Do not get me wrong, I love seeing stories and sharing stories myself of winning clients and talking about signing our dream clients. It’s wonderful.
But, any business will also lose clients. Denise Duffield-Thomas actually says that receiving your first refund request is one of the best and biggest milestones in your business!
I’m not ashamed to admit we’ve lost a number of clients, we’re a retainer type business and to be frank – I wouldn’t want to still be working with everyone we ever have.
We work with some wonderful, wonderful people – sometimes we know from the get go that it’ll be a fixed term contract, others we don’t. But the reality is, we lose clients.
If we got super down, questioned our entire business or shut down every time we lost a client, Trax Media would have ceased trading a long time ago, you don’t have a business through a pandemic without getting a few grazes!
It’s important to remember that you are running a business – it is not personal. Even if it’s because they don’t like CEO of Trax Media Rebecca Shepherd – they don’t know me as an actual person, so it’s STILL not personal to me in my everyday life.
You can lose clients for a number of reasons, their business may be suffering financially, they may have grown so much they need someone full time! You may have fallen out of alignment with them, they may have evolved in another direction.
I’ve had clients who were totally dreamy at the beginning, but were a nightmare by the time they left. People and businesses change, as much as you’re constantly growing – so are they.
I urge you to remind yourself for every post or story you see celebrating a new client, someone is losing one elsewhere and just not shouting about it. It’s a natural part of business and life, and sometimes the universe is just doing the hard work for you by removing them first.