Being Ghosted By A Client

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Linda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhart. Welcome back to the podcast, everyone, and how is everybody doing?

Well, more importantly, how are you?

Yeah, how are you?

I'm back in my house, so that's a good thing, uh, compared to the last hurricane 2 years ago. No damages, which is great. Prayed a lot and it worked.

Yeah, I think a lot of us prayed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was not fun. It was not fun. It was very— it's very stressful. I don't think you realize that it's so stressful until you're in it. And, well, you know, we were at Clio Con and I was so not focused on Clio Con. I couldn't. I mean, I was worried about my husband being here and trying to do everything himself. And it was, it was just hard because I'm trying to get home and flights are canceled or delayed and I couldn't get out and my stress was like up here and I don't like to live up in that kind of a stress. So yeah, I'm glad I was able to—

Well, thank goodness you're safe.

Yeah. Yeah. And we're going to be safe regardless because we left. And you can see now you're seeing my kitchen. You can see that the pool guy's here. I don't know what he's doing since there's no power, but—

I saw him out there with a little vacuum hose in his hand a minute ago.

Must have some battery thing. I don't know. But, yeah. So, anyway, we're gonna talk about being ghosted by your client, which is a wonderful topic, especially for October. And also, it happens. You can be ghosted by a person, and you can be ghosted by your client. So it could be ghosted in many ways. You know? And I actually didn't know what this term meant until my daughter told me she was being ghosted. I had to go and Google ghosting and to understand what it is because it's not a term from my generation. We didn't ghost people. So, right, Steve? We didn't ghost anybody.

We weren't allowed to ghost.

We actually answered the phone when it rang. Imagine that.

Novel thing.

You didn't know who was calling you. You just picked up the phone, you know? But yeah, so being ghosted by your client pretty much is when you need stuff from them and they don't, they don't provide it. I would say that's probably it. And one of the tips I think that's important to, to think about is Sarah and I talk about this when we start an engagement with a client. Gather the information during the honeymoon period, because if you don't, that, that can change, and then they can get aggravated because you're asking them for a lot of things, and they've already paid you a lot of money and for to do the work. Why do I have to do all this work? So then they get busy, and our clients are super, super busy. And I think that's probably the main reason why you might find that they disappear on you. It's just they're so busy. And you kind of have to stay after it. And I always feel like a nag when I am like, hey, I need the documents. Hey, you know, kind of go back into the thread in Lissio. We've already asked for this. And just the gentle— I love the words gentle reminder because it sounds so soft, but you're reminding them. And I've had that one I picked up from, I think, some of our team. One of our team was like, gentle reminder, I asked you this 3 weeks ago. You never answered it. So yeah, it can go both ways, I'm sure.

Yeah, I, I do feel like, to your point, Linda, they— because they do get so busy, the best way to handle it is just, we're going to ask you a lot up front, setting that precedent like we've done in the past where it feels like a heavy lift in the beginning. Just kind of explain that process. But it is hard. And I'm curious what, Steve, you do if a client just— you're working with them and then nothing, crickets.

If they completely disappear, you— yeah, I think the best tool that we have is just pick up the phone and call them and say, hey, are you okay? How are you? You know, we haven't heard from you. We're concerned. Um, we care. We want to keep the ball rolling here. You know, you make it in their best interest.

Oh, good point.

For the reason why you're calling them. You don't make it confrontational. You don't remind them that they haven't responded because they already know that. That's like calling somebody and saying, you owe us $50,000, and they, they already know that. You know, you need to find, you need to find ways to get around that and show them that you're, you are so in their camp and you're so ready to help them, but you need them to be part of that process. So that, that concerned approach is, I find, the best. It's like, are you okay? What can we do to help you get there? You know, sort of thing.

I'm curious, have you ever tried the approach? I sometimes try—

Oh, here we go.

I sometimes try the approach of, and I don't like to do it sometimes, but I presume based on the lack of responses, you're probably going through quite a bit. I'd like to schedule some time with you. Oh, I like that. I try that approach too. I love your tip as well. I know Linda and I work, I mean, it's happened. Linda and I were just talking about this because she has on Artisani side, she did have a client just kind of do this again to her repetitive pattern. Not a negative thing, but she sort of knew. And then the hardest part, I feel like, when a client does do these ghosting moments or periodic times is the amount of time that we have to get the work done.

Right.

It's really hard. Like, I know Linda is super challenged. And your life is complicated right now, given the weather predicament that you're in and all the things. And so it was like, how do you— you not only do you have to handle the disappearing act, and the forgiveness of it, because you don't want to hold it against anyone, but also, how do we measure— how do we communicate the other side of that? Because it's—

Well, you know, something else that works too, the verbiage of I just want to make sure that we're protecting space for you to get this done in a timely manner.

That's a great one.

It's always— see, the tax deadline is always the trigger, right? So all of a sudden they hear that the taxes are due, and then why isn't it— you get it sometimes where they'll say, why isn't this done? Well, we haven't been able to access your ABC bank account and your credit card, and you haven't answered these questions that we have on these Transactions that we just don't know where they go. So we are just sitting here kind of stagnant, and we need you to be responsive. And I think with this particular client Sarah's talking about, he always was great, put his credit card details in, paid every month, and then he flat out disappeared. And when he disappeared, it was just completely gone. Didn't pay his bills. Credit card must have been compromised. Didn't pay his bill. I'm trying to reach out, and I tried texting, I tried emailing, I tried calling, I tried every which way I could, and I got nothing. And I finally just said, well, he's not paying me. I'm not going to continue to do the work. I can't continue to do the work.

Yeah.

And then we're sitting here in the same thing. We're sitting here with an issue because now the work isn't done. And now at this point, I mean, tax-wise, There's no way that we can get it done at this date. Probably by the time this is on, it's past the date. And that's— and he's such a nice person that sometimes you have clients that you— and I've had him for so many years, and I really like him. So, and I let him know, I'm like, we were supposed to have an appointment yesterday. Well, it was a hurricane. I didn't have power. I wasn't in my house. I had a lot of things going on in my world. I let him know, like, sorry, I'm not gonna be able to keep the appointment. And I don't think my husband knows he's on camera.

He's walking.

He's trying to get things done. So, um, oblivious to the fact that he's on camera, but that's okay. So we, we're just, you know, I try to reach out to him and just let him know. And he's been— he's a kind person. So he's like, I totally get it. Let's push this out. Um, you know, not a rush anymore. But I— and I— and at this point, because we tried to do it with— without connecting in person the last time he kind of came back, I— Sent a message to the team. I'm like, guess who's back from the dead? You know, speaking of being ghosted. And then we aggregated what we needed, sent it to him, and nothing. Then I called and all of that, nothing. And now all of a sudden he reached back to me. He's like, hey, I noticed the work isn't done. I'm like, do you not see? And he sent me the email. I went and looked. I was actually on with Sarah, and I'm like, it's the same email I sent it to. How can he not have gotten my email? It's the same exact email unless there's a reason. Emails being blocked. But, I mean, I responded before and we set up a time, so clearly he has it. I just don't know what to do. But he's such a nice person. I'll catch him up and get it done as much as I can. But I'm gonna actually, this time, gonna get online in a Zoom call with him.

Yeah.

And get everything connected right there with him and download everything I need. That way, if it breaks again, he's got a weirdo bank, which makes it difficult. You know, it's an odd bank. All those little things that kind of line up against us.

Well, and I think that listening to your description of that experience brings to mind it. In that kind of situation, it's okay to go ahead and say to them, you know what, we're not going to make the deadline. And because we're not going to make the deadline, let's just use this as an example for tax extensions. You're going to pay $250 a month penalty for not filing on time. And so if you, if you give them the what's going to happen if we don't get this done scenario, sometimes that'll get them to respond.

Yeah, for sure. Consequences to those actions.

Consequences. Yeah. And if it's all in how you present it, not in—

And those are not our consequences to your face. They're, they're outside of us. Professionally, though, to the situation where Linda's at, it's a Professionally, you— we don't know what's going on in each other's lives. And so it, it's also a professional courtesy to your accounting team that's supporting you, just as it would be to your tax team. I, I can tell you right now, no tax individual is going to want you to drop all the stuff off a few days before you're out.

No.

You know, if you're complicated especially, uh, you're gonna pay that fee.

Yeah.

But so it is hard. It is a professional service, and it's that valued professional service And I, I see it happen to myself. Things happen. You kind of trip up. I face consequences to those things happening. That is the same in concert with what we do. It is the same effect. We cannot make magic happen in less than 20— we don't drop everybody else to put you up front.

Right.

So we have to think about it in a two-way street. But there's also gratitude. There's gratitude of knowing We've worked well together. Like, Linda, you know how it works. Could you imagine trying to start over right now with anybody else in this bucket?

And I truly like this client. I mean, he's been— we've had personal conversations about his music. He's a musician as well, besides being an attorney, and it's fun to talk to him. And then I kind of didn't talk to him a lot now that the firm's grown bigger and somebody's assigned to do the work. I didn't miss that.

That could be the key right there. Finding out, is there somebody else in your organization that can help me get these things?

Yeah, I mean, for sure. Yeah, we'll get it done. But yeah, it's just, it's interesting and it's going to be, it's a lot to catch up. He's at a big company, big file. So yeah, it's a lot of work.

Now, what about the ones that ghost us and you finally are going to give up? How do you handle that?

When they come back?

Uh, no, when, when you're gonna just give up and say, I can't help you anymore.

Oh, someone that you want to get rid of anyway?

Well, because they've been ghosting you.

Barely. I think it's the action of not actually responding.

We had one that we were like, this can't continue because it was putting a burden on the staff.

Yeah.

They have work assigned work that's for the whole week, and then all of a sudden this person skips multiple weeks, bigger client, and then all of a sudden the burden is on us to catch up because you didn't answer our questions or didn't provide access.

That's what I'm asking about.

Yeah. Sometimes it just becomes too difficult because if it becomes a repetitive pattern, it's not sometimes that you got a client that doesn't bother you much, but then also in 2 respects, if it's Disrupting the workflow with the team. You can't do that to them either. You can't say, hey, I need you to work weekends because so-and-so didn't give you the answers 5 months ago, and now we have 5 months' worth of work to catch up on. That's not fair to them either. It's not fair to the other clients that they have to take care of.

We have one client that we really love. We do like working with her, but we have every single month this year asked her for— to review the financials with us, and she's ghosted us. She doesn't even answer. And our experience with her was this last January, right in the middle of 1099 season, she decided she wanted to rip apart the whole last year's financials. And so I'm going to reach out to her in November and say, we've asked for 11 months now for you to review the financials with us. We can go ahead and do that now, or we can do it in February or March.

Mm-hmm.

But we're not going to— we're not going to play that game this year.

Mm-hmm.

You know, because you've ghosted us all year.

Yeah, I, I do feel like there's consideration in those conversations of, you know, past patterns have predicted how we're going to handle this going forward. So I feel like we've offered a lot of good tips, like, like you're saying, pick up the phone, call them. We've tried every medium. Linda's tried every medium. Um, it's, it's reaffirming the relationship. We enjoy working together. It's just, this is not a workable solution at this point. What are some other viable ways to communicate with you? I had this happen last night. You know, I'm training somebody on the software to help them and, you know, they ask, they're like, is it OK to send you this text? I'm like, yeah, I'm fine with that. Just know I will respond. I need to reprioritize how I'm going to respond. So at least we had open communication on how we were going to communicate. together. And I feel like the biggest thing I took away was from this Clio Con is there is so much happening in all of our worlds. The number of ways to get ahold of someone, the level of communication, your emails get bogged down depending on what style of working method you do. And so I personally, I don't feel bad in the persistency of saying—

Right.

You're paying me for a professional service. Let's get this done. But I also will let you know, if you're going to slam me with everything, this is not going to be done overnight.

Right.

This is going to have to feather in based on the current workload. And you're not always going to get Linda and Sarah. That's just not how this works. We have grown to a space that we have some very amazing, competent team members that do so well, that teach us sometimes some amazing stuff. I'm like, oh, that's great. I'm so glad you know that. And so I feel like we've offered some really tangible tips. It is a challenging space to be in because we are living in such busy worlds and things happen. Like, I had a client call me last week, right before I was leaving, and just was like, I'm so sorry to just drop this on you, but my— so much of my life has changed and I cannot practice law anymore.

Oh.

I'm dealing with some health things. Well, my heart sank. But then I was also like, when did this happen? Clue me in, please. I'm dying to know. You want to support them. Like, to Linda's point, your heart is there. We work with our hearts. Our hearts are always front and center.

It's always interesting right before you go away on anything. It's when these calls come in. At least it seems that way.

Yes.

Or leads come in. We've been this little quiet space, and all of a sudden, like, 5 leads will come in when you're leaving to go to a conference. It's, it's, it's crazy.

So I call that the universe. That's just the power of the universe. Yeah. Well, and I, I'm honestly, I was having a great conversation with my husband this morning, and he says, wow, it seems like we, we should be leading with a gratitude list of, of where we're grateful for things. Because it— and there's so much in that space of leading with gratitude because it's a boomerang effect of how things come back to you and how you can appreciate.

I like that.

And I appreciated that kind of recentering of that mindset because it is hard. I don't feel people intentionally ghost, or I think honestly life is busy. So many things are coming at you The biggest thing I feel like is, and maybe we should have this as a session later, is when life throws you this hurricane or this life-altering moment, what do you do now? Because it refocuses what's important. To me, what's important is I'm healthy and happy, the team is working well, that they're feeling supported, the company is good, and then my personal life will benefit from that because this stuff is settled.

Very well said. Yeah.

You know, the work-life balance crap. I've, I've been the proponent, like, I— that is not even a phrase that works in my life. This is my life, right? And I work well within it, and I define what those are for me. I feel like that's the same for others, and I feel like that's how you proceed with clients when you're in these so-called ghosting moments, is reaffirming the value, like you said, Steve, of where we are. Linda, all the mediums that you brought up of all the different ways to communicate. Well, I got a question. I've tried every medium. What am I missing that doesn't work for you? And what should work for you? So I know I can rely on getting a response. I think that's a fair question. That's in any relationship. So, yeah, those are really good tips.

You said it, though, Sarah. What you just said there is really prolific because you said, and this totally can happen to anybody. You can be going along, even like a hurricane. Okay? A hurricane is a blip in my life. We did everything we had to do to make sure we were safe. Safety was all of it. But it's the same thing if somebody has a health issue that can just throw a wrench in everything and change all of your whole entire life. So you really want to be considerate when someone's ghosting you, whether how you respond. You don't know what's happening in their world. You don't know what's going on. They could be going through divorce or something.

Yeah.

Parent taking care of a parent. Those are things that really— yeah, their family's not doing well and they had to take on this role.

Yeah.

So you don't expect or you don't wanna like, hey, why don't you give me this? Because when you're under stress, and I can tell you from just coming back from a very stressful time to come into this house, I, I don't have power, can't see to take a shower. Managed to get a coffee this morning because I have a battery thing. But in life, if that's my only worries, that's right.

Yeah.

What other people have going on. And it's just all this is fixable. It's all stuff. It's fixable no matter what. Like, we were worried about our couch getting wet and we spent a lot of money on it from the last storm. And like, you know what? We walked out of here and we said, look, there was things we couldn't lift or put up high. If we have to buy another couch, we have to buy another couch. We did as most we could to protect the house. But that's stuff.

It's just stuff.

We were safe. And that's the most important thing all in all. And I think that When it comes to being any— anybody having something in a life moment, that, that's a once in a lifetime. Now you get these repetitive people who are constantly not responding. That makes it hard if they're constantly ghosting you. What you just said was perfect. How do you reframe the conversation to say, look, and I think sometimes it might be just an awareness. Let them know what their ghosting does on the other side. Let them know the impact of it.

Exactly. Precisely. Selena Gomez said this really well. She said, where we are today, we need to put our phones down and be present in every moment because the phone doesn't feed us the information. Like, we, we need to be present. And when I heard this recently, it was on a just a random feed of things. I was like, you're right. I, I do find myself, I am listening to somebody and I'm trying to get something done. No, you know what? I'm gonna start The phone needs to go down when I'm talking with staff, talking with clients. These distractions are going to have to mute themselves so I'm present, so I can understand, because human interaction is what we're missing right now, and it helps validate us. Um, and I think that's what's happening is, oh, I'll get to it later, I'll get to it later. And before you know it, it's like 4 months. Well, getting to it later means I've got a burden.

Right.

So, yeah. Yeah. So I'm, I've just, I've kind of like in the last 24 hours of thinking of all these things, I was like, okay, because I've had a few come up this way. Life is happening. And then they're like, oh, crap, Sarah, I can't believe it's been 8 months since I last talked to you. I'm like, I know. I know it.

Like, for a little bit.

Yeah.

But now with 1099s coming out, right? So we're gonna try to send a list and be proactive on this stuff. What do you do if they don't answer you? Like, you're sending out a list. Please approve the list. We do the 1099s with you. What if they don't answer you? I'm straight up gonna have to sit down and And as a founder of a—

co-founder of a company, of our— I'm gonna have to call. And as the founder of Minted Lives, I'm gonna have to call and say, you know what, I really need this process to be different. It will not look the same.

You can't live through that again.

Yeah, I, I personally lived through the bulk of that. It's a heavier, heavier lift like it is right now, um, in this time frame. So, but yeah, it's, it's these expectations that are not with judgment, the expectations of with each other, but take the judgment off and, and move forward. And then I'm grateful. I'm grateful I could answer somebody first thing this morning when I was like, God, they wrote me at 1 in the morning, pretty much my time. Like, oh shoot. So, you know, I'm just gonna kind of go with that mindset going forward. So.

Great ideas this morning. I like that.

Yeah. So maybe we just frame the ghosting Obviously, Halloween's got us, right? October.

Yeah. Well, it's a good time to talk about ghosting, for sure.

Absolutely. I love that you said I had to go look it up because, yeah, these new terms are so true, Linda.

I look up so many things. First I ask Tammy, and then I look it up if she doesn't know, because sometimes I actually know more things than she does. Sometimes I'm like, really? I'm the older one here. Why did you not know these terms? And she's like, I don't know. I've never heard of that before. I'm like, yes, she does know ghosting, though.

You know what? With one final thought that comes to mind with attorneys, you can say to them, have you ever been ghosted by a client? How did that feel? And guess what? That's where we are. Man, do I care about you?

Yeah.

You're genuinely caring about someone's well-being. You're hoping that they respond back with, I've been so busy because it's this. And obviously we see numbers, so we can kind of get Like, we could literally write a message. I can see that you're busy because of XYZ and revenue, but we— it's important for us to connect because I'm concerned about these, these components, right? These important pieces to you. But to Linda's point, how, how do you find that? So I think it's reframing the conversation again. I, I actively want to participate. I just need to know what's the way to do that.

So, right.

Yeah. Well, this is great. I'm loving this conversation today. Yeah. And I'm glad your internet held out. And your power held out right now.

God, so internet know that my internet might go. Yeah.

Well, we're glad you're safe and that you're here.

Yeah, absolutely. And prayers to all the other people out there.

There was some really big tornadoes in this storm. So yeah.

Yeah. Right.

It's been a tough one. And to be so back to back too right now.

So there's still people from Helene suffering for sure.

Exactly. Exactly. So, well, Tiara, do you want to take us away?

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Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.