The Fastest Way to Start Hating Your Business

The fastest way to start hating your business!

You know, when we start out as entrepreneurs, we have this dream about working with our passion and doing work we love and making a difference. But if you make this one mistake, that dream can easily turn into a nightmare.

Hey, I'm Don Downs from RV Business Coach. This morning, I'm going to talk about the fastest way to start hating your business.

Now, I actually did this when I first started my business. It started out OK and got some clients. Things were going good. And then I started getting more clients and I got kind of sloppy about the clients I got, and I got some who... to put it politely weren't real good fits.

Some of them were just very, very demanding. No matter how much I gave, they wanted more. It was all about them. Me, me, me. I want more, I want more, I don't care what's in the coaching contract, I need more than what you promised to give me. Not a lot of fun to work with.

Another group was kind of blame shifter's, right? They didn't want to do the work, and they wanted to blame me when they didn't get the results that they wanted. So they weren't a lot of fun to work with.

And then the third group were just, for lack of a better word, kind of rude. They wouldn't show up to appointments. They would cancel at the last minute if I was lucky, but often they just didn't show up at all. And then they would call at all hours of the day and night and expect me to drop everything and help them out.

So it wasn't a lot of fun and it was really starting to wear me down. And then it started to affect the whole business because these clients, the small percentage of clients, were taking up all of my time and energy and keeping me from serving my good clients, the ideal clients, even better.

Well fortunately, I ran across this concept called the Red Velvet Rope Policy. It's a concept right out of Book Yourself Solid®  called the Red Velvet Rope Policy.

And the idea is we put up like a little red velvet rope at the entrance to our business and only our ideal clients, only clients that energize us, excite us and bring out our best work are allowed to get in. And we turn away all of the others.

And this makes such a huge difference, because when you do that, then you have the energy to do your best work with your best clients.

And it's OK that you're not serving everybody. Remember the saying, "There's certain people in this world you are meant to serve... And others? Not so much!” We don't have to serve everybody! We're just here to serve our ideal clients.

Identifying Ideal Clients

So how do we go about doing this?

Well, first of all, we need to get really clear about who our ideal client is. And by that I mean look at their characteristics, not demographics.

The demographic would be something like I want to work with people who make  $250,000 dollars a year. That's a demographic. And the problem with demographics is it can change overnight, right? One layoff and that $250,000 a year person is broke.

Characteristics tend to be more internalized and something that stays with us. So you're looking for characteristics like:

• A “go getter”
• Someone who does what they say they're going to do
• Someone who wants to make an impact and make a difference.
• People who keep their word,

those kinds of characteristics.

Figure out that the characteristics that you want to work with. And a good way to do this is just look at the people you like being around: your friends, your family, your co-workers, that you really love being around and start figuring out why is it you like being around them, and what are their characteristics?

And then start writing those down and paying attention to it. And this makes a huge difference because once you're clear on those characteristics, it just starts sneaking into everything you do.

It sneaks into your copy, it sneaks into your conversations, and then those non-ideal clients will start to self select out, and your ideal clients will self-select in.

Pruning the Duds

So that's great. But what do you do when you have clients who aren't so great, who have already made it past the door and they are in?

Well, this is kind of hard to do, kind of hard to envision doing, But what you need to do is prune the duds. So as you go through your client list and you find those that are dragging you down, you need to to encourage them to leave the business.

Now there's an artful way to do this. It's not as simple as saying, “Hey, I saw this video from Don Downs at RV Business Coach and he told me, I don't have to work with you anymore. So see you later!”

We can do it a lot better than that. But there is a process. It's a little bit more complicated than I want to go into in a short video here, but I'm going to make you a special offer.