4 kinds of clients you should avoid working with

4 kinds of clients you should avoid working with

Every penny that comes through a startup is cherished because it's going to help fund the future growth of your business.  The second most common reason a startup fails is because it runs out of money, so do you really want to work with everyone if they're just going to be wasting your time?  Because remember, time is money, right?

Growing your pool of clients is just as important as investing your money the right way.  If you don't have clients, you don't have any money.  If you don't have the money, you can't invest it in yourself and will likely fail.  Usually if you have a service based business, like an SEO company, you build up relationships with each client that comes across your desk.

What happens when your first clients become a problem and start sucking up most of your time and you can't focus on your other clients? 

Keep them or ditch them?

In the beginning you're going to want to keep on as many clients as possible in order to grow your bank account.  But if a client or two starts to become a nuisance, it might be smarter to cut ties with them completely and let them go.  You will lose that chunk of profit they were bringing in, but you will be less stressed and you will also have more time on your hands to focus on gaining more clients.

When I started out, I thought that I would keep every paying customer no matter what they were like.  I quickly realized that there were multiple types of clients and not all of them were worth my time and effort.

To help you avoid the hassles I went through, here are the 4 types of business owners you should try to avoid at all costs:


Business Owner #1: The Bully
This is the type of customer that thinks he is more important than anyone else in the world.  When the sun shines, it's only on him/her and they think their sh*t doesn't stink lol.  No matter what he or she is calling or emailing about, they always ask to speak with a manager or even an owner.  These types of business owners sometimes threaten with legal action if you don't forward them to the person they're trying to contact, which is ridiculous.

Imagine how stressful this is if you have a nice secretary working on your calls and this type of person calls in.  They will be caught off guard and not know what to do most likely.  The people answering the calls will likely be stressed out for not reason except that this type of person is a bully and wants everything to be his or her way.  Did you know that over 40% of workers have said they left a job solely because of a stressful environment?  What do you think these bullies are creating for them? 

Keep your good workers and cut ties with the bullies in you client list.  Your office will be much happier that you did and the people will see that you're protecting them as much as possible, making it a happier work place


Business Owner #2: The Time Sucker
When someone is paying you $100 a month and wants to call you up every day, that's a time sucker.  I understand that they client is parting with $100, but that doesn't mean they can call me whenever they want because they have a question.  I will gladly answer a list of questions in an email, but calling all the time is just wasting my own time.

Now this tends to happen when someone is green and doesn't know much about what is going on.  I have a lot of SEO clients turn into time sucks because they're new to website and how they work.  What I'll usually do is have an auto responder set up on my emails and even set something up on my phone so that time suckers can get directed to a section of my website where they can get the answers they need without wasting 30 minutes of my time.

Some of you are saying "Well, it's only 30 minutes!" and I agree that it isn't a lot of time.  But there are multiple time-suckers in my client list and if I were to talk with all of them when they called, I wouldn't get any work done lol.


Business Owner #3: The Nickel and Dimer
A lot of potential clients will treat your business like they can bid on something on Ebay, which isn't going to happen.  These types of business owners are the nickel and dimers.  You will clearly have prices on your website or you will go over what everything costs via email or phone call and they will come back with a counter offer like it's some sort of negotiation on pricing.

I've actually had people say something along the lines of "Well (persons name) offers a similar service for half the price, why don't I just go pay them?" and my response is usually "Well you're here, you know you can pay half over there, but we're still talking" lol.  Usually the person will pay me my full price after they realize I'm not budging.  After they notice they can't dwindle down your pricing, they will usually stop trying to haggle a lower price every time they pay for something.  But there are the rare few that always try to counter your invoices and say they'll pay less than what you're trying to get.

To avoid anything like this, you have to go off of your gut.  If the person is talking about how they don't have enough to purchase your top services or products, they're usually not a nickle and dimer, they're just on a specific budget.  The ones who get the final total and want to haggle about the price are the ones who can afford what you're selling but they want to pay less.

Try to avoid the nickel and dimers because they just create stress.  You will have to have multiple conversations with them about pricing even thought they know how much something costs, and it's annoying.


Business Owner #4: The Online Complainer
When someone decides to complain on a platform like Yelp before they even contact you to resolve something, they need to be dropped immediately.  There's no telling how often they will complain about something you do even if it's the right thing and they're just not happy with it.

I've had people do this in the past and not only do they instantly open a dispute within PayPal and raise it to a claim before I can respond, they go right to Yelp and post something negative.  They don't try to work it out with me, they just want to bash my business even though they don't know what the hell they're talking about lol.  One of my SEO clients actually did this and tried leaving a bad review on my Yelp page while opening up a claim in PayPal.  I ended up losing the claim because PayPal wasn't great with digital transactions back then, and the Yelp review went up.  I then got a nasty email from the client about how their rankings dropped for their keywords and I was scamming them... 2 weeks later they were on the first page and they emailed me back apologizing and wanting to continue working with me.  I asked them to take down any negative reviews they could, and they obliged, then I refused to work with them lol

Online complaints can kill a company no matter what industry it's in.  Over 90% of people will read online reviews and make purchasing decisions based on what other random people are saying.  Don't you think that I would have suffered a lot because this dumb @ss thought I was just trying to scam him?  I would have, and it could have been a killing blow because he was a moron that didn't try to work it out prior to posting negative reviews where he could lol.



In Conclusion:
Cutting ties with negative people and the ones who will just waste your time will always increase the work flow and usually your profits.  The ideal clients for me are the ones I have to talk to once a month and go over what we've done in the last 30 days, then we don't talk again til the end of the next month, but that doesn't happen much lol.


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Thanks!

Razzy