Kelson Carterpresident at carter's my plumber

Double Your Profit Day #17 The SMART Way to Say Goodbye to Stressful Clients!

17 Aug 2025 · 2 min

Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast

17 Aug 2025 · 2 min

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In this solo‑host episode of the Double Your Profit series, Kelson Carter explains why and how business owners should deliberately offboard problematic clients. He first outlines that even clients who fit a company’s target market can become “bad” when they consume excessive resources, complain constantly, or simply aren’t a good fit for the service provider. Protecting the team is presented as the primary profit‑maximizing lever, because skilled technicians are harder to replace than any single customer. Carter then advocates an emotionless, repeatable standard operating procedure (SOP) for firing such clients: a scripted email with legally‑safe language, CRM flags to prevent future outreach, a step‑by‑step checklist, and optional referrals to other firms. The episode stresses that preserving employee morale and time outweighs the fear of losing a difficult client, and that businesses can and should seek customers who pay well and treat staff respectfully. The overall message is a pragmatic, no‑drama approach to eliminating stressful client relationships in order to grow profit and maintain a healthy team culture.

Chapters

Welcome back to the Double Your Profit series. Today's kind of a fun one. We're talking about firing bad clients. Now, we spent a lot of time in the earlier episodes talking about really making your business aligned towards profit, and that's gonna be customer segment. That's gonna be what type of work you're taking on. Are you doing commercial, residential, new construction? But what happens when you have a client that fits inside your scope? They should be what you're aiming for, but they're just a bad client. Maybe they take too many resources, maybe they complain too much. Maybe you are just not a great fit for whatever they're looking for as a service provider. It is okay to not service everyone. Now, as you're building a profit, your team is really important, and I mean really important. The biggest profit-moving levers that we have to pull is our team making decisions that are profit maximizing. So what that means is it's our job to protect our team from volatile people or massive time wasters. So whenever a customer starts to get belligerent, we are all too happy to fire someone. The way I like to think about this is it is significantly harder to find a tech technician or a really capable team member than it is a customer. So we really want to make sure we're protecting our employees' time and also the emotional toll that comes with dealing with really challenging customers. Now, the important thing to do here, similar to our accountability, is we want to make this an emotionless process. What that means— make it a standard operating procedure. Here is exactly how we offboard that customer. Here's how we're going to communicate with them. It's going to be via email. Here's the words we're going to use so that way if an attorney gets involved, we have some backing. And here's what on our CRM to make sure that we never accidentally go back out to that customer again. We would have this crazy experience where someone would just be totally belligerent, and then 6 months later we would be back in their house and we'd be doing the same thing all over again. I didn't really know how to offboard that customer. So you have to make it an emotionless process. Here's what happened. Here's the checklist of what we do next. Here's how we communicate that they're no longer welcome to call us. And maybe we even provide them some recommendations of companies that we don't like very much that they can go work with next. That's usually my favorite step. My final note on this is team morale is really important, and when you're growing your business, how your customers treat your team is a big deal, and you don't have to settle for it. You can find customers that want to pay you for your service and treat your team nicely. Make sure you like and sub for more stuff about firing your worst clients.