Double Your Profit Day #8 Fire Your WORST Customers (and make more money)

Welcome back to Double Your Profit. Today, we're gonna start with an imagination exercise. Imagine a customer that has driven you nuts, lost you a ton of money, and then imagine never having to deal with that person again. So what we're gonna do today is we're gonna fire our very worst customers. We don't need them. They're going to suck profit out of our business and they're going to consume additional resources. Now, there are hard costs and soft costs to bad customers. The soft costs are the trickiest to pin down, but that doesn't make them any less real. I'm gonna give you an example. I'm a bad customer and I'm gonna call in often. I'm going to complain a lot. I'm going to send texts. I'm going to send emails. And that is going to create distraction. So my team is going to end up having to deal with that. My call center team will have to answer the phone, answer the emails, respond to the texts. They're going to send it up to their manager, who might also escalate it to their manager depending on the severity. And what's going to happen is we just wasted hours dealing with, frankly, probably just some bullshit. So what I would encourage you to do is stop working with them. Now, some of those customers might be your largest customer. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It just you should figure out a way to de-risk it first. I know a ton of companies that one single customer is 30 to 50% of their business, sometimes even more, and it consumes all of their time. That customer knows that they have this vendor by the balls and they price it accordingly. And their take is that they give so much volume that they don't have to give margin. Now, it's probably scary as you have large customers that are accounting for a large portion of your business, but what you want to do is de-risk it by adding adjacent customers or customers that you can serve better, and ideally tracking their profit on a customer level. Now, I can't really do that very well because we have tens of thousands of customers and they are pretty much all homeowners. But if you're dealing with businesses, it is much easier. Are they giving us good work? Are our margins good for this one builder? Or should I kill this account and go find another one that is more productive with less resources? The main takeaway here is revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. So what that means is, look, That one account might be a really big dollar amount. The revenue might be huge, but if it's sucking all the profit and adding additional costs and burden to your team, it's not worth it. Let's shrink up the business. Let's tighten into the things that we are best in class at that are driving all of our margin. And let's go as hard at those as we can. If you've ever had a customer you've had to fire, I'd love to hear about that below. Those can be a fun time and make sure you like and sub so you don't miss the next one.