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How to promote good behavior when you see signs of a bad client
Last week I completed an online course from a friend of a friend. It included a fairly straightforward bicycling metaphor and a familiar refrain about growing your business: draw more good clients. It was a pilot of a course he intends to roll out this summer.
His advice, and I am sure you’ve heard it from other places too, went something like this:
- Identify your best clients — that is, the ones with whom you enjoy working
- List WHY you like working for them
- Identify bad experiences with clients — I’ve certainly done this!
- List WHY they were bad experiences
- Combine those “why” lists into the perfect client
- Only work with those clients
Of course, there is a big missing piece there. Very few businesses are in position to determine who their clients are. None of us can really afford to simply turn work away when we see inklings of a potential “bad” client experience on the rise.
Small businesses don’t become big businesses by turning people way.
