 So, we are here today to talk about, instead of firing a client, which I've talked about more than once, it's before when you get the client, when does a bid turn into consulting and when should you let it go? And this is very relevant. He's, he actually gave me some great advice because I was really struggling with a customer. And yeah, I've been in business 15 years, yeah, thousands of sales and the whole staff and I still am being honest, I have struggled sometimes with customers because sometimes you don't know when to let go. There's sales that go really easy, like, oh, I want this and I know I do this. So, I provide that. Then this customer comes at me and this is not the first one but this is just the most recent one with a list of things they want for their new server. Sounded reasonable. And then five emails, a 40 minute phone call later. I don't know what she wants still and maybe she's watching this. I don't think she watches my YouTube, but on the off-chance. If not, maybe it'll be a good wake up call. Good wake up call. I just finally had to decline the project and I hate doing it because she became, she was a referral from one of my businesses that we actively engage with. It's like, hey, you can, you've helped my company. You can probably help hers. I couldn't and not because they just had ways they wanted to do things that I didn't think was made any sense to me. Like they wanted to use technology in a way. They wanted to use QuickBooks in a way that does not designed to be used. And then they wanted me to support that and I'm like, no, here's the thing from QuickBooks that says that's not the way to do it. And I get this email back. I've been doing this for 20 years this way and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they lost track of their other IT guy and I'm like lost track of them. He quit returning your calls. That's probably what happened. I feel like it may be the backstory. I'm just assuming here, but that's definitely a possibility way. Well, yeah. They ran away too. Yeah, they ran away. You know, I do a free consultation with people when I'm doing consulting. And I think doing that helps to put people to ease because you've got to give away something. And when I do that consulting call, in that first hour, I'm determining if I want to do business with this person. But they're also determining if they want to do business with me. And I give a lot of things away for free in that consulting appointment. But I think you and I were talking about when is it that you need to start charging for things like this? Yeah. And so if you didn't know or you don't watch previous videos, Brett does business consulting. And obviously you're here because you probably know I do IT. But there's a similar thing where it's not just I'm providing a service. It's a solution we're providing. So there's always this determination you have to. And I've seen people, oh, you should charge for all your sales calls. I'm like, well, that's a good way not to even get your calls. Correct. And it's different. I'm not talking about where we go in a deep dive and assessment that you should charge for where you actually do some engaging work. But that initial call sometimes sit down with a client. You have to fill it out there. Like I suggested these are the server ideas I had for the way they should do it. You should set up remote desktop. You set this. So there are a lot of things I give away. And I'll actually refer back to something simpler like wireless consulting. We did this big bowling alley. We had to go out there, spend some time figuring out where all the Wi-Fi is. But I call it my crayon drawings. We scribbled it out and we measured it, measured a building with a little wheel thing, and we drew some pictures and we go, OK, these are where the Wi-Fi devices should go. It's very general. We know specifically where they go. They know it generally because there is the risk that they're just going to do it on their own. And that's a lot of people say, you should charge for any Wi-Fi assessment you do. I'm like, no, I would lose the lead again. Right. And we close the majority of them. But sometimes you don't. And then you've now given, all right, you probably need 16 devices to make this job work. Now they have that information too. Right. But I've got to ask you, though. How many times when you've done it, let's say you've had somebody, you've gone out and done this estimate, and they go and try to do it themselves, what happens a couple months later? We get a call. Right. Yeah. Because sometimes they bid it out to the lowest bidder. And especially with technology, you're not comparing apples and oranges. It's not like they're just going to take my quote and drop the same thing in. We took over IT from a company that actually had the same stack we used of both hardware software. Like, it looks like a job we would have recommended. We actually joked. Like, did they watch my YouTube videos? But they had configured it all improperly. So the good news we have for the client was, hey, good. You have nice equipment. You have the right equipment. Bad news is it's all configured very wrong. Right. And so it cost them less because it was easy for us to just change the configurations, adopt them on as a client, and fix what the previous IT company had done. But once again, it took an evaluation to get there. And because I had an idea what the problem is, technically, just on the sales call because I logged in and looked at something. I seen how they had it hooked up. I changed one rule and it fixed the immediate problem they had. But I won them over as a client. Like I said, they go, what do I owe for that? And I'm like, it's a sales call? I guessed that these guys had done nothing wrong and they did. Right. So those are fine. There's like, Fred said, there's a lot you have to give away. It's really hard, but you do have to stop. And once I decided I was like a 40 minute phone call and just all these emails back and forth that were paragraphs of telling me I'm doing it wrong is always a red flag. Right, right. Ask for my advice and then tell me I'm wrong. That's never a good way to have a relationship. I did a workshop and one of the people I got to meet with after that workshop, we sat for about an hour and a half. And it had a great conversation in a coffee shop. And I gave her a lot of information. And I realized up front that I wasn't going to be able to. I was going to be able to help this person, but I wasn't going to make any money doing it. And there are sometimes you have to do that too. I was able to help her and she was very appreciative. And I said, if there's ever something, as you move through the processes that we talked about today, when you become successful, what you're doing and when you want some more advice, then we can talk about. Because she wanted to work with me. She couldn't afford what I was going to have to charge, even if I charged half of my rate. So there's sometimes where I want to help somebody and I'll help them. And you've done that too. You'll help them. But it's when that customer or that potential client starts to say things like, no, that's wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. There's a point where you have to say, OK, we either need to end this relationship or we need to start charging for it. Yeah. So it's hard to figure out always when that is and it can be in different places. Either they can't meet the prices that you're charging. And that's not necessarily an indication that you should just go lower. Because at some point you know your market value. You know what you get for this type of project. You should always be aligning to make sure your price value does match your market you're in. But in reality, it's just some people that are going, hey, great, I want this. And that happens a lot with clients where they come in thinking they want something really big and they realize that's just not an affordable solution to them. I'm like, people go in, I want complete redundant servers and all this other stuff. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's about $25,000. When do you want to get started? You're like, oh, my budget was $5,000. I'm like, well, we got to talk then. We're going to have to scale back to your size. Because there is simply the hardware purchase alone exceeds your budget. So there's times you can't do anything. But you still keep a very professional out. And that's what he actually had a suggestion for the wording you told me. Yeah. Do you remember what she said? Well, I think it was you were resending an email. And I think they had said something about, well, she had emailed you something because if you say what the email was about, I'll remember what I told you to write. What was the email about? What did it say? Do you remember? Yeah. And it was basically her asking, it was the bottom line was she wanted to use QuickBooks in a way that QuickBooks didn't say. And I just said, look, I can't support this configuration. And that's where I paused on my email. I can't support it. And you said something like thank you for your time. Thank you for your time. I wasn't aware of what your budget constraints were. I wasn't aware of what your budget constraints were and what you're looking at. And it might be a better idea to do something about looking elsewhere. Looking elsewhere. We may not be a fit for each other. It's about coming up with a polite wording back and forth. There's not a way I can give you a cookie cutter on this because it's going to be different for each one. But wherever the impasse was or the other problem is, and this is one of the other questions she had for me, I thought I would get too very drawn out. That was it. And that's what you answered and responded to. Hey, I wasn't aware of your, because there was something about budget. I wasn't aware of your budget constraints or that you wanted this detailed of information. I was just giving you basic information, thinking that we could have another discussion. And she thought I was going to detail it out in absolute detail. Tell her what licenses to buy, what quantities to buy, how much each license. Like a whole lot of detail. Give her the recipe for nothing. Yeah. And it was not, it sound like just a quote. It was a, I want all these comparative quotes. She had a series of ideas. And at that point it's consulting where I want to know what my business looks like model after this scenario detailed out, then this scenario detailed out, then this one. And they were completely wildly different. It was like kind of asking for one extreme, the other extreme, and maybe a middle, but not like a simple quote. Like very, she wanted the absolute license costing details. At that point it becomes consulting because you're looking for a template that you can then go hand on there. And one of the red flags that was raised and the second to the last email was, I just want to buy it all directly from Dell, I have a coupon. When you're the CEO of a company and you tell me you have a coupon to buy it directly and want me to give the quote, you've pretty much said you don't really want, you don't value my time now. And you just want to order everything directly without me and maybe have me configure the part that you don't know how to configure. And I'm like, at some point I can't figure out where that is and they don't want to say because, well, they're fishing for information and it's where you kind of have to go, we're probably not a good fit to work with each other. There's a fine line with that because how long would it have taken you to do that analysis? Honestly, how long? Probably at least an hour or two minimum of my time. And I'm fast at it. So I know how to put all these things together because I work in this industry, but still an hour or two of my time is a lot. The most expensive thing ever is your own time. Always remember that. That is hugely important. So the sales process can be hard and you have to weigh it out. Like how much will I make on this sale? Honestly, this server project for was not a big money maker for us. It was not some project that I'm going to be, wow, it's worth spending an hour at a time because it does scale upwards. I did a very large Wi-Fi bid. It takes more of my time, but the reward for it, it's a six-figure bid, so okay. That's the return on investment that you're looking for. Right, but when you talk about the potential that I'm only going to make a few hundred bucks on it for whatever, just a couple hours of consulting time or something like that, how much do I spend a few hours putting up proposals together when they don't even want to buy the hardware for me? So there's like, I'm cut out of it except for some minor consulting and they didn't want to pay a consulting fee for me to put the bids together. That I think was the kicker. Yeah, that was another kicker they had in there. They wanted you to spend hours of time, hours. Yeah. Because you'd already spent a 40-minute conversation, a ton of emails, and now probably another two hours of figuring, don't do it. Yeah. Don't give away, I just got to say, you can't give away that time because your time is precious. Yeah. I can't even say precious. It's hard because this is just a mentality you can read, it's the sunken cost myth. And this is a problem where if someone puts a few dollars into something, they become so committed to it even if it loses them more money and that same mentality can catch you up when you're doing a sale where you can just go, I'm just so committed because I got this far. Look, I'm two hours into it. I got to get a return on it. And if it's only a dollar return, is that worth it? Because you're gonna spend more time on it than you think. Right. And let me see, our goal is always to have a long-term client, but if it starts out this rocky, it's a lot of red flags because the goal is never to fire a customer. The goal is if you can pre-screen them well enough, you never have to fire a customer. You just choose not to do business with somebody. Yeah. And that's okay. That's okay for everybody. And that happens every day in every industry. People choose not to do business with people. But defining that fine line of what is just pre-sale and what is where you need to actually start making money, that's a fine line. Yeah. And I had another email come in the other day and I actually referred them over to someone else because it went out of what I do. They had a question about, they wanted me to get on a conference, call it them about a comparison to about five different phone systems. None of them I've ever sold before, but I have talked about them on my YouTube channel and they thought I would just for free jump on the phone with them and have a discussion with their IT department about it. I'm like, there's nothing in it for me. I kind of meant that a very, and that was actually a reply. I said, I don't sell any of these. I said, so I would charge you for my time to consult. They go, oh, we can buy, aren't you a reseller for all these? I'm like, no. And once I realized what they narrowed down what they're looking for, I referred them over to my friend who specializes in that because they actually, when I did talk to them a little bit more, I still went a step further and emailed them back a couple of times. They were really looking for one specific one and that my friend specializes in. So I'm like, oh, well then just reach out to him. That's, you are in exactly the world he's in and they are, they thank me very much and they say, well, they may use this in the future, which I appreciate because they got an honest answer for me, I didn't charge them any money. You let them down nicely that it probably wasn't a fit. I'm not just out here for the money. I could have charged them, could have done more, but you focus down on it and go, all right, I'll refer them over to here, keep a good, open thing. Son of a thank you letter for reaching out to me and away we go. And it doesn't have to end badly when you do this, but you don't want it to end badly for you either. Well, the biggest thing is don't burn any bridges because you never know when a contact's gonna come back to you and need something else and actually that could turn into a more lucrative contract. Yeah, especially when someone puts things in caps like I was expecting a more detailed quote, really. Yeah. I, my desire to be snarky is always there, but I will, I will. You called me, you called me and said, what should I say? That opening line of a, yeah. I like the politically correct thing because I think don't burn a bridge, but don't sell yourself short. And I think when you don't charge for something, you're hurting other people in the industry. There's another thing to think about. You're hurting other people in the industry. There's a point where you need to start charging because if you don't, just the next person that comes around is gonna fall into that same trap and it's a downward spiral. Yeah. So you got it, there's a happy balance here and that's kind of what I'm gonna get here. It will leave you with that. That you have to think about it, value your time. I don't understand. I've seen people say, well, you should just charge for sales. I haven't seen a business model around that work if you've found someone that has some figured something out, but I don't know any IT people who charge you just to even look at something in terms of like, hey, I'd like you to come and give me a proposal to wire my building. Oh, you gotta give me 150 bucks to even tell you how much it is to wire your building. I have a feeling I wouldn't be going out as often as I am. And I have a feeling that people that are doing that aren't around as much or are not gonna be around. Yeah. I mean, because asking for a quote on how to wire the building is different than how would you wire it and can you draw me an entire schematic? Well, now that would be. Now that's time to charge. That's time to charge. Us going through and sketching it up real quick on a drawing board so we can give you a proposal because we need to know how many and give you a quote on it. So you just gotta figure out what that line is and it does take a little your time, a little effort to close the deal but you gotta figure out when to not close the deal. I know it sounds a little fuzzy but these are just things you have to constantly be thinking about and you're probably going over in your head right now going, I do know Kofo, I should probably stop replying to him. Like, yeah, it's a spiral. So thanks and leave comments in the below and see you next time. All right. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, go ahead and click the thumbs up. 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