Losing a Big Client / Meeting Notes May 2020

Location: Virtual

Attendees: Janet, Sheila, Salma, Angela, Jan, Crystal, Tamara, Alyson, Christine; Cathy, Lisa (guests); Janice (former member)

A video recording of the full meeting is available at this link until May 31, 2020.
Password: 6W?.9@=E

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Discussion: Losing a Big Client 

This was such an engaging discussion that it was difficult to focus on making notes! There are definite advantages to meeting in person, but at least with a Zoom meeting we have the ability to save the video and read the transcript! The transcript has been tidied up for readability.

Janet: So, tonight we are talking about losing a big client. The description that was on the website is: Do you rely on a particular client for a good chunk of your income? What impact would it have on your business or your life if you were to lose that client? How to be prepared for that happening? And what I didn’t add, but should have, is what can you do to recover from that?

Before we start the discussion, I just wanted to share some points. I just happened to get in my email, in the past week or so, an article that covered this topic. I’ll share this in the meeting notes, but the recap, just the summary is:

• Don’t take it personally
• Find out why it happened, why they’re leaving. It may not have anything to do with you, or it may.
• Make sure you get paid for whatever you’ve done.
• Make sure you tie up loose ends, by communicating with the client and/or the new person that’s going to be taking over what you’ve been doing
• Assess the damage, what the impact is, and what you’re going to do next.

I thought those were all really good points, and they do go into a lot more detail, so I will share that article in the meeting notes. I thought I would just start by putting that out there.

Table is open for anybody who wants to say anything. I don’t have an organized discussion here. Okay, let’s start, does anybody here have a client that accounts for, let’s say, at least a third of their income?

Angela: I had one.  I’m still with her, but on a smaller capacity.

She decided to downscale. I was definitely one of the lucky people that got to stay, but there’s certainly not as many hours. It all worked out for me in the end. It definitely was added stress, for sure, because she was. She was probably, I will say, 50 to 70 percent of my monthly income.

Until then, I don’t think I ever really… I didn’t market myself. I didn’t put myself out there. In fact, I turned away work, because I was so comfortable.

I tried hard not to let it bother me, but I mean, it was a hustle to go and find other work to replace that income, and thankfully by the time things really ramped down with her, I had replaced the income plus some, so it worked out in my favour in the end.

Janet: So, you knew ahead of time that it was happening?

Angela: I knew in, I think it was March or April, that by the end of November it was going to be me, her personal assistants, and her that was going to be left.

Janet: Yeah, that’s a nice bit of time to try and…

Angela: Yeah. What was really weird, I think, for me is that this is a team that I had worked with for probably 10 years, so it was really weird to see all the people that I had worked with, my work family, slowly disappearing from the radar there. I mean, we still keep in touch on text, and social media, and all that stuff, but it was just… I think that was the weirdest thing for me, is just not having that connection on a daily basis. On the other hand, I work with a lot of those same team members with other client work right now, so that’s kind of really cool.

Janice: I was subcontracting for the same client, and Jan too. We knew. We had a few months to know, and I definitely wasn’t marketing myself. I knew it was going to end, but I felt so busy with the work that we were doing, that it wasn’t an easy thing for me to do anyway, to market myself, but also, we were so busy. Plus, I was in the process of selling my house. Work ended and the next week, I was moving. In a sense, at the time, it was perfect for me, and then about a month or so later, I got a full time out of the house job, so I just took that, and went with that. That was fine.

Now, that full time job ended, of course because of COVID, so now I’m sort of back to, “Well, what do I do?” Am I looking for full time work, or am I back here to virtual? The virtual is looking pretty good, and if I can make that work, I would be happy to do that, just continue on with some courses, and upgrade my skills. The marketing is painful though. Oh my goodness. Just the thought of it. Just to hear you talk about it, oh my goodness, and all that social media. It’s just like, “Cringe”. But that’s something I have to battle on my own.

Sheila: I think the nice part of being a business owner, is you can kind of control that. When you have a client that leaves, I mean, when you’re new, you may not know how to get new clients, but I know now what works for me in my business. I know that I can get more clients, or I know that I can find something in the meantime, or reach out to contacts and be like, “Do you have anything you want to subcontract while I’m going through this transition?”, as you build those relationships. For me, to your point Janice, about finding social media marketing a headache, I never really found clients that way, for what I do, anyway. I have social media accounts. They’re not really active. I’m going to start making them more active, but I’m not doing it because it gets me clients. What gets me clients is meetings like this, and making relationships with people in my community, and going to in-person networking, and really talking to people in person, as much as that’s weird for a virtual business.

Janice: How has that changed now that we can’t do that as much? Have you found that’s changed, or is that just on hold? If you’re not out there doing in person networking, or meeting people. (Note: We talked about this at our March meeting.)

Salma: Well, there is a lot of online networking events happening.

I don’t know if Crystal can speak to this, but I do know clients that are in BNI groups, and now they’re all virtual. I actually get a list of all these online networking events that are happening, and a lot of people are loving them more than the face-to-face, because you can actually talk to more people. I had an article that I did post on LinkedIn about effective online networking, and it was from Alignable. It was a really good article about that. So yeah, you can. To Sheila’s point, you have to know your niche, and if your people go, then maybe… I know whenever I’ve lost one, I’m like, “Yay, now I have free time. I can figure out and focus on other stuff, or focus on other clients and work with them.”

Sheila: Take a breather for yourself, and just think “Okay, where am I at?” Take a moment to collect, and think about where you’re at, where you want to go, are you on the right track? That sort of thing.

Janice: Jan said that too, what was your word Jan? You said, I don’t know, rethinking, regrouping?

Jan: Sabbatical.

Jan: That gave me my first thought, do I want to take a break? And then I took on another client who made me realize, I think I might be on the wrong path here. I stayed with that client as long as I could without… Right? It’s hard when you really like the person, but you don’t like working with the person. I just took a step back, and I’m on a sabbatical, and deciding what do I really want to do? Because I miss a lot of the VA work, but on the other hand, I don’t. Does that make sense?

Group: Mm-hmm. It does. Yeah.

Tamara: Yeah, I’ve ended up giving up big clients, being the one to initiate them going away. As scary as it is, my reasoning for leaving them was stress. To be able to have…Kind of trusting the process too, right? Something’s telling me I need to slow down right now, and the timing was always good. Looking back, in retrospect, it’s always been the right timing. Other things would come along, and I still had that time to recalibrate me, and then I could be fresh again for what’s to come. Yeah, I don’t do marketing at all.

Again, reaching out to your own network too. Letting us know, “Hey, I’m back.” We can keep our ears open. That’s huge value for you. Even former coworkers, that’s kind of where the word of mouth went for me initially, when I started. Reaching back out to those kind of people, where, “Hey, is there something that you’ve got on the go?” People are understanding, businesses are getting that virtual works. It’s a different conversation now, and you can actually help to teach them how to work virtually, you know? You’ve got that insight already in your back pocket.

Sheila: Groups work as well. It’s not quite the same as just posting on your social media accounts, but going into Facebook and LinkedIn groups, you can really make a lot of connections there. It’s like virtual networking, but you have to be active in them in order to do that, so that they know who you are. Now, I get people that tag me, so I’m in a couple of women in business groups, or local business in my area groups, and someone will post, “Oh, I’m looking for a virtual assistant”, and my graphic designer connection will be like, “Oh, check out this person.” They’ll tag me, so I know, and I can comment on it if it’s something I’m interested in. That kind of works with getting to know your community.

Angela: I just recently got three clients from a Facebook group, so it works.

Salma: Yeah, I got my new client, she’s from a Facebook group from my RV Entrepreneurship group. So, same thing, yeah. That’s the thing, if you put yourself out there, and you talk about, not just your business, but your personal, what you’re passionate about, what your hobbies are, then those people will also connect with you, because then you have a commonality. Sheila’s probably on Facebook groups that are dealing with Salsa dancing, or the dancing and the kids. That’s your passion, it’ll come through. I was on ones with travel and RV, and that works with the people, because they know that I understand how their lifestyle is.

If there’s something that you feel passionate, or it’s your hobby and you enjoy… Say it’s horses. You join the horse group. You never know, there could be someone there that has a farm, and they want to promote that they have horse riding, and their stables are open, and then they think of you. Definitely.

Janet: This won’t work if you’re just getting started or restarted, but if you you’ve got an opening because you’ve lost a client, instead of trying to figure out, “Well, where am I going to find another client?” is look at the clients you’ve got, what you’re doing for them, but what else can you do for them? Present that to them, because I don’t know how many times I’ve done that. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes people, they’ve reached their budget, and that’s all they can afford, but sometimes it’s like, “I didn’t know you did that.” Sometimes, it’s like, “Well yeah, that’s what I do.”

I have a client who was referred by another client, and I probably wouldn’t have taken him on, except that the client that referred him, I just adore her, so I thought, I’ve got to do this for her. He just wanted MailChimp set up, so I did that. He told me at the time, “I’m happy with my website. I have a guy looking after it.” Anyway, that was in November. He’s now ditched his web guy. I’m looking after his website full time. Not full time, but I mean, it’s me. I’m the web person, and I’m doing all kinds of stuff for him. We have lots of Zoom calls, and he’s paying for that. He’s got money, and it was kind of like, “Well, do you do this?” “Yeah.” Yeah, so there’s no harm in asking, or at least letting them know, because you might have things that you think they’re doing stupid. Like, “Why are they doing it that way?” Well, present them with another option and say, “Hey, did you know that instead of this, you could be doing this? I could help get that set up, or I can manage it for you.” Whatever. You’re going to ultimately save them money, or help them make more money, so it’s not like you’re just looking for more money, you’re looking for more ways to help them.

Angela: I’ll piggyback off of what Janet just said, and say, a lot of the time, a client doesn’t know what you can do for them until you tell them. Just bringing up an idea or something of how to make things more efficient for them, or whatever the case might be, that’s all it takes. It’s like, “Oh really? That’s a great idea. Why don’t you take that and do it?” That’s happened to me, I can’t even count the number of times, but always looking for ways to improve the business, and make it better, and more efficient, and put more systems in place, more organization, more data for reporting, whatever it is.

Cathy: I just had that happen today. Two to three simple points in a conversation, she’s like, “You really know what you’re doing. Here’s the data, just do it.” Thank you. They’re thinking old school, and it’s not efficient, like you say. They need better processes, and to bring things up to the current time period, as far as presentation, and graphics. Even just their letters and letterhead, and the graphics. Yes, make sure to let our clients know what other things we can do.

Sheila: It’s off the topic of losing your main client, but to piggyback on this further, I find having a regular check in with my clients, even if you’re not logging your time and billing them for it, is beneficial. Usually, out of those calls, you end up getting more work, and you can ask questions like… It doesn’t have to be “What are you working on?” or “What can I help you with?” It could be, “Is there something that’s not working for you right now? What are your pain points?” See if you have any suggestions on how they can do that. You can ask them, “What are you spending a lot of time on?” You can see what you can take off their plate to help with that, just some further insights.

Alyson: Do you do that through the phone, or do you do an email check in? What do you find has worked best for you?

Sheila: Definitely, you want to be able to talk with them, so you can have a back and forth. Whether that’s through Zoom, or a phone, or even if they’re local, you could go for coffee. I know a lot of my clients end up hiring me, even though they know I’m working virtually, they tend to hire me, within my area, knowing that if they need to meet with me to really sit down face-to-face and work something out, they can. They’re paying a premium for that, and you could add that added value of saying, “Every quarter, let’s go for lunch”, or something along those lines, and really sitting down and planning out what’s coming up. It’s going to be different, depending on your clients, too. Some client, I’m checking in with them regularly. Other clients, I’ve been working with them long enough, I have a set kind of system in place of things I do. It varies, and you’ll kind of get a feel for it as you work with them.

Tamara: Yeah, and that’s what I find with my clients from the get-go. From my first call with them, I say, “Look, I need at least every other week, a phone call, if it’s 15 minutes, just to touch base”. I need that. as a feedback, as part of my processing, the way my brain, and I want to build a relationship with my clients. I’d rather go deeper with less clients than surface with 10 different clients, because that’s just me. I like to connect with people. It gives you those opportunities more easily, like Sheila said. It’s easier to ask the questions when you’re on the phone with them, than, “Hey, here’s another email for you to read and respond to.” If you’ve got that, just even 15 minutes or half an hour every two weeks, you can touch base and say, “Hey, where are we at? What’s going on? Let’s look at calendars. Let’s look at this. Let’s look at that to see where things work, and what are you missing?”

I had a client who, they know I’m not doing bookkeeping, but they had a question about QuickBooks that they couldn’t figure out, and they’re like, “Look, can you spend a bit of time on this, and just see if you can…” They’re not asking me to do their bookkeeping, but I don’t mind doing the research on fixing something for them. It’s not my current wheelhouse, but it is my bigger wheelhouse of my background knowledge that I’m pulling out from.

Christine: I’ll just say too that I love meeting my clients face-to-face. Three of my clients are right here in Georgetown where I am, and so it’s really easy for us to get together for coffee. It really helps to build a strong relationship. We talk about the kids, we talk about business, we talk about this and that, and then we strategize, and we always walk away feeling like we’ve accomplished quite a lot in the one hour or so. I have a client that lives in Hamilton, and I’m in Georgetown. We meet in Burlington, and I don’t charge him for that. For me, it’s building a really good relationship with the two of us, so we’ve been working together since last July. I just find that those meetings, even though I’m not making money off of them, they really are quite valuable to me in my business.

Sheila: I guess the conclusion here, for losing main clients is to accept that space, and use it as an opportunity to either replace it with a new client, or change directions, or what have you, but looking at it as a positive thing. If they left you, looking at what you can improve, what you can do different, if you’re even going in the right direction, or if you’re like, “You know what? Yeah, I wasn’t giving it my all, because I’m not really interested in doing that type of work”, and replacing it with work that you do like.

Christine: Yeah, and I agree with what Janet said earlier too. It’s important to ask, even though it’s really hard to ask the question, because nobody wants to hear criticism, but it’s good. You need to know, first of all, if it wasn’t anything that you did, then that’s good to know, but if it was something you did, it’s really good to know that, so you can correct that for your future clients.

Janet: Also, not just corrective, but to be aware of the signs. I did lose a client, this was many years ago now, but it was out of the blue. It was, “Okay, I’m not going to work with you anymore”, and she had time she had paid for, and I said, “Okay, we’ll use up the hours you’ve got left.” “No. I don’t even want to use them.” I’m like, “What’s going on here?” It turned out she had been unhappy for a long time, wasn’t comfortable saying anything, but she was giving me no feedback on the work I was doing, and in some cases, she was changing the stuff I did.

Instead of saying, “Hey, what’s going on?” knowing that she was probably going to change it anyway, I didn’t try as hard to do a great job, so my work started not being as good. Just out of the blue, she was like, “Okay, you’re done.” I was devastated. It was just such a shock, and it wasn’t… I forget how many hours I was doing for her. It wasn’t a ton, but she was somebody very prominent in her industry, and that’s why I was really afraid, because she had always been singing my praises, that she was going to be doing the opposite. That never happened. She was very discreet about it, and we have stayed in touch. The problem was the lack of communication, really. The fact that she didn’t say she wasn’t happy, but I also didn’t say, “Why is it you’re changing the stuff that I’ve done?” I just figured she’s a control freak. Whatever I do, she’s going to change it, instead of saying, “Hey, am I not doing it the way you would like it done?” Watch out for the signals.

Tamara: Again, if you have those regular touch base calls too, you can pick up on those more easily. I think it can work more organically into a call, than feeling like an awkward email of, “So, what’s going on?”

Cathy: I think the Zoom connections have even ramped up that more, because you get the facial and the interaction. It’s really been helpful.

Christine: When I send work to clients, depending on what we’re working on, sometimes we send posts and graphics, or content and graphics back and forth through Facebook, or I’ll do it through email, just depending on what we’re working on. Every time, I’ll say, “Here it is. As always, your feedback is welcome. There’s never any hard feelings.” I say that all the time, because I really want them to feel comfortable coming back and saying, “Well, I don’t like this. I don’t like that.” I think it’s worth repeating to people that you welcome their feedback. I always say it in the beginning of the relationship, but like I said, I repeat it too, just to remind them.

Sheila: Does anyone do feedback surveys with their clients, or anything? Alyson does? Yeah? I do that in my other business. I don’t do that as much in my virtual assistant business, but I do have the more ongoing conversations. I’ve learned that it’s better to, like Janet’s example, it’s better to ask when something seems askew, or ask those tough questions like, “Why are you changing it?”, or “I noticed that you’re not doing this. Is there a reason why?” Kind of digging in a little bit, because it’s kind of your job to do that, in a sense. Don’t shy away from it. That’s how you’re going to build that relationship and the communication going.

Tamara: Yeah, I’ve got the Google form that I use for testimonials, which… It’s not when I first start working with somebody, obviously, but it’s a neat little way to get feedback. It could be geared to a quarterly or something too, where you formulate questions to weed out anything that could be an issue. If you have some experiences, you can learn from them and use those to formulate a questionnaire that, “Do you mind filling this out? Take five minutes”, or two minutes, even. Most of the time, it’s not a lot of information, but it gives you very valuable feedback.

Christine: It’s not anonymous, is it?

Tamara: No. No, it would be like a, “Hey, this is something I do with my clients”. Yeah.

Cathy: What kind of questions would you ask?

Tamara: You want to have leading questions. You don’t want to just have, yes/no, and you don’t want to have just compliments. I have things like, “Where were you before we started working together? What was the state of your business? What kind of things have changed for your business since we’ve been working together? Very in depth kind of… Things that you want as a testimonial, or as good feedback. My purpose of mine is testimonial, but it could easily be done as a check-in form. Google forms is great, because it’s quick and easy. It can be right in an email, and they just go through the questions. It’s easy to track. Once you send it, they can fill it out, and you can pick it up.
Sheila That’s good. That would be good too, when you’re just starting out, and you’re not sure necessarily, as a virtual assistant, what’s going to be the best value you can provide, like what services they’re looking for. Having that check in, and asking them, “What are you enjoying most about working together?” or something along those lines, will also help with your marketing efforts in saying, “I can help you with this, and here’s how I can help you with this.” Knowing what the this is, in theory, I think we all kind of have an idea, but getting that customer, the client’s description of it, I think helps figure out how are you going to relate it to your potential customers as well.

Alyson: I agree 100%. I don’t know how many times I still get asked, “What do you do?” I’m like, “Oh gosh. If I have to answer this one more time”. I actually now have a template for when I’m making connections on LinkedIn, and somebody says that, I just copy and paste it, and throw it in, because it’s like, “I do this, this, this, this and this”. I think that’s a actually a really, really good strategy, so that people can understand from the client’s perspective, and then you can market it to get into their network as well for potential leads going forward.

Tamara: I’m still reading Arlene Dickenson’s book, Reinvention, and one of the things she suggests, it’s kind of about rebranding your life, your work, whatever, and how she worked, as a marketing firm, and going back to the full basics. It’s like, “Okay, it’s the hardest to say who you are. You can easily describe somebody else, or see what qualities somebody else has, but it’s very difficult to look in the mirror and say, “This is me.”

One of the exercises she mentioned is go back to people who have known you since you were young. I went to my girlfriends who I’ve been friends with since high school, and I was like, “Okay, what do you remember of me then?” It was just like, “You’re down to earth. You’re this…” it’s like, “Yeah, that’s the core of me.” I can then build from there. It was neat to be able to ask people I trust those questions, in a way that it wasn’t, again, I’m not fishing for compliments. The point of this is that this is what I’m doing. This is what I’m looking at as me as a whole, and when I’m going with my business going forward, because I want to be me. I want to be authentic in what I present in my business. Those people who know you that well can be a valuable source of feedback.

Janet: I did something similar a few years ago. I forget what I was working on in general, but I asked people to tell me three words that they would use to describe me, and then I compiled them all to see which ones came up often. It was surprising. There were some that I would have expected, but there were some that I would not have. I guess it was a personal branding exercise, and it was a real, real eye opener. That’s worth doing too.

Sheila: That sounds like it would be something interesting to do as a Facebook post. Like, “Okay everybody”, because you’re not just necessarily targeting specific people. You’ve got family, friends, co-workers, whatever, and you don’t know who’s going to respond to something like that. That would be an interesting experiment.

Great discussion, right? Feel free to add your two cents’ worth in the comments!

Related Reading

• What to Do When a Web Design Client Leaves (same principles apply to VA clients) by Eric Karkovack
• How Losing a Client can sometimes be a Good thing for your VA Business by Terry Green
• How to Bounce Back After Losing a Big Client by Lisa Wells