Stop Being So Available To Your Clients | EP 174

The first thing I wanna talk to you about today is this concept of you're not being a good consultant.

If you're available to your clients all the time, 24 seven, and I'm exaggerating here, but you know what I mean.

Available to your clients all the time, you're not actually being a good consultant.

You're actually training your clients Over and over again, every time you pick up the phone at 7 o'clock at night or take a text on the weekend or answer emails on the weekends, lots of stuff, you're actually not being a good consultant.

You're training your clients to expect the impossible.

So most consultancy owners think that being super available to their clients all the time is what separates them from their competitors.

But what you're actually doing is setting up an expectation with your clients that you can never... possibly maintain.

In the moment that you, like if you're always available to your clients, you're always super responsive, the moment you don't live up to that, the moment you get busy, the moment you're in a meeting, the moment you start to try and hand that relationship off to someone on your team, your client's like, hang on, what's going on here? And all of a sudden you become the problem.

Today, we're going to look at or expose how being too available to your clients doesn't actually build loyalty.

It builds dependency from your clients on you.

Dependency always turns into resentment when you're not super available, you're not answering your phone all the time, and you don't get back to them in that millisecond that they expect.

Let's talk this through.

I know in your head that you feel like you need to do everything that you possibly can to build this client relationship.

And if it's a new client relationship or you're wanting to really nurture it, you think that being available 24-7 or every time you pick up that call at 6 or 7 p.m. at night, you feel like you're building that relationship.

But what you're doing is...

You're setting this example, you're setting a precedent and your clients will then start to hold you to it.

We call it, you know, we call it like this expectation piece.

You're starting to build expectation in your client's head that you will always be available.

And the moment you break it, they're going to get frustrated with you.

I literally had a client, you know, one-on-one or a client in a coaching session say, or a client on coaching call who literally had to stop our session mid-call because their client was calling them and they're like, oh, I'm sorry, I've got to take this.

And I'm like, but we're in a meeting right now.

And he's like, I'm sorry, sorry, I've got no choice.

Like this client's really needy and I've got to talk to them.

that's not a client relationship that's a leash um i had to stop and we obviously we had a good coaching call after that about you know building client dependency but it just highlights how rampant this is in this industry you know when you're always available clients stop respecting your time like an eight o'clock call just becomes a normal a weekend text just becomes normal responding to emails on the weekend just becomes normal And when you're not available for once, when you're in a meeting or on site or, God forbid, working on another client's project, you know, those clients start to get shirty with you because you've built this dependency, you've built this expectation that you need to be available all the time to them.

And so you've trained them, like you've just trained this need or this desire from your clients.