Welcome back to Awkward Conversations week! As we promised yesterday when we were discussing how to fire a client, today we’re talking about what to do before you fire a client. Let’s talk client training. It’s kind of like dog training, except with clients.

(Actually, that’s not true. It’s nothing like dog training at all.)

Client training is something you’re going to want to do if you have clients who you can’t (or don’t want to) fire, but they’re behaving in a way that makes working with them untenable. Maybe they don’t pay on time. Maybe they email too much. Maybe they call randomly in the middle of Let’s Get It On. Maybe they’re making the work impossible, maybe they have wildly unreasonable expectations, or maybe certain personality elements are making you want to put their head in a lake.

Whatever the situation, they have to change. It’s not you, it’s them.

There are two possible objectives for sending a client training email…

Continue Reading

Welcome back! Previously, on Awkward Conversations Week, we talked about how to tell someone their payment bounced. Mmm. Sticky. Today we’re talking about telling a potential client you don’t want to work with them.

“How to say no” may well be the second most searched term in the history of the internet. (Second only to “how to flip an omelette”. Naturally.) Saying no is darn tough for many, even under the best of circumstances, and even when you’re declining something no reasonable person would agree to.

Saying no to a potential client is an especially weird animal because it is often very difficult for people to imagine anybody turning down paid work. There is a belief that freelancers, small business owners and service professionals would take anybody’s money, much like a bookstore or a cell phone company. But, of which you are undoubtedly aware, there are plenty of reasons an ittybiz owner might want to say no, and it helps to have some language handy.

This one has a few different subtypes with different associated concerns, and we’ll address each of those separately. The template, however – affectionately referred to as Thanks But No Thanks in our templates file – remains the same. We tweak for details, but the boilerplate is pretty solid.

Regardless of the subtype you’re dealing with, the trick to saying no to paid work is in making sure you communicate three specific things. Your communication needs to hit three success metrics, or you’re cruising for drama later:

Continue Reading

So, funny story.

As you may know, the revenue model we have at IttyBiz is significantly made up of people who put our classes on payment plans. If you were around for BIG LAUNCH, you may remember that there was a 12-pay option, where instead of paying the full tuition upfront, students could spread their payments over a full year.

Periodically – and by “periodically” here, I mean “around 50 times a month” – PayPal cancels a payment plan (what PayPal refers to as a subscription). Sometimes this is because a credit card expired, sometimes this is because a payment bounced, and sometimes this is because the moon is in Virgo.

When this happens we get an email notification telling us that the subscription was cancelled. In response to this, we send out a standard email to get the sorting it out party started…

Continue Reading