'm not working with them anymore, they are my go to. Like, I'm so happy with what they did. Even if they no longer fit my business, I want to send more business to them because I know how professional they are. I've had one really bad experience where I had a fractional coo. It was my first fractional CEO in my business. And when we transferred everything over, she actually didn't transfer over a lot of the training videos that I had for some of my programs and where we were storing them for my courses. Wasn't working. Like the whole system just never worked from go. And unfortunately she lost everything, so I had to re record everything and that was super frustrating. It left a terrible taste in my mouth. And I think you can bet I'm not referring business to her. So this is the importance, like you handing everything off in a really professional, organized manner can make the difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business, depending on how many people this person could refer to you, depending on how much you charge, and so many other factors. So you really do want to do this well. And the last bit, I know it's awkward. I know it feels like you're fishing for compliments and who am I to ask them to say nice things about me? But you do need to ask for testimonials. I'm terrible at this. I'm so bad at this. I know my podcast producer is always on me to ask you guys to like go on to Apple podcasts or whatever to review this podcast and say if there's anything that specific that you like about it. And I feel super awkward and cringe about it. Even though I train on this. It's always funny when a client completes with me and I've trained them on asking for testimonials and they're like, katie, aren't you forgetting to ask me for something? And I laugh and I'm like, yeah, yeah, I absolutely do want a testimonial from you. Thank you so much. I'll send you some questions. Asking for testimonials A. It's awkward af. The reason it's awkward AF is because you're not a sociopath, you're not a narcissist. Congratulations. You're safe to be amongst other people. But it also means you're going to get really weird when you're asking for testimonials. That's the downside. Asking for testimonials is one part of the hurdle here, getting over the fear of it and being comfortable with it. But you also have to understand that most testimonials that people give are really bad. They're not helpful for other people who are considering hiring you. It may sound really nice for someone to write a testimonial saying, oh my God, Tim was so kind. I really enjoyed every single one of my sessions with him. He was super helpful and I just really appreciated all the support he gave. What the F does Tim do? You have no idea. Like, who is this person? Where did they start from? What did they accomplish while they were working with Tim? What's the result that they're getting now after they've completed the work, what made Tim stand out more than anyone else that made them choose to work with him? When someone's looking at a testimonial of yours. Yeah. They're doing it to make sure that you do what you say you do and that you're a good person. But more than that, what they're looking for is, is this person who gave the testimonial like me, Was their life like mine when they signed up for this? What are they saying about how it was to work with this person and what's the result that they got? So one of the things that I have found super helpful and I train my clients on this, is to send them a very specific list of testimonial questions. Some people love this, some people hate it. I had one client in my BYOB program who, when I trained him on this, he was like, this just sounds like, so formulaic and cold, and it's like, cool. Then. This doesn't have to be your process, but when you do ask for testimonials, you want to give people a little bit of direction, because if someone's going to write a testimonial for you, they want to write a testimonial that'll actually help you get more business. I can't think of a single Yelp review that I've written that was positive about a restaurant that I wrote because I didn't want them to get more business. The reason we give testimonials is because we want to promote this business that has had a positive impact on us. So set your clients or your former clients up for success so they can do that effectively. The other thing about asking for testimonials, and this is true across the gambit of any favor you are ever going to ask of anyone ever in your life. How a lot of people treat. Asking for favors is, here's a hot potato. I'm just going to throw it at you. Ow. Now it's your problem. Now you have to manage the hot potato. You have to make sure it doesn't burn your hands. And if you drop it, then that's your fault. As someone who moved 16 times in nine years because the real estate situation in San Francisco Bay Area is fucking miserable, I can tell you I moved a lot, obviously. And when you move, unless you're hiring movers, I mean, there are times in there that I couldn't afford to hire movers because I was in my 20s and I was bad with money. So I Had to ask people to help me move. You know, I had to ask the friend who has the truck and I had to ask the friends who I knew were strong and wouldn't hurt their back. And I had to arrange all these things. Things. Now imagine if I asked someone to help me move and they said yes and I was like, great. And then never communicated something else to them. Didn't tell them where to come to help me with my stuff and where we're going or what time or what day. Didn't give them a heads up on like the kinds of stuff we were moving. Like if we're moving a grand piano, that's something they should know. I don't play the piano so I don't have one in case you were wondering. But when you're asking someone for a favor, it's your responsibility to remind them. It's your hot potato. You're the person who has to communicate the details. You're the person who has to remind them of, hey, just want to touch base. I know I asked you for help with this. This is the date. Does that still work for you? Do you need reminders? Do you want me to call you at 5 o' clock in the morning? Because we're going to be doing this super, super early to wake you up. When you're asking other people for a favor, the kindest thing you can do is to carry as much of the mental load of remembering to do it as possible. So when you're asking people for a testimonial and they say, yeah, absolutely, I want to do that, you're going to say, okay, amazing. What I'm going to do is I'm going to send you some questions that you can answer and I know you're really busy, so if I don't hear back from you in a couple days with answers, I'm just going to send you another follow up email because I know what it feels like when you offer to do something for someone or you agree to do something for someone and then you forget and then you start feeling bad and I don't want you feeling bad. And also if you decide you do not have time for this or you've decided for whatever reason you don't want to write a testimonial for me, no bad feelings at all, just let me know so I don't pester you with it. Without that design, if you're reminding them, without you explaining that up front, you reminding them can feel like you're chasing them down and pestering them and annoying them to get this thing from them, and it feels really gross. But when you design that and you say, hey, listen, I'm going to do all these things to kind of manage the mental load for you because you're doing this incredibly kind thing for me, it takes a weight off of their backs. It allows for them to keep living their lives and. And also do something really nice for you. Small caveat here. If you did not like working with this person, don't get a testimonial from them. Don't use a testimonial from them. Words carry energy. And when you use the words of someone whose energy did not match up with yours for whatever reason, guess what kinds of people those words are going to attract more of? That's right. You're going to attract more of that kind of person. So you want to be super, super hyper specific about the kinds of testimonials you're actually utilizing in your business, and you only want to use the ones from the people that you really enjoyed working with. I also want to name that the people who give you testimonials and the people who give you some of the best testimonials you might be shocked about. I had this one client about three years ago who started working with me because she wanted to start a coaching business. And we worked together for half a year and we had these amazing sessions where we planned what she was going to be working on and how she was going to really hone in on her niche and start marketing and doing sales and all the things. And I trained her on a ton of stuff that she would need when she started the business. And every session I'd say, cool. What did you accomplish from last session? Nothing. No, I just. I didn't get around to it or it just. I don't know, I. I was resistant to it for some reason. And at the end of six months, she was like, I want to write a testimonial for you. And she hadn't started a business. Like, she hadn't gotten a single client. She didn't market anything. And I was like, oh, oh, okay. Yeah, absolutely. Would love to have a testimonial from you. And I'm like, oh my God, what is this person even going to say? They're probably going to write a testimonial about how they didn't get any results. And she wrote one of the most beautiful testimonials that I've ever, ever seen that made me feel so good about my work that she had signed up to build a business and that when she signed up with me, she thought she wanted all these things and through our work, she didn't necessarily get what she thought she wanted. She got what she needed that she didn't realize that she needed from our work together. She also named that she'd been in an MBA program. I'm sorry, an NBA MBA she'd been in, not the National Basketball League, International Basketball association, whatever. I don't. I know sports. Absolutely. I also know acronyms. This is honestly why I can never work for another company is I can't handle acronym acronyms is because I can't handle acronyms. I can't even pronounce the fucking word. Also, as I'm recording this, I'm really sleep deprived. So just don't mind me right now. I apologize. I will be better rested for the next episode, I promise. What was I talking about? So she even explained that she had been through an MBA program, she was trained in business and she named that she learned more about how to start a business and get clients and market yourself and do all the things from working with me for six months than she ever did in the whole two year program she was in. You will be shocked the kinds of positive impact that you have even when your clients don't necessarily get what they signed up for. If you treat your business a little more professionally and you don't, you don't pursue friendships with your clients, one of the things that you want to design with them also is what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first, Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. One of the biggest challenges I hear from new business owners is how hard it is to figure out what to post on social media and to stick to consistent schedule with it. Because it's hard. And so in the month of May, I'm actually launching a challenge to help you build that muscle of posting every single day. Each participant will get their own customizable content plan for the month of May. An extensive list of content prompts so you have an endless bank of ideas of things you can post that work with your content plan. Every Monday through Friday we will have a 45 minute Zoom call at 9am Eastern where you will create your content and one lucky person per day will be able to volunteer for for the coaching hot seat where I will help you fine tune your messaging so that your content can help you attract high paying clients. If you can prove that you posted every single day for the 31 days, you will win a 30 minute one on one coaching call. With me. Normally I charge $497 for this, but for the whole challenge, for your content plan, for the content prompts for this, 23 daily calls that you're going to get throughout the month. It's only $197. This is my birthday gift to you this year and I'm so excited to hold your feet to the fire and make you post every day about your business and get more clients. If you're down for a challenge and you want to join us, then go to weeniecast.com challenge. I can't wait to see you there. If you treat your business a little more professionally and you don't, you don't pursue friendships with your clients, one of the things that you want to design with them also is like a six month check in, just to check in to see how they're doing for you as a business person. A, this helps you kind of check in to make sure that they're doing well and that you can speak authentically about their success. B, if you get to that point six months from now and they've decided that they want to keep, like, start working with you again, that's that natural conversation for you to have where you're discussing picking the work back up. What I run into with my clients is, you know, I become friends with them, so I have to design with them. Hey, now that we're not working together anymore, still call me, still stay in touch. Just because we're not in a professional agreement anymore doesn't mean we have to stop talking. And I'm so glad I do this because I've made some of the most incredible friends in my life through working with them. So that is your offboarding process. Those are all the things that you have to consider when clients complete with you. Now I want to share with you a little bit about what my philosophy is about my clients and how long they work with me and them coming to completion at some point. And I want to name that there are some business models out there that are reliant, right? So my relationship with my podcast producer, Neil, I'm not going to do any of the things he does for me. If he and I for some reason stopped working together, there just wouldn't be a podcast. I'm not learning how to edit, okay. I'm not figuring out how to upload things to places and have other stuff go on. I don't even know the things. I don't want to know the things. What I like about our professional relationship is I get to show up sometimes with an idea. I get to talk into a mic for anywhere from an hour to two hours and he turns it into an episode and does all the things and I don't really have to worry about it. And all I have to do is have incredible conversations with people who book sales calls with me because they want to learn about working with me because they listen to my podcast. That is what I love. So that's a reliant relationship that is, you know, Neil in this case is not building independence in me because I don't want it. I'm sure if I did, he would find a way we would design a package for him to train me on all that. But no, thank you, I'm good. My philosophy with my clients is very different. I'm not working with clients so that they're always going to be dependent on me to grow and run their businesses. My ultimate goal is that a client works with me from wherever they're starting from and throughout our work, however long we work together, be it six months, a year, three years, My goal is to see them to reaching their goal, whatever that is. And absolutely, I have clients who've worked with me for years and years and years and who are committed to just continue working with me forever until they hit that goal. And I love them. I will always have space in my business for those people. And also I have clients who work with me. They might join BYOB beginner for a year and get their first like 5 high paying clients and really understand like the simple ways that they can market and sell their services and realize cool, this is good enough. I don't need anything else. I have clients who will go through the BYOB Advanced process program and we'll get all the infrastructure built in their business from their website, their email marketing, to creating lead magnets and understanding how they can do webinars and so on and so forth. And once we have all that set up, they're good. They don't need to continue working with me. And that's my goal. My goal is to create a self sufficient business owner who knows that they can do it on their own in some instances. I'm also not the right coach to continue with them. I had a client a few years ago who just this incredible coach. We worked together for nine months. She did this beautiful job of building her business and establishing multiple different revenue streams for the work that she did. But when we came to the end of our nine months, you know, one of the things that she was struggling with was she was the mom of two small children and her husband had a very time intensive job. So she was really struggling with how to manage her time, how to balance the demands of her new business that was doing really well and the demands of her two beautiful toddlers. And I'm not a mom, I don't have toddlers. I spend time around kids very rarely. If my friends have kids, those are the kids I'm spending time with. But I'm not taking care of them, I'm not managing their lives, I'm not dealing with them with they're sick, I'm not liaising with their preschool. I have no idea about that stuff. So for this client, you know, she'd gotten to this really beautiful point in her business and what she needed next was a coach who could help her work on balancing motherhood and business ownership. And that wasn't me. And so it was a natural conclusion for her to move on to someone who really fit her needs for that time. When you approach your business with this kind of philosophy, it becomes a lot less scary when people complete with you, it becomes a lot less imposter syndrome inducing because you've made it about them getting to the point where they need to be. I've bumped into several business coaches out there in the world who, when you start like being in their world, they start trying to set that expectation that once you hire them, you're always going to work with them. Once you hire them, you're going to be with them for decades and often, not always, these coaches will play on the insecurities of their clients to so fear that they can't do it on their own. And let me tell you, if you're starting a business and if you're looking for support to start and grow this business, stay away from people like that. Because what they will create is reliance in you. They will so doubt that you cannot do this on your own. They will give you just enough to help you with that next little problem that you have or that next little goal. But they won't set you up to be able to tackle the whole thing on your own or at least to understand who you need to hire to help you tackle the big goal. Because hopefully if you have really big massive dreams, you're not doing it all your own. Hopefully you're hiring someone to do your social media. Hopefully you're hiring someone to do ads and to do some PR and to get you booked on stages and to liaise with your literary agent for the third book that you're going to be publishing this year. But as a business owner, you ultimately can do that on your own when you have the confidence and the know how. When I work with clients, my number one goal is to build that confidence and to establish that know how. The clients who it really makes sense for them to stay working with me for an extended period of time are the ones who are starting from absolute scratch. They know that they maybe want to do coaching or they want to do consulting, but they need to first figure out like, what their niche is going to be, what their offer is going to be, how much they're going to charge, how do they market it, how do they sell it, but like, that's just the beginning of their journey. Like they, yes, they want to, you know, have some clients and they want to make a lot of money. But the clients who tend to stay with me the longest are the ones that have the biggest dreams. They're the ones who look out in the world and know that if they stick with this, if they're deliberate and they have the correct strategy, they're going to be the kind of person who is Oprah's life coach. They're going to be the kind of person who gets paid crap ton of money to be a keynote speaker at major events and conferences. They know that if they have the right action plan that they can launch themselves into the stratosphere and become famous. Not just for the sake of being famous, but for the sake of bringing their wisdom and their gifts to the world. Because they know in their bones that they have this deeper gift to give to the world and they feel a duty to to deliver it. And those are the clients that I will always make space for in my one on one practice. Because I can't tell you the pride at seeing someone grow from making $0 a year in their business, to hitting their first $100,000 a year, to hitting their first hundred thousand dollar month, to getting booked on stages, to writing their book, to doing all these things that they only ever dreamed of, but because they were brave enough to put their money where their mouth was and brave enough to actually get to work and stop being a weenie about it, they actually make it true for themselves. Those are my people. If you really struggle with that fear when a client completes because you're worried about backfilling them, then one of the things that you really need to start working on in your business is consistent marketing. Without consistent marketing, you're just constantly going to have a artist boom and bust cycle happening. And if you want to learn more about what that is Then I want to point you to episode 74, where I talk all about what that is, the impact it has on your business and how you can avoid it. But essentially, you want to become so consistent in your marketing that even when you're at full capacity with clients, that you have inquiries coming in. Right? And the only way to do that is to be ironclad in your consistency. I invite you to check out the 31 day challenge that I'm doing in May. It is my birthday gift to the world. It's my birthday, but I'm giving you guys something in the challenge. You're gonna have daily accountability. You're gonna have a social media marketing plan for the month of May that is going to set you up with some content that you can reuse throughout the year. You're gonna have a whole list of content prompts that you can pick from, and you'll get the opportunity to get spot coaching with me to give you feedback on the content you're creating and a little teaser. Anyone and everyone who completes the challenge and successfully posts 31 days in a row through the month of May will win a 30 minute one on one coaching call with me, which is typically valued around $500. And if you want to join that, then go to weeniecast.com forward/challenge and check it out. Squirrel. Squirrel. If you're ready to stop being a weenie and actually run a business that makes money, then go ahead and book a generate income strategy call with me by going to weenicast.com forward/strategy call. On this call, we will talk about your goals, your dreams and your frustrations in getting there. And if it's a fit for both of us, then we can talk about different ways to work together. Boom. I got excited about the word smorgasbord. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Are you an entrepreneur? Are you struggling to stay focused and organized while juggling a million tasks? Are you looking for ways to improve your productivity but finding it hard to stay motivated? Then new? You need to get access to my Weeniecast for Winners show that's exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I know you might be thinking I've tried everything to stay on task and nothing works. But I'm enjoying the advice I'm getting here on the weeniecast. And let me tell you, I'm delighted to be able to help you and thousands of listeners just like you, my friend. But the Weeniecast for Winners podcast is next level and I'd hate for you to miss out on it for just $1.99 a month. Weeniecast for winners delivers in depth and actionable advice that's specifically designed for entrepreneurs, including those with adhd, whether diagnosed or suspected. I'll talk you through how to increase your sales conversions, keep your mindfulness on point, and even offer practical tips that can help you be more productive and successful in your business, all while catering to your unique needs of being an entrepreneur who might be struggling with with adhd. With winicast for Winners, you'll get practical tips and strategies that you can use to drive your business forward without the frustrations and setbacks that often come with adhd. So if you're ready to start seeing real Results, subscribe to Winniecast for winners today at weenicast.com winners for just $1.99 a month, you'll gain access to the valuable insights and strategies that can take your business to the next level. Weeniecast for Winners is a show that's worth every penny for entrepreneurs who want to succeed. Subscribe now and start enjoying the benefits for yourself.