Eighty percent of your results come from twenty percent of your clients – as a business coach, I always advise CEO’s to at least fire the bottom twenty percent of your clients (they’re sucking up eighty percent of your time).
Feels odd to be thinking about getting rid of some of your revenues at any time, let alone during an economic downturn, but these clients likely generate very little revenue, and perhaps even cost you money. So get rid of them.
Your bottom 20% also take up more of your time and energy too.
When cutting these bottom twenty percent clients, you can also eliminate some of the waste or overhead you have in supporting them. You’ll free up time in all areas of your business especially shipping, customer service and accounting. You’ll save time in your sales meetings by not talking about these clients.
Fire the bottom twenty percent: clients who take up time, suck up energy or don’t pay their bills. You’ll free up more time for your profitable clients and get more business from new, better ones.
Who would you rather spend time with? Your Top 5% or your Bottom 20%? Where are you spending it now?
Tim
June 6, 2010
Hi Cameron,
I agree totally with your comments.
As we all know and as you point out, it is a very difficult and scary decision to make – firing some Clients in this economic climate.
You speak with thousands of people each year and must have some real life examples where businesses have done this and can talk actively about the benefits they derived from this action.
Maybe that would help many others be less fearful of talking that step?
I’d happy create the website to host the stories for no other reason than it lets people see that this can be a very successful strategy and they can see many examples of where this has made a real difference to other businesses.
Just an idea….
Kevin