 I will jump straight into this. I hope you all are ready for about 30 minutes of absolute destruction. This is, I'm going to get vulnerable. I'm going to talk a lot about mistakes. I'm going to talk a lot about how we all deal with mistakes. And we're going to talk about mistakes that lead to what we might all consider the absolute worst outcome. So let's talk about that. I think when it comes to our professional lives, firings are basically worst case scenario. So I want to talk first about the first vendor that I ever fired. He was my CPA for three years. He was the first CPA ever hired. And he handled our taxes for three years and did a fantastic job. But I think he was getting busier and busier as time went on. And on top of that, I was getting busier and busier. So you can see that we were getting pretty close to the deadline. I called him a week before the tax filing deadline. And told him that I'd get all the information to him by the next day. His verbal response to me was, we're in crunch time right now. I'm completely swamped. I won't be able to get to that until later. And I said, okay, I'm sorry I didn't need to get this stuff to you this late. But I understand. And so basically this thread is I had sent him that stuff and called him. And he said he was too busy. And then he followed up with me the day before the tax deadline and said, hey, can we set up a call? I'm ready to go. And I said, you told me you were too busy. And so I ended up filing with somebody else because you were too busy for me. And his response was, wow, thanks for telling me. I wouldn't have wasted my time. I have spent a lot of time on accounting and tax questions for you this year for free. With the expectation of filing your taxes and being paid. I never responded to his email. I never called him back. I never referred business to him again. And I've literally never spoken another word to this guy in our small city of Orlando that's saying something. That response is probably a response that we've all felt like sending to a client at some point or another. I understand why he may have sent this email. I get the sentiment behind it. But the fact that he sent it and had zero empathy for what was actually communicated on top of the fact that this was an emotional response. And it was a little bit of a slap in the face. So ask yourself, now perhaps being on both sides of this, how much value, how much money did he lose by sending one snap email? This particular CPA. Just from me alone, since this happened, I've spent tens of thousands of dollars with our current CPA and their bookkeeping service. And on top of that, I've referred multiple accounts much larger than myself to my new CPA. In addition to that, my new CPA eventually hired us to build their website and SEO their website where we got them to number one in Orlando for the number one search keyword phrase. Four CPAs in Central Florida and she has now retired a millionaire. And this guy is still pretty much exactly in the same place he was back then. So let's take a look at that from both sides. So let's talk a little bit about ego. He sent that email to me as a snap ego defense. We all carry this burden around with us. Our ego gets in the way of everything. It tells us we're way more important than our clients. It tells us we're way more important in the moment of doing anything. Ego gets in the way of empathy. Ego gets in the way of professionalism. And so anytime you feel the rising urge to defend yourself, I would ask that you take a step back and ask if that's your ego talking or if it's a rational, logical, professional response that's flying through your head. So let's talk about what creates firings. I thought about this really hard. I thought about it for a very long time and I feel like I've come up with a very succinct way to talk about why firings happen. And I think 100% of firings happen because of this. So either you are not creating value, the client does not see value, or you are disconnected with the client on a professional or a personal level. So let's talk about what you do. Now when I talk about clients, you can replace that word with boss or employee. This works all the way around in a full circle. So if you're in your head, if you're thinking of a situation that you're in, whether you're an employee, whether you're the boss doing the firing, or whether you're being fired yourself, everything that I say still applies. So let's talk about what you do. I'm going to talk about this from the perspective of being a freelancer or an agency that's being fired for the bulk of this. So let's talk a little bit about that. What do you do? There's four steps specifically that everybody should perform when they are being fired or in the process of being fired. And number one is collecting information. And it's sometimes really hard to do. It's hard to remember how critical this step is. When it's happening, oftentimes there's a very gut wrenching, visceral, emotional outpouring that comes from something like this. You've put so much time and effort into it, you've put love into it. Whatever you've done up to that moment is being rejected. It's not quite as bad as heartbreak, but it's a mini version of that, right? And it hits us all of us in a way that taps into our deep subconscious, that we all have this desperate need to be appreciated and valued for what we do. And so when we get fired, that little version of yourself is really getting stomped on. And the reaction is hard to get a hold of sometimes. And so you forget that you have to remove that ego from the situation and approach this from a professional standpoint. And if you are a professional, the first thing you're going to want to do is ask why. Why are we being fired? And you need to dig in to find out. And this is assuming you don't already know. If you already know, then you have a different problem. But if you don't know all of the reasons or if the reasons being given don't sound authentic to you, please don't hesitate to dig in. Digging in shows that, and again, in the middle of a firing, your job is to be professional. If you're a professional in a firing and actually the purpose of this talk today is to help everybody in here grow your business. If you handle firings properly, I promise you that you will grow your business. So when you dig in, you're going to be asking questions like, is there anything we could have done better? You're going to ask questions like, did my team member help you in this way? And from what you said, did they fail you in this other way? And if they did, could they have done differently? Find out whether it's, sometimes it's a personal thing or maybe it's a communication issue. But the more you know, the better prepared you'll be. And we'll talk about that more. So after you've kind of dug in and you've asked questions, but also this happened simultaneously to the step two, it was part of the process as well. I want to talk about taking the high road. It is very, very easy to get defensive about your work. It's very easy to jump in and start explaining or excusing why there was a disconnect in the value that you're bringing to somebody. And what I'm going to tell you right now is if you're graceful in firing, it creates a high level of respect. It can. It has the ability to. And I'll give some examples of that later on as well. So, and when I say take the high road, it doesn't mean get walked on. That's different. It doesn't mean accepting everything that the client might use as a weapon for the firing. Sometimes clients make up excuses for a firing when it's actually a different reason. It's your job to get to the bottom of it, but while you're getting to the bottom of it, you're still delivering value to that client. You're still proving that you were the right choice in the beginning regardless, right? So, let's say they say that I'm sorry, but we didn't like the design that you presented to us. It's not a good enough design and we don't feel like you understand our brand very well. Your high road response to that, well let's talk about the low road. The low road response to that is we ask a lot of questions. We dug in. We spent this much time on it. Everybody we talked to said it was amazing work. We understand why you would feel that way. That's a low road approach. That is not giving grace to a client. That's not giving empathy to a client. And that's a slap in the face of their opinion. The reality is design is the most subjective part of any project. So, that's not an option. The high road is I understand how you might feel that way. Maybe there is a disconnect here. I believe that if given another chance, we could probably find a way to turn this ship around and make this right. Our mission is to make this right by you and to deliver an amazing product to you. And then from there they're making a choice, either to give you another chance or to continue with the fire. Likely the firing is going to continue. But you've just planted a seed in their mind that you were capable of doing that project appropriately. It gives them a lot less cannon fodder for later if they're talking about you. Your job in taking the high road is actually defending your reputation. You have to defend your reputation. And that means even in getting fired going the extra mile. And of course, if you can't read it up there, the pro tip in this scenario is any time a conversation has the potential to have politics or emotion involved always find a way to make that meeting in person or over the phone. Email tone will destroy conversations like this and harm your reputation no matter what your intentions are. Text just does not carry a high road tone of voice by default, unfortunately. So the next step here, this is for people who aren't freelancers, but in a way, even if you are a freelancer, this applies in a certain way. But step four will go into it in more detail. But if you run a team, if it's not just you, this step is critical. If you're being fired or if you have been fired, you need to communicate the details of that event with the rest of your team. You do not want the rest of your team later to come up to you and say, hey, what happened there? And then you have to explain as a reaction instead of being proactive with your team. Culture is really important here, being transparent. It freaks people out when clients fire an agency. They want to know all the reasons why. But your job in communicating internally is to clear the air number one. And number two, not to get over excited about the situation. When communicating internally with a team, no matter how bad the firing was, no matter what went wrong, whether it was a minor issue or a major issue, it is super important to take that middle road and approach it from a stoic professional perspective and just simply give the facts. Here's what happened. Here's why this is happening. And it's no big deal. At the end of the day, no matter what internal communication is, is that this is no big deal. Whether it's a big deal or not, it's not a big deal because this is an opportunity to learn and get better as an agency. And when you're communicating internally, not only are you sharing with all of the stakeholders on the team what happened and why, but if somebody else on the team has some culpability or some responsibility or accountability for why the situation happened, then that has to be addressed with that person in greater detail. You have to figure out more about it, which is where we get into step four. So once you've gathered all the data, once you've taken the high road in your exit with this client, once you've communicated with your team, the last and the most important step and the one that's the easiest to skip is spending time to internalize this lesson and figuring out how to make that a part of your DNA as a part of your learning process. If you do a Google search for failure or mistakes or firings, you'll see a million platitudes from all of the most successful people in the world talking about learning from their mistakes and how the definition of success is learning from your mistakes. At the end of the day, they all come down to that same sense. And so in this scenario, in the beginning, when we had our first couple of firings and we were busy, I didn't know how to do this step four. We were so busy just getting work done and helping the next client that we never took the time to go back. And not only audit kind of what happened and why it happened, but also to make some specific changes across whether it's our processes or whether it's specific team member approaches to projects or whether it was the types of clients we were doing business with. There were a lot of lessons to be learned. And sometimes it was managing expectations. There was all these different reasons for all these different firings. And we were not getting better as an agency until we started spending time internalizing. And that means, for me now, it means meditating. That's something that I only recently started doing. And going into meditation with an intention, spending 20 minutes focused on my breathing and asking myself, in my own head, asking myself what went wrong, why did it go wrong, and what can I do about it. And usually by the end of that 20 minutes, I'm either already starting to come up with solutions or my mind is saying we need more time. It's too complicated. We're not ready yet. Your ego is still on the web. But I'm getting feedback back. And spending that time on meditation has actually been one of the most valuable internalizing tools, especially in regards to firings. And other people, prayer works fantastic for this, too. So meditation and prayer, they both work well depending on what your specific needs are. All right. So that's kind of like top-level theory stuff. We're going to spend the next 15 minutes or so jumping into specific real-world practical examples, how we handled it, sometimes poorly, and what the end result of each of these specific scenarios are. And just as a quick heads-up, I'm not mentioning any specific names. I'm just kind of giving general industries for the, quote, client in question or the team member in question. But really in a lot of cases, some of these are hybrids of multiple clients just compiled together for the purpose of story. But these are all things that have actually happened or it might be a hybrid of two events that happened. All right. So the first specific example I'm going to give today is probably the largest firing we've ever had. We didn't do anything wrong on this project. It was actually how we handled it afterwards that made all the difference in the world. So it was a large organization and they needed us for a complicated web development project. And that project needed four full-time developers probably for a period of about 90 days is what we had it estimated for. So the initial project planning went fantastically well. We had very detailed specifications on the project. Everything was cooking with Crisco. It was awesome. And then there was a 30-day lead time leading up into the project where we aligned all of our assets and got our team put together. And the day before the project started I contacted the client to remind them that the kickoff meeting was the following day and the client did not respond. The following day at the kickoff meeting we all jumped on the conference call. The client never showed up. Side note, this client paid 100% in advance because they needed to get it out in December of the 2016 season. Their budget for the year hadn't been spent. So they had paid for this large project 100% in advance. But they never showed up to their own kickoff meeting. A week later I get an email from our contact saying I'm so sorry, but our department has been consumed by another department within the organization and we no longer need your services for that project. I'm thinking in my head, how does this play out? Our contract, at the time our contract did not cover this scenario. I had no idea I had to plan for a situation like that. Our contracts do now cover this situation but at the time there was nothing in writing. So what do we do? Are we writing a check back for the whole amount to this client? Side note, I have a crazy amount of expenses and time in on this project already. Am I about to get an illegal battle of the client to get money for something that we literally never did and never broke ground up? So I'm freaking out inside my head. I am in panic mode. And this is where mentors come in. I had a mentor that I met through WordCamp five or six years ago and one phone call later that mentor said all you have to do is get them on the phone and say these three sentences and you're good to go. I was like what? That's all I have to do? They're like yep, that's all you have to do. All of the clients said those three sentences to the client. Clients like good, no problem, we're good to go. And everything was good. There was no contract dispute. We ended up basically, what it was was we set it up so that our expenses on the project needed to be covered. And all we had to do was just explain to them that we can prove our expenses. And as long as we can prove our expenses, then we were good to go. So we ended up keeping 50% of that total retainer for never doing the work. And everything worked out and everybody wrote off into the sunset on that one. And the lesson learned there is find people who have done larger projects than you, make friends with them, and be prepared when you start to grow because you're going to need their help. Alright, so this one is particularly embarrassing. Back in 2006, we were growing faster than I could handle and I didn't have any experience with scaling agency services. I was having a hard time finding help. And so I was doing all the jobs and everywhere where I didn't have help I was doing that job too and I was working somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 hours a week. And we started a project and the project was supposed to take six weeks from start to finish. Three weeks into it, we had not delivered anything to the client. I literally just didn't have enough time to get to them. They had paid their upfront deposit and they were asking me, hey, where's the stuff? Where's the stuff? And I'm like, oh, we'll get to you next week. We'll get to you next week. We'll get to you next week. Three weeks into it. They didn't have the stuff and they were like, okay, this isn't working out. We need to bail on this. And how does this work? So the reality is I still could have gotten that project done on time. We had enough leeway in there to do it and I believe that we could still make it happen. But we had lost the faith of the client. They didn't feel like we were going to be able to deliver on the value. But I had a contract. So here's a high road, low road situation. I could have held them to the contract. I could have told them that we're going to do it anyway and we're going to keep the money and we've got a contract and we're just going to follow the law here. Or I could say, you know what? I completely understand. We're going to refund all of your money and we're going to make sure that you're taken care of. And then also, in addition to that, if you need a referral for somebody who might have more time than us, I'd be happy to give you a referral as well. And the way that this ended up happening is as they decided to go for the flow refund. They took all the money back. They absolutely fired us. We never did business with them again. But six months later, I sent them an email and I said, hey, I just wanted you to know that we fixed all of our processes and we now have solved the problem of delivering projects on time and I want you to know that you firing us was a huge favor to us because it helped us get better and we appreciated the way that you did it. Six months after that, they referred business to us. One of our larger accounts is still doing business with us five years later. So that was a firing that we were able to turn something really negative into something really positive. And then taking the high road to an extreme, right? We just kept pushing on it. And the real reason I sent that email six months later was part of defending my reputation. I don't want anybody out there saying, hey, that agency doesn't deliver on time. I wanted to make sure that they knew that they were a part of us getting better, right? And anytime a firing happens on both sides, everyone's job is to find a way to separate the egos and work on improving or protecting the reputations. So jumping over to... All right. Shredding company. So... This is common. If you work in the agency world, as you start to go upstream and work with larger and larger clients, you start to work with a small client and they become a large client, what happens over time is they start paying your agency more and more money to do all sorts of different jobs until you're doing like six jobs for the same client. And then they look at their bill every month and they're like, oh my gosh, I could just hire some people to do this. And that's what they do. Over and over again, it's a cycle. So, larger clients get a new controller in or a new accountant in or they get a new CFO and they decide, oh my gosh, that bill's too big, we can definitely do this cheaper in-house. They bring it in-house, they fire you. Nothing personal, it's just money. Taking the high road when that happens is key. So in this specific scenario, we... the new marketing director at this Shredding company, he was technically our enemy. It was his job to come in and replace us as an agency in this scenario. So he was technically our enemy and we could have chosen to throw him under the bus with the CEO because he had a lot of questions that he really should have known before he was hired. But we chose not to throw him under the bus. We instead took the high road and we gave him everything we needed. We even gave him a little bit of education. We wished him the best of luck. Side note, we're not idiots though. We had a separate conversation with the CEO on the backside. With the CEO expressing some of our concerns. We said, this guy's probably a good guy. There's a couple things that he could probably get some help with. I want to let you know that if anything goes sideways with him, we still have your back. If it goes well with him, we may be a good support for him. That conversation with the CEO and helping him without throwing him under the bus actually created allies from a firing. And they still do business with us to this day. And they still hire us for projects that are a little bit too complicated for their new marketing team. But also as a reminder, for those of you who haven't been caught in the cycle before, a quick, quick kind of outline of that. What happens is these bigger organizations like marketing or their design in-house and their development team sometimes they'll bring it all in-house. And that will be great for them for about three or four years. But all of those people working in that creative department for one organization they stagnate. As creatives, they stagnate because they're working on the same thing all day every day and they don't iterate and learn like we do in the open source community. So they have no idea what the new tech coming out is. They have no idea what all the new stuff coming out is and so what happens is they stagnate they burn out and then that department starts to tank and that organization realizes oh my gosh and after they've given them raises for three or four years we're paying as much as we were paying the agency for half the service we were getting. We need to fire these guys and hire an agency and the cycle starts again. So be prepared for that cycle. It's usually depending on the industry and the size of the organization people tend to run around five years or so. So if you're in it for the long haul take that high road and be there on the other end of that five years. I'm going to blow through some of the rest of these as we're getting closer on time. We're going to go this one this one was a really tough one. This was a large company in south Florida that we've been working with they do some wholesale work I think they do about two million dollars in sales per month on their e-commerce website that we built and maintained the back end for them and the project manager was awesome we had a fantastic relationship with the project manager we had no contact with anyone else in their organization and that guy made a couple mistakes that led to some losses and revenues for the organization and basically when his back was to the wall he had he was either going to keep his job or by throwing us under the bus and saying it was our fault or he was going to get fired those were his two options he was either him or us and in his defense he called us and asked for our permission to throw us under the bus and our relationship wasn't with the CEO this was a very tough decision because at the end of the day as the owner of the company making sure that we're profitable and growing as an agency is the key to our success and here we are about to lose a potentially large contract and really this decision just for everybody in the room in this position this decision can go either way and I'll tell you what we did and how it ended up but again this could have been the wrong decision here so in this scenario because we didn't have the relationship of the CEO of the company I felt like even if this guy got fired and somebody else came in there's no guarantee that we're going to keep this work and in fact we knew that their organization was very very hard to work with and he was the only person in that organization that was actually easy to work with he was the only one that spoke our language and so we opted to let him throw us under the bus and we lost the contract and three months later he hired a new prime contractor in the position technically that we were in previously but really it was just some freelancer somewhere who wasn't doing any of the work and that freelancer subcontracted all the work to us so we got the job back and we still work for them today and their CEO still doesn't know so that one we made the decision relationship over money and it worked out as a general relationships over money is usually the right way to go but I'll take that a step further and I'll just say that if you're struggling with what seems right versus what is actually right then your ego is in the way remove your ego and doing what's actually right every time will make life a lot easier so this one this one's an interesting one we were pulled in by a high level marketing director for an international financial firm and she pulled us in to rebuild their website and help them with messaging online and also assist with their branding we went in we met with their stakeholders and their C-level executives and we had a fantastic meeting and at the end of the meeting their CEO was like hey we need to get you guys in here again we have a lot of technical questions for you and I want to bring in my technical team we came in again and this time I brought my developers and we basically got grilled for two hours on high end technical questions on how we would solve contracts and how we would solve Y and how we would solve Z and our initial contact that brought us in was 100% sure that we were going to get this contract and so we continued to invest in giving them value and value before we had a full engagement with them and then what happened is after three meetings in about 12 hours of my staff's time a significant investment in resources traveling to and from their location we did not get the job we had nothing to show for which doesn't happen often because we usually charge for discovery but in this scenario our contact was so warm and so genuine and so trustworthy that we believed we were going to get it we didn't get it instead of being angry with her instead of being upset which by the way my ego was raging I was very angry in this situation I instead thanked her for the opportunity and wished her the best of luck she was so angry that she quit her job and she went and got a job at a much larger organization where she probably hired us for 10 projects that were worth 20 times what that project was and it's just because we treated her with grace in spite of getting socked in the face these guys this one kind of this one kind of hurt we did some work for a long services company they're regional they were medium sized when they came to us and we helped dramatically increase their business and I think we also cut their Google AdWords costs down by like 80% and increased their conversions while cutting the costs by that much it was just like astronomical work literally worth millions for a fraction of what he was paying us to do that work and we did that work for a couple years it was a fantastic relationship and then out of the blue one day he said hey guys your services are no longer needed this will be the last period on the contract and it shocked me to my core it was like our guaranteed golden egg for life type plan based on the results that we got for and again there's an ego thing I immediately started digging in I needed to know why we were getting fired what was going on it was like you guys really have a it was great the first year or so but you guys haven't done anything new for me in a while I don't know if I see the value anymore right this is an important lesson to learn like even if you create a ton of value it doesn't guarantee loyalty it does not guarantee loyalty but I kept digging and I kept digging and I kept digging I still couldn't quite figure out it was they were relatively weak sauce excuses of why he left us and so because of that it made me even angrier and I wanted I really really wanted to like give them a piece of my mind instead what I did in this case I had to do a lot of getting on this account instead what I did was I wished him the best of luck and I as a parting gift put together a small package of lifetime value that we created for his organization and that as a reminder and then I asked him where he was going and he told me the company that he was going with and I did research on that company and I found out that they're not really a great company so I gave him some predictions of what's going to happen and I said in regards to your SEO results which is a huge part of your business if somebody else takes over the work that we're doing those results will still stand for another 6 to 12 months or so but after that they're going to start to decline and once they start to decline it's going to be very very expensive to get them back to where they are so be very very careful with what you're doing I hope you know what you're doing but bon voyage and good luck and Godspeed sir and 8 months later he hired us back at twice what he was paying us before because we weren't jerks when he rolled out the door and because our predictions came true if you deeply understand your industry and what's working and why somebody might be leaving or what's going on giving predictions for the future does not cause you any harm as long as you're not being a jerk about it as long as you're not letting your ego get in the way and say just like we all have this natural reaction if somebody breaks up with us and starts going out with somebody else our natural reaction is like oh my gosh that person is terrible you just threw your life away that's not what I'm talking about what I'm talking about is doing your research and following through so in this scenario he ended up going with some vertical company that only did one thing to get people about it and come to find out later who made the decision because he was attracted to the salesperson and ended up dating her for a little while and then his business tanked and then the relationship tanked and it came back around so this one was devastating we were working with a local tech company in Orlando they were super demanding we gave them a pretty good deal because they were a startup, they didn't have a lot of funding yet and I was personally interested in them being successful and even though we gave them a great deal which cut our margins very slim they were more demanding than most clients so I think everybody in here who's done agency or client services work before there's this general general of the cheapest clients being the hardest ones to work with this was definitely right in that scenario this particular project ended up parting out my team and this was this was one of the only projects we've ever worked on where we were just kind of roped into it and we were so deep in the project that once the client started getting overly demanding and instead of being nice about his demands he was being brash and argumentative and accusatory with my team at every level of this project and it got to the point where it was just creating a toxic culture I literally lost two of my most valued employees because of this one project people just didn't want to work for this guy he was just terrible to work for and it didn't matter what we did it was never good enough and so it was a shame I hadn't done my homework at a time but apparently a lot of other people had worked with them in the past and they all had similar experiences but at the end of it because I lost two team members they left right around the same time that we launched the project and the client was still messaging these team members who had quit and the client was not getting any response so he's making the assumption that oh my gosh they hate me they don't and they clearly are dropping the ball and don't want to work with me anymore that means they're probably going to start talking about me around town so this guy promptly starts going to all the tech events and talking about how bad of a job we did on his project and how terrible of an agency we are this is the first time this had ever happened in our 12 years of doing business no one had ever said negative things about us to other people in the community and in this universe your reputation is everything and I know that we did a fantastic job I know our team delivered above and beyond so I had to do one of the things that I hate more than anything else on this planet I had to confront another person about their misbehavior and not just another person this is another CEO of a big company and I had to confront them about bad bad behavior I prepared for this meeting for two weeks and here's here's here's how the low road might look like I accuse him of the bad behavior I tell him how amazing of a job we did in spite of what he thinks and then I tell him how bad his behavior was and I tell him that my team members quit because of him and that he cost me all of this and I can't believe he's doing that that's the low road instead what I did was I swallowed my pride I sat across from him and I said I know for a fact that you would never say things like this about my company or my agency I know you would never do that you were too big of a person for that you also know this is a small world and there's no such thing as a perfect project probably problems on both sides and if my team was saying the same things about your team that nobody wins in the situation but maybe some people on your team are saying things by the way I knew that he was the one saying it because I knew the people that he was talking to apparently I had the inside scoop I knew who it was but instead of pinning him to the wall instead of putting his ego in a position of having to defend I told him that I was sure he would never do that and I also told him what it cost the agency but I did not blame him for my team members firing what I instead said was hey I had a couple team members leave it was very very stressful and I apologize that the communication wasn't great at the launch of your project and it's a lesson for us to learn and a way for us to get better I took blame that maybe I didn't need to take and I gave him an escape and the end result of that no one on this team nor he ever said anything bad about our organization again and while we don't do business with them anymore both his reputation and ours were preserved and protected and I think you can imagine that if I had taken the low road how that might have played out awesome alright so we are we are on the finish line here and we're about to jump into some questions I think we got a couple minutes for questions 15 minutes 15 minutes for questions alright I'm going to skip a couple and I'm going to jump to the last one and then we'll take questions so this is I've told this story before but this one is especially important this one isn't a client firing this is me being fired by an employee so a while probably more like 7 or 8 years now we had a team member that worked for us for for a short period of time let's say it was less than a year normally when we hire developers who don't have a lot of experience there was a significant investment in teaching them and helping level them up before they finally start to create value for the organization but this so normally we really kind of need them to work in our organization for about 2 years for us to get a return on investment and if anybody leaves prior to that 2 year period it's a huge loss for the organization as far as what we did and this team member rolled out around the 8 or 9 month mark they were really really starting to get good and they were definitely going places and it hurt it hurt a lot I really expected them to be with the organization for a long time and so my gut reaction my instinct was to hold them accountable and to tell them that they're making a huge mistake and I can't believe they do that to us and that whole deal but instead I asked them a lot and I didn't really get good reasons but I think it was probably because they didn't get along well with our senior developer at the time so they probably had good reasons to leave so instead I just said I'm glad we could be a part of the chapter in your life and I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors if you ever need anything which by the way that's a hard thing but if you plan on hiring people if you plan on growing an agency probably the most important thing that you can take to your heart when it comes to employees is that your job is to lift them up your job is to be a servant to them and your job is to realize that this isn't necessarily a lifestyle or a life mission to them the same way it is for you as an entrepreneur it's really just going to be a chapter in their life and it's your job to make it a positive chapter one where both parties walk away enriched from it but again took the high road in this situation and didn't share with them emotionally how I was feeling but instead wished them wish them the best and about a year or so maybe two years after that that person was organizing a local conference and invited me to come and speak at that conference and that was my first work camp and that was also the place and the day that I also met that mentor that I mentioned earlier that ended up in three sentences being worth about $30,000 going to that first work camp I have met so many incredible people I have met so many amazing people who have taught me so much about my own business about how to be a good leader and also how to be a good teacher and also how to be a good student it's such a rich and powerful community that we've all built here and it's important that we all find a way to put our ego aside when it comes to being fired or firing and take the high road every time don't forget that ten years from now your best clients probably won't be your best clients this is temporary you are going to grow and the people that are around you and people that surround you are going to change and they're either going to grow with you or they're going to change your mistakes now your pain now is what you're going to call your experience thank you questions we've got ten minutes I'm going to put up this is my AMA and while the questions are going on I'll put the slide information up if the screen goes away or if you still need it let me know alright, what do you got for me? I'm hoping to have a conversation with Donald how would the conversation go if you're having to fire someone? how would the conversation go if you're having to fire someone? yeah, so in a small business you don't have an HR company and the only advice I can give you there is it's going to suck and if it doesn't suck then you're doing it wrong meaning it's going to hurt internally the event itself I've only done this a handful of times even though I've been in business for a very long time I haven't had to do a lot of fire but I will say this from the view that I've done the key is short professional to the point and then separate quickly do not hang around you can answer a couple of questions but then shut it down do not draw it out it's just like a breakup if you're breaking somebody's heart they're going to want to cling to you and ask you a million questions and follow you around and sometimes do damage to your stuff it's emotional it's not professional at that point for somebody who's getting fired but assuming this is in person always just professional there are no personal attacks you won't accept personal attacks if somebody starts to say anything negative on a personal level and then on top of that as a recommendation if they have access to any sensitive stuff prior to the meeting shut that down as well no matter how much you love that person or trust that person or think they're your family or whatever it is firings can make people weird and if you accept that emotions may come to the surface and you are just calm and professional just short, clean, professional close it down don't drag it out don't try and give a million reasons don't try to give them your whole thought process on why it's happening here's the main reason we're going to have to let you go thank you so much for everything you've done you're amazing I think you're going to do greater things somewhere else that's how you're doing it you're still killing them with kindness out the door how often do you think if you think they deserve it absolutely in some cases you may be paying them for you may be giving them some runway depending on how valuable they were if they weren't valuable at all probably no runway sometimes these things go you have to make a determination based on who they are and what they brought to your company kind of hard there's a couple I think hers was up first as a follow-up to that the advice to keep it short and sweet when you are doing the fire and the other advice when you are being fired you need to figure out why how do you handle all that it's just about asking questions it can still be short and sweet there's only a couple questions you can ask when you're getting fired why am I being fired is there anything better we can have done and it's really only a couple questions and they're the same questions that you might ask if you're being fired was it something that I did could I have done anything better maybe I'll ask for a letter or a recommendation it's still short and sweet both ways but like I said some clients are not going to want to when you're firing somebody you may not want to give them your whole thought process you're just keeping it short and sweet but sometimes you can get more out of a client by digging and sometimes that's where the gold is at and it is a little bit different between agency and client versus boss and employee firing clients when they're completely as you said for instance this wholesaler or tech company was completely toxic maybe one of the decisions would have been firing the client before it affected your whole organization it happened to me as well so when you decide that and how to do it so that's a great question I actually skipped over the slide where I got into that one a little bit so this will give me an opportunity to do that real quick we we have a what I would call a simple and elegant way of firing clients and I think everybody in this room would benefit from this method of firing clients let's just make the assumption that you've already decided to fire a client for whatever reasons let's just make that assumption when you get to that point in the relationship whether because it's toxic or because they harass the team member or if they were just a terrible person and they're doing personal attacks or if they're overly demanding and they don't appreciate your value whatever the reasons are so you've gotten to the point where you need to fire a client I highly recommend taking the road of letting them fire themselves there's a little bit of a magic to this if you fire a client you burn a bridge and you burn your ability to get more business from them in the future and your ability to maybe get referrals from them in the future but if the client fires themselves then no bridges are burned and there's still opportunity in the future so this is the path that I take and it depends on where the conflict is now don't get me wrong there are exceptions to the rule if a client is sexually harassing somebody or using profanity and demeaning members of your team that's an unequivocable you're fired good day sir situation that's different but if it's for professional reasons let's say they're too demanding or you're not getting enough value from the client or the client's just obtained a work with and you just don't really want to work with them anymore what we end up doing is saying so we've taken a close look at this account we are finishing up an evaluation we're planning on getting back to you if we need to meet with you within the next couple of weeks to review our findings so we give them some a little bit of crap time to know that something's coming right so there's no like coming out of the blue and we're going to have a weird conversation it's like hey we're auditing your account we notice that there's some issues on the account that we really need to deal with and we're going to work through this and come to you with our findings and see if we can find a positive way to resolve these issues so and then we come to them in a meeting and we say hey we've analyzed the account and we realize that on this particular account we're actually putting in a lot more work than we expected and the margins are just not there unfortunately we'd love to work with you some more but the value just isn't there for our organization it might not be a good fit based on our sizes or maybe our culture or communication styles that might be causing the issues that being said we've got two options here either we can reset the contract over here at this rate a different hourly rate or a different flat rate pricing that you're going forward or alternatively and you can give them another option of different ways of doing business with you but basically the line is here you go, you get to choose both of these solutions are the only way that will allow it to work for you so maybe the other solution is let's say you have a communication problem with the client we need your team to either replace this person with somebody else or you can work with us because there's a conflict of communication or let's say someone on their team is they keep calling us out of hours or weekends they're violating whatever your rules are in your organization so you need to change all of these things and we're at this rate or we can help you find another agency so we're giving them two options we're not firing them we can help you find another agency we'll be happy to give you some recommendations for somebody who's a better fit for you or we can reset here's all the new rules and the new pricing and usually the new rules and the new pricing are so far out of their league that there's no universe where they're going to choose that option so now they are graciously saying oh we love your help finding somebody else who's a better fit for us and they fire themselves and you don't burn a bridge does that make sense alright we're good if you guys have any other questions well actually I think this thing's closing down is there closing comments there are some unofficial after parties pressable or walkthrough.us have an information on that on their Twitter otherwise enjoy your evenings we'll see you right early tomorrow when we copy alright I'll be here tomorrow so if anybody has any more questions tomorrow as I wander around I'll be in trouble