Delegate or Abdicate: Are You Responsible enough to make the call?

Hey everyone, um, today I wanted to share an experience I had a couple months ago. 2 separate client experiences back to back. Um, one, because it's gonna make me feel better, and 2, I think there's a lesson here, uh, that I can share out of the experience. A good lesson. I'm not just a complaining, uh, opportunity. So we had, um, 2 clients canceled their services with us and both effectively decided we were not being proactive enough with them. And so, um, one of them said in their cancellation request and comments that they didn't feel like we were being proactive enough and he wanted more out of his quarterly, quarterly meetings. He actually was only willing to pay for 2 meetings a year instead of 4. So yeah, we weren't proactive enough with his quarterly meetings because he never was willing to pay for it. He also didn't want to pay for bookkeeping services, yet he wanted us to have our hands in his bookkeeping and to give him advice in that regard. The other client canceled us. He was paying for bookkeeping services, and he also felt like we weren't being proactive enough. But in looking at our communication history with this client, we reached out to them multiple times, but it was never convenient for them to respond to us. And so he ultimately felt like we weren't doing enough, even though he wasn't actually taking the time to do it. Now, so those are experiences that I take, and I take everything personal. It's just who I am. But it doesn't do me any good as a business owner to blame them, even though there is blame that I can clearly place on their shoulders, which I just did. But that doesn't help us grow as a company. Um, so I'm going to get to the lessons that I feel like I've taken away from this, where we could have done better. But I first want to share, this is very similar to your gym. Like, if you think about your nutrition services, uh, Your nutrition services are not going to do your client any good unless they actually follow the advice and recommendations you're giving them. Your group training classes or personal training classes are not going to do your clients very good or very well, whatever the proper grammar is, if they don't put in the work. Not to mention You might have someone who wants personal training services, but they only pay for the group training class. So that person likely is going to get upset with you in the long run because you're not meeting their needs, even though at the end of the day, they're not paying for their needs to be met. So I think about my experience and I think about the experience inside the walls of my gym and the, the gems of our clients. And, um, here's my takeaway lessons, because again, sometimes clients are just dumb and sometimes they're just not the right people that we want to work with. It is human nature. It is what it is. There's plenty of, uh, fishes in the sea, as they say. But where can we take responsibility? Um, I, I think about this difference between abdicate versus Delegate. In the finance, the financial world, a lot of times business owners will hire a bookkeeper, and what they ended up doing is abdicating the responsibility. You see, the difference is this: if I delegate, I'm assigning responsibility for something to somebody else, but I'm staying in the information loop. If I'm abdicating something, I'm assigning responsibility to someone else. Whether they take it or not, I walk away and I no longer pay attention to it. In order to grow your business, developing talent and/or the relationships with people you've assigned responsibilities to is one of the most important things you can do. At no point should you ever abdicate your financial responsibility. So a lesson for gym owners that I'd like to share before I get into 3 other ones. is you always will need to be involved in your financial situation, even if you've hired a bookkeeper. Like for us, what we did after, uh, looking at this scenario is we decided, you know what, our services aren't that clear to our clients because we in the past would say, yeah, we do bookkeeping, here's the price. I would say 50% of the time the client is expecting us to, in addition to the bookkeeping, they think they're also getting and paying for consulting, whether that's in like Zoom meetings or phone call meetings, which is not the case, or we'd have to charge more. So, so that we don't have that miscommunication with clients anymore, we've actually added separate levels similar to probably what you have with nutrition. In your nutrition services, the lower-priced nutrition service probably is a more DIY focused thing with less touchpoints from your coach. If they want more touchpoints from the coach, typically it's a higher fee. So we've done the same thing. Now we have your basic bookkeeping where we send the good reports and some simple analysis, but then for those clients who want additional insight, we can have a monthly meeting or a quarterly meeting. And of course the fee goes up from the basic with just the email report to an actual interaction. So that's one thing we took away from this. We weren't being clear enough. But so here are the 3. Oh, anyway, so jump back to my scatterbrain here. Don't abdicate your responsibility for your success, your financial success specifically. Hiring a bookkeeper is great. There's 26 of us here at Insight Tax, and we can all put food on our table because we have clients who pay us for services like bookkeeping. So I'm definitely saying, like, you know, do your own bookkeeping. I'm not saying that hire us instead. What I am saying, though, is even when you hire a bookkeeper, you need to stay in the loop, whether that's looking at whatever monthly reports they send you or taking and investing in sitting down with your accountant every quarter or every month, depending on what you feel. makes sense for you. Okay, so the 3 questions I would say I've asked myself, which I encourage you to maybe ponder on based on the scenarios that I've talked about: do your clients know what they're actually paying for? So in the case of the one client, he was upset with us because we weren't proactive with his quarterly meetings, which is true because he was only paying For 2 meetings. He was only paying for semiannual meetings. That's on us. I'm going to take blame for that. We should make sure our clients know what they're paying for. So we need to build that into our system. What are you doing on your end to make sure your members know what they're paying for with the services? That way there's no mismanaged expectations. Second question, do your members know what other services you offer? So in the case of the one who wouldn't take time for us, I've had other clients like that. And the solution we had was, dude, let's just schedule a recurring meeting so that, you know, it's on your calendar and, you know, I'm going to be there so that we can make sure you've dedicated the time to take it. Because look, business owners are busy. Your members are busy. when they leave your facility, they're thinking about their life. They're not thinking about us. And so this particular client, he's growing rapidly. He's being very aggressive with his goals and he's doing an amazing job at it. But so when I reach out to him and say, hey, here's some stuff to think about or to do with your bookkeeping or questions we have to make sure our reports are accurate, he's in the middle of something else. He doesn't want to be interrupted. So he stayed focused on that. And then ultimately felt like I wasn't being there enough or being proactive enough. So I could have just said, look, I think in order for this to work out, we're going to need to set aside a specific time that you're going to dedicate to accounting, your accounting, and that would have solved the problem. So do your members know all the services that you actually offer? And yeah, it's a great chance for you to upsell them. Um, if you don't have goal meetings with your members, that's a great opportunity. Sitting down and setting goals with your members every quarter is a great chance for you to then remind them of the other services you offer. It's not a pressure thing. You just want to make sure they know what their options are in case their goals have changed or they want more results or whatever that may be. And the third question, where have you placed the responsibility for your financial outcome? Have you abdicated your bookkeeping and accounting responsibilities to someone else and you're happy to not think about it until tax season comes around? Or are you involved in the process? Yes, you're paying someone to do the work. Are you responding to their questions that they probably are emailing you? Because we usually have a few questions for all of our clients based on certain transactions every month. Are you reaching out with— if they send you a monthly report, are you actually looking at it and analyzing it? And if you don't know what to do there, are you taking time to at least understand what you need to know or how to read the financials in a way you need to in order to make the best decisions? Because you can hire a bookkeeper, you can hire a CFO type of service to help you understand that, but you have to be involved in the process. process. I promise if you are involved in the process, you're going to see much faster growth. And potentially damaging things are not going to catch you by surprise because you'll see them ahead of time. So those are my thoughts. Thanks for listening. Remember, profit is a choice. Choose to be profitable.