Episode 7:“Are You Pineapple-Worthy?”
Today we’re digging into onboarding clients, students, and customers. Why care about your onboarding? How can you do it better?
Summary
Nick and Kai walk through their client onboarding processes, from first contact through project kickoff, including the deliberate friction points each uses to filter out bad fits before money changes hands. The conversation extends to offboarding, gift-giving as relationship maintenance, and what it actually takes to run a full practice with a waiting list.
Highlights
- Nick requires video on every DraftRevise prospect call. If a client pushes to audio-only or demands IM, the call is canceled and the engagement doesn’t move forward.
- The Van Halen brown M&M contract rider was a diagnostic: if a brown M&M appeared backstage, it meant the crew hadn’t read the contract carefully, and the band would audit the entire stage setup. Nick uses this as the framing for why every detail of a first impression matters.
- Kai splits his onboarding into two separate documents: one covering steps up to payment, a second covering what the next three months look like after the check clears.
- Nick’s offboarding checklist for DraftRevise includes canceling Stripe billing, archiving the Basecamp and Slack projects, mailing a thank-you card, and setting a three-month follow-up reminder. He says that last step alone has recovered tens of thousands of dollars in returning clients.
- Kai describes Philip Morgan’s approach: during prospecting calls, Philip tracks red marks against a list of roughly 10 criteria, and past a certain threshold he won’t take the engagement.
- Nick cites Alan Weiss’s rule of turning over about 15% of your client load per year, which for an eight- or nine-client practice means cutting one client annually.
- Kai caps himself at five retainer slots and turns away clients he wants to work with rather than add a sixth. He frames taking a sixth as a disservice to existing clients, the new client, and himself.
Read the transcript
January 29th, 2016. Kai mailed me a pound of brown M<unk>Ms today. I didn’t know how many M<unk>Ms were in a pound, so I went to Google it. Kai mailed me five hundred seventeen Brown M and M’s today. I am very disappointed in him, and I love him. I love him dearly. So, onboarding. I feel like we need to onboard listeners to this podcast because they don’t know what we’re doing, but Essentially, what would you define an onboarding process as?
I’d say an onboarding process is a structured Pattern that you hand to a new person, be it a client, a prospect, a customer, or a student. That informs them of the next steps to expect as they move forward with the engagement or the purchase. It’s basically giving them a list. It’s removing the fog of war for what should happen next in an engagement or an encounter.
I like that. My definition is slightly different. I actually define it as everything from the moment you walk in the door, however that looks, you email me, you apply for something. to one of two endgames, either when you pay me or when kickoff has completed, depending on the type of the project. I consider even like following through a little bit of the process after you’ve paid me. Like you’re not fully onboarded. You don’t really know what’s going to be happening until maybe we get into an initial meeting and we talk about strategy. Or you don’t have a you know, you might come in without a clear sense of exactly what the offering is, and still manage to pay me a lot of money for it, which I think is very interesting.
Hearing you say that, I think I start to realize like I actually, in most of my engagements, have two separate onboarding processes. One is informing people what happens up to that point where you pay me and like one or two steps beyond. And the second is, okay, now that you’ve paid me and we’ve started this engagement, here’s what the next three months look like. So when somebody approaches me to work as a coaching student. I’ll say like, okay, cool. Like, here are the next steps up until the point you pay me. And here’s what comes after that. Generally, it’s we’ll get on a call. I’ll answer your questions. I’ll ask some interrogative questions about your business. If I decide I want to work with you, you could pay me. And then we’ll do a kickoff workshop. And then once they pay me, I’m like, cool. Here’s step two. We’ll do the kickoff workshop. We’ll define a plan. And here’s what the next three months look like. So I Split it in half, so I have two separate onboarding processes that overlap maybe by 10%, and hand them the document, so to speak, at the right time. Yes.
My onboarding process is less rigorous but longer term. So I’ll just outline let’s say draft revise. I’ll outline what happens when you apply for draft revise. I determine whether or not you’re a good fit. A lot of people apply to DraftRevise who aren’t a good fit for whatever reason, either. I’m sold out, which is the most common one. or they don’t make enough traffic to actually mandate A B testing on their website, and they think that it’s a sack of money button. That’s the second most common. Or they’re just not a good industry fit. Like a lot of agencies apply for A-B testing, thinking that they get enough traffic or enough of a conversion rate on seven-figure projects that it actually warrants. Running an A-B test, and that’s almost never the case. So I have my assistant do a smell test on whether or not it’s a good fit. If it’s not a good fit in whatever capacity, unless they’re completely a jerk, then I send them on to Revise Express and suggest, you know, just. Get a tear down, and we’ll figure out what to do next. I’m trying to find other more appropriate ways to tackle that, like doing a dashboard rework to decrease your churn, that sort of thing. Once you get past the smell test, if you are a good fit for A-B testing, I send you what’s called a welcome packet, where it’s just a PDF that Handles as many of the most frequently asked questions that I get from clients as humanly possible to try and address that sort of stuff before we get on a call. And then I also send them a link to my calendar so that they can actually schedule a call and figure that out. Once they get on a call, they have to actually have video on and see my face. If they punt to a phone call or audio only, we reschedule the call. If they are not getting enough bandwidth, we reschedule the call. If they demand to go over IM only, which has happened with clients, I cancel the call and we don’t move forward with the project. Do all of those things in order to it’s important that you see my face, period, full stop. You have to know I’m a real person, not just a crappy contractor who’s pressing the A-B test button and making you money. We have to get along. If we’re on a draft revise engagement, you’re going to see my face a lot. You’re going to. probably get on Skype calls with me to hack through stuff. And the more friendly and relaxed that we can feel around each other, the better. I think that’s very important. Usually, by the time you’ve gotten on the call, you’ve already decided whether or not to buy the service, and your wallet is out. I haven’t even told you the price yet, but your wallet is out, and the price is probably going to be fair to you. I end up quoting the price after we get off the call in order to determine kind of what your needs are, how big your traffic is, what the ultimate financial upside would be of my working with you, what the major impacts would be out of A-B testing. Then I offer you what’s called like a pricing sheet, where I give you a couple of different options of the prices. depending on how much work and value you want me to be delivering for you. And then you pay me or not. And then the onboarding doesn’t end there. Once you pay me, I give you Basecamp, Slack and Visual Website Optimizer accounts and get you set up on all of those things. I begin writing a giant teardown of your entire marketing funnel that takes about a week, and I begin planning out our first set of A-B tests. I believe onboarding is completed with DraftRevise when you have your first set of A-B tests running. And that often takes two, three weeks from You applying to the A-B test is running, somewhere in the middle of which you’ve paid me. So that’s my onboarding process for that.
That makes sense. And I like how, in the middle, like your onboarding process isn’t just, here’s how I get a client. from payment to working with me, but there’s multiple what I like to think of as speed bumps in there where you’re like, well, if they’re not willing to video chat with me We’re done. We’re going to reschedule. Like you’re putting these roadblocks in place where the client has to swerve around. And if they’re not willing to conform to how you work. they’re done. And I encourage every consultant that I work with, like put these in place, make your clients qualify themselves to you. Because that will result in a dramatically better client relationship. They might come in thinking, like, I’m hiring a pair of hands off of Fiverr, or Upwork, I’m hiring the monkey to press the A-B test button for me, but, or the bird to reference the Simpson episode. But by putting these in place, you’re essentially saying, like, no, I value my time. To work together, you need to value my time. These are the requirements to demonstrate you value my time. If you fulfill these requirements, then we could work together, or then we could begin the process of working together.
Yeah. Yeah. I like that a lot. There’s a lot of like public optics things that come out of that, right? You are. You’re coming off as a consultant. What does it mean to be a consultant? A consultant addresses business value first using tools at their disposal. That may be design, that may be writing, that may be programming. And consultants carry themselves in a specific way. They just do. There’s down to your style of dress, down to the exact verbiage you use. They all matter when you’re dealing with a client engagement. And all of that is meant to convey: this person is not a journeyman, developer, designer that I’m getting off of a chop shop, right? That you can. If you need somebody to chop your PSD for you, you can send it off to another country and be done with it within a week. But that’s not why you’re hiring me. There’s a deeper set of thinking at play. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Absolutely. And the onboarding. I guess the onboarding is also. us, the the generic, the us as consultants, listener included, training the client on what to expect. Giving them instructions on how an engagement will proceed. It’s making it easier for us so we don’t have to explain it every single time, write the same email every time instead of saying, Here’s a welcome packet. It tells you what to expect. And these are the steps as we move forward, and this is what to expect. As we move forward from if I decide you are allowed to pay me to starting that first engagement, starting that test, going through a kickoff project together and seeing what comes from that. It’s optimization in a sense.
In a sense, yeah. I mean, I’m always retooling my onboarding process because it’s the first impression that somebody typically gets of you. And if you’re sitting behind a Skype Call. Right now, I’m wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and I feel very comfortable in a T-shirt and jeans. But if I went on a prospective client Skype call wearing anything short of a jacket, like I actually like dress up for it. I don’t think you do that, but I do that. I’m using a nice pen when I do that. We talked a little bit about pens in a previous episode, hilariously. You know coming into this engagement that I’m there to muck with the internal workings of your business and charge a lot of money for it. Full stop. That’s it. I love doing both of those things. It’s because I’ve gotten, frankly, closer to that money and to that business value that’s allowed me to charge a lot more in my work. And All of that starts with the onboarding process.
Yeah, yeah, touching on the dress aspect, I I definitely, it’s not that I don’t dress up for client calls, it’s more that I wear my normal outfit, which is a nice hoodie from REI or Banana Republic, a pair of jeans. Present myself in a casual way because my interactions with a client are I’d say in a casual demeanor. I struggle for the right words, but I try to frame my engagement with a client as close to my actual personality as possible. Take it or leave it. That’s what you get when you’re hiring Kai. Like behind me, I have a print from Mike Montero hanging up on my wall that says, fuck you, pay me. It’s my favorite quote from one of his talks at Creative Mornings in San Francisco. And I frequently have clients comment on that. Like I get on a call for Prospect and they’re like, that’s a very interesting print you have behind you. And I’m like, it is. It’s from this talk about. You know how designers and consultants need to set parameters with clients and charge what they’re worth and make sure that they get paid fairly. So, let’s start talking about how I could help your business. Thinking about it, it feels like a subtle Jedi mind trick. Like it sends a message to the client, like, this guy’s confident enough to have a poster behind him that says, fuck you, pay me. And we’re about to talk about him paying me multiple thousands of dollars, or me paying him multiple thousands of dollars for an engagement. What’s going on? This is a bit different. It’s a little disorienting.
Yeah, I like that. I used to have a row of stuffed animals on the shelf behind me, and people would invariably call out the stuffed animals. And I would list all of their names and a couple of their life stories. And then you would recognize that I actually like, while I am taking myself very, very seriously on this client call. I’m also like able to do something really frivolous and weird and name my stuff animals and put them up there. And it worked really well for getting a certain type of client that, you know, was able to take very few things seriously but the work. And focus very carefully on the work. And I love hanging out with people that take few things seriously but the work, because it shows they have a personality and that I can actually resonate with that. And that’s something that I really do aspire to.
I realized a couple of days ago that every single one of my clients right now is a client that I would be happy if they called me up and said, like, Hey, I’m in Eugene. Do you want to go grab dinner? And like, the answer would be an instantaneous yes. Or, like, yeah, I’m cooking something. Come on over. Like, the cl. I have Begun framing myself in these onboarding and these prospecting questions in these video chats and the early conversations with clients to read out people who I wouldn’t be able to develop a relationship with. Maybe not a friendship, since it can be awkward mixing friendship with. Work, but who I could develop a relationship with. And it’s been successful. I look at my five clients on retainer right now, and I’m like, I would go out to dinner in a minute with any single one of these people and be glad to share a drink with them because. We could have a rapport. And like you just highlighted, we could talk about the business, and we’re both focused on having the business succeed, but there’s a personality and there’s a humanity, and there’s Engagement beyond just the numbers. And I’ve hated every engagement where it’s just like, how many links did we build? How much is traffic up? Great. Calls over.
Those are no fun. There’s more to life than that, right? I have had dinner with five of my eight clients so far. I had dinner with one of my clients last week, and lunch with another one of my clients the week before that. And I love it. I love that, frankly, I live in a large international city with a major airport and people can get off the plane and take the train in 20 minutes and have dinner with me. And it’ll be a good dinner. Like, we’ll have a good time and be able to have a good conversation and eat good food. And that’s. That’s really valuable. I want to talk about another thing about the onboarding process for a minute and shift away from the relationship stuff, which is important. A certain meticulousness that you can carry yourself with in the onboarding process. When you send something like a welcome packet, when you Have an assistant tackling a lot of things, and they’re particularly well organized. You send a signal that you are Like organized and professional in a safe bet. Clients want safe bets. They just do. And they’re not going to that’s why they go off of referrals. That’s why they go off of your pedigree and your portfolio. That’s why those things are important. They’re not going to go with somebody who doesn’t have a portfolio and looks like they’re just fresh out of college and takes 15 minutes to reply to your initial email during business hours. Like that’s not a great way to go about doing it. And I’m going to cite one thing that I just remembered. And this is a good thing to talk about. Do you know the band Van Halen? I I have heard of them. They yeah, they’re like hair rock from the eighties and nineties and very influential. Yeah, there you go. For the audience, people who don’t know who Van Halen are. Do you know what they did with their roadies? No, no. Oh. They had a stage rider, and their standard contract contained a provision calling for them to be furnished with a bowl of MMs backstage. But the MMs had to have all of the brown ones removed. And if they found a brown MM, the reason they did this was if you were If you were finding a Brown MM and they didn’t do this properly, that was a sign that there were other things broken behind the scenes, and they would always find something else. So if Van Halen ever found a Brown Min M, they would conduct a complete review of the entire stage setup and delay their show even and like go out and do all of these things. And this was like an urban legend for years, and then somebody found a contract that actually had it in there. But they would cancel a scheduled appearance without advance notice. They would be very, very upset if they ever, ever found a Brown MM. And you can screw up as a consultant. I screw up pretty frequently, but I, in the first impression, Try not to. You should remove the brown MMs from your user experience, having people be onboarded.
And I love that story. The brown MMs serve as a canary in the coal mine. Where, if they miss this detail, or there’s no MMs in the dressing room, I mean, we could like, I know Lady Gaga has some ridiculous provisions in her rider where you have to do X, Y, and Z, and this has to be in the dressing room. And it serves to make sure that The person who is in charge of, as we’re pointing out, preparing the stage, preparing the scene, is reading through and hitting all the details because if they’re missing these details Or at least asking, not asking, like, why do you need all brown MMs? They aren’t reading the contract, they aren’t reading the writer. Our onboarding packet and onboarding process sort of serves that same purpose. If a client isn’t willing to turn on video for the Skype call. Well, that’s the Brown MM. That’s, hey, you’re missing, the client is missing on, or messing up on the writer, messing up on the details we’re putting in place to make sure it’s a successful engagement. So it goes both ways. We don’t want there to be. Any mistakes in how we present ourselves when we’re first working with the client, but we also want to have these restrictions in place. So we’re only working with the good clients. Whenever a prospect emails me, I have a set of five questions that I always send back. It’s a nice templated email. I always get responses back, but I make sure to say in there: hey, the more information you give me here, the better or the easier it will be for me to determine if we’ll worked it well together. And if I could help your business. And if I get responses back that are one sentence long, I know this is not going to be a good fit. When I get the responses back that are three to five sentences, a paragraph for each question, I’m like, okay, cool. You passed test number one. We’re going to be able to work well together.
Yeah, yeah, it goes both ways. You should not be handing me brown MMs. If you’re like. signaling is a bad communicator in your application, that is a Brown MM. If you are showing up 15 minutes late to your first call, that is a Brown MM. If you show up and demand to chat on IM, that is a Brown Min M. If you don’t pay me on time or you have a really broken development process, those are each separate Brown Ms. And, you know, I’m usually handed one or two Brown MMs over the course of onboarding, but the pickier you are, the less tolerant you can be of a Brown MM. I would love. I would love to go nuclear at the slightest sight of a brown MM. Love to. I work towards that every day in my job.
I think our colleague Philip Morgan does this really, really well. What he does is he has a list of Like the 10 things he looks for in a good client relationship. And when he’s on an onboarding call of somebody, when he’s on a prospecting call of somebody, he’ll give them a red X if they mess up. And if they get more than a certain number of red marks. It’s done. Like he will not work with them. They have failed. And I adopt something similar in my business. And I’m not sure if it’s they start out at like 30 points and they have to hit 100 for us to work together, or they start at 100 and they can’t dip below 70 for us to work together. But Whichever way it is, we’re putting these criteria in place even in this early onboarding process to make sure that the people who make it through the gauntlet are people who will work well with us.
Yeah, yeah. I’m by the time this podcast airs, I will have fired a client that just started like suddenly treating me fairly poorly. Things have been going well for a long period of time and then they didn’t. And that’s a sign to me that either you’ve lost the enthusiasm to continue the engagement or I did something and you don’t feel comfortable broaching it to me. And in either of those situations, I literally have nothing I can do for you. Like, I can haul you on a call and be like, look, this isn’t going well. What’s up? I can probably salvage it. I mean, there are other reasons why I’m probably going to end this engagement, but there are, like, those were the big ones, right? Like, if you’re able to be enthusiastic and interested in the work, then I can overlook a lot of things. I could overlook a lot of brown MMs.
Yeah, and I think clients build up goodwill, or we build up goodwill over time. It becomes easier to overlook some of the Brown MMs, some of the issues that pop up, since everybody’s human. Everybody has a bad day. There’s a month in every client engagement where things don’t go as well as planned. And with good communication, one of the parties will say, like, We aren’t where we want to be. What could we do to fix this? But there’s also those moments where you’re like, it isn’t worth putting in the work to salvage this relationship. This is one of the benefits we have as consultants. We get to fire a client, we get to say, You know what? I’ve decided I can’t help you anymore. At the end of the month, our engagement is done. Here’s how we’re going to transition out of here. And That’s a perk. That’s sort of, I guess, the flip side of onboarding, exiting. I’m not sure what word offboarding a client. But that’s something that I’ve never really thought about as a process, but I think is valuable for clients or for consultants to define. I know my father, as an attorney, has a very defined SOP for off-boarding a client. Like when a client either Let’s him go or he lets a client go. He’s like, okay, great. It’s going to be a 10-hour process. I need to wrap these things up. There’s going to be a final bill. I’ll credit you whatever is left on the balance you’ve paid me. I need to get you these files, but here are the 15 things I need to do because we’re ending this relationship, and that’s what it’s going to cost. Having a system like that makes it easy to communicate to a client, even when they let him go. Like, it’s not as easy as pulling the plug or turning the attorney machine off. There’s steps that need to happen, both for legal requirements and both for how I run my business to end this relationship, to sever this relationship, to hand off the information you need. As you work with a new consultant. And so, as much time as we put into thinking about onboarding, I think it’s valuable to think about offboarding clients in a humane and gentle manner.
Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. And I actually have an onboarding end process for my larger consulting engagements as well as draft revise engagements. Like I need to make sure I’ve Turned off your Stripe billing, turned off your Visual Website Optimizer account so you’re not running up my plan. I have to archive our Baseboxamp project so you can’t make any further edits to it. I have to archive our Slack project. I have to thank you for your time. If it went well, I have to send you a thank you card in the mail. If you want to. Possibly pick up A-B testing again in the future. I have to set a reminder three months out to ask you how your A-B testing practice is going. And if it’s not going well, maybe we should pick it back up. I’ve regained clients that way. And I could have left, frankly, tens of thousands of dollars on the table without doing that. Yeah, I have a standard procedure for parting ways with a client because it’s going to happen. Clients are going to fire you. You’re going to fire clients. Projects end. I know that’s shocking, but they do. And so you have to make sure that you’re accounting for that and build a process that’s sensible to end it. In a way that is as equitable to both of you as humanly possible.
Absolutely. I want to ask a sub-question there. Do you frequently send your clients gifts? All the time.
Tell me more about that. All the time. I send zines to my clients. I haven’t done that lately because I’ve just been really busy with holiday stuff. I don’t send holiday gifts because I’m a monster. I definitely the longest term clients or the highest paying clients domestically I send gift baskets to. And I’m sure if you’re one of my clients and you haven’t received a gift basket, you’re like, oh my God. I’m not gifted. I know a lot of my clients listen to this podcast. They’re like, I’m not gift basket worthy. I’m firing Nick D immediately. I’m so sorry. But it’s a practice and I’m occasionally terrible at gift baskets. Basically, this is just an opportunity for me to mail gift baskets to every single one of my existing clients. Now I have to send like an apology gift basket to be really big. But you are taking care of them, right? And I think this is a subject for a whole other episode, but It’s an act of playing the relationships that you have and making sure that you’re thinking of them, right? A lot of the time, I just Sometimes my gratitude just comes out on a phone call, and I’m like, man, I’m so excited to be on this project. I’m really enjoying it. And it’s never fake. When I say that, You’ll know if I’m faking it because I’m not saying it, or because I’m too busy grinding away at the work to say it, which now my clients are probably freaking out about that. If he thanks me, he’s not working hard enough. If he doesn’t thank me, he doesn’t like it. No thanking, no gift basket, just 25% higher revenue over last. Oh, okay, it’s great.
I’m sorry, Nick, you f. Increased our business dramatically. We’ve been able to hire 15 new employees, and actually, literally, by the moon, that’s happened. We’re letting you go.
I have a great story about actually a client giving me a gift. I hung out with a client who visited Chicago from Honolulu in the dead of winter. It was like February. And so it was like eight or nine out, something like that. It was cold. And he shows up at a restaurant with his luggage because he’s about to fly out. And it was with like 10 other people. And he produces a pineapple from his luggage and hands it to me. And everyone at the table gets silent because This client had handed me a pineapple, and that was a sign of significant respect. I mean, first off, you have to check a pineapple and bring it here from Hawaii, which, like, holy god, that must be very hard. But also, like, that’s a sign that I am pineapple-worthy. Great. I’m pineapple worthy. Wonderful. I take the pineapple on to the blue line to go home. And the blue line and the CTA writ large are filthy and horrible. And and have a reputation for that. And I get on an otherwise empty L car on the and then there’s somebody else sitting across the L car from me, like maybe about 25, 30 feet away from me. They perk up and they see the pineapple sticking out of my backpack. And they’re like, Is that your pineapple? And I’m like, uh-huh. They’re like, I can smell that pineapple across a filthy L-car. I’m like, Hell yeah, you can smell that pineapple. And I tell you, I went feral on that fucking pineapple. That was the best pineapple I’ve had in my entire stupid life. I can barely have pineapple anymore. And I think about that, I still think about the pineapple. This happened two years ago. This happened two years ago. I should have forgotten about the pineapple. I should have been given other pineapples. It’s fine that I’m not giving pineapples. I’m flying to Hawaii in two weeks. But yes.
But I mean, a small thing like that. Can, I mean, it’s generated a memory, it’s generated a story, it’s generated goodwill, tiny things like that. Even I like, I make sure to thank my clients. When we reach milestones and projects, or when we just have worked together for a while and say, like, you know, I really honestly love working with you. I wouldn’t change it. I enjoy it. And It’s true. And the clients that I’m not saying that to, or I don’t enjoy working with, they aren’t my clients anymore.
Yeah. Yeah, you have to like the work. Theoretically, if you’re listening to this, you’re probably independent, or maybe you want to be, or something like that, or you have been in the past. And like. Again, you have full agency for your work. If you don’t love your clients and you don’t love your work, get better clients. Alan Weiss, whom we cite often on here, says you should turn over your client load, what is it, 15% every year, something like that? And for me, that’s one client because I only have eight or nine clients at any given point. But like I I appreciate the sentiment. You’re pruning the bonsai tree to allow it to thrive. That’s really what that looks like to me. And yes, you’re leaving money on the table, but hopefully you’ll end up getting more from it. And when you can negotiate from a position of abundance, I say this very often, you can act in more rational and clear-headed ways. You can fire that client who’s been lightly pissing you off lately. You can have really hard adult conversations with people and not have to be afraid of reprisal from them. And I think that’s tremendously empowering and gratifying to have that feeling.
Entirely. Entirely. And it’s. It’s something as consultants that or business owners that you need to work towards. And somebody who has a single client or is saying like, I’m having trouble filling the pipeline, it becomes harder to let go of that bottom 15%. So the first step is Attracting more clients and making sure that you have some filtering mechanism in place. So maybe you’re not weeding out everybody who isn’t a good fit, but you’re throwing out the 50% of people who you just would not enjoy working with. And from there, as you slowly build up over time, then you get to a point where you’re like, okay, everything’s stable. If I lost one client, I’d be fine. This client and I just aren’t working well together. Okay, I have the capacity to let them go and maybe have a month where I have an open slot and use that time for personal or professional development or fill it with somebody on the waiting list. It’s something you build up to over time. It’s not something that, unfortunately, you could do immediately, but it’s a great goal to work towards. I know that This in the last four or five months have been the first time in my business where, like, I legitimately have had to use a waiting list and tell people, I would love to work with you. I would desperately love to work with you. I intentionally limit myself to only five slots so I could focus the necessary attention on a client. I’m at five slots right now. We have to wait three months. I can’t work with you now because it would do a disservice to you. And that has been the hardest conversation to have, especially when it’s like, I freaking want to work with this client so bad. To do anything else, but that would be to do a disservice to my other clients who’d be getting less attention, the new client who I’m bringing on, and me. Since suddenly I have to work another X hours a month and I’m not going to be happy with it, and it’s going to have even more negative repercussions.
Yeah, when you start to cut meat, like a client fulfills absolutely everything that you want out of them, and it’s an amazing project, and you have received no brown MMs, and both of you are pineapple worthy. Like all of those things have happened. and you still have to cut them because you’re too overbooked, that’s the moment when you have to hire an assistant or grow the business in some capacity. We’ve talked a lot about like what that looks like for us in the past, but like I think that’s a good criteria. And yeah, you should Kai, you should hire an assistant.
I have, and she is wonderful.
Okay, great.
She is a dream to work with. I don’t think we’ve done an episode specifically on assistance yet, but that’d be a good topic for a future episode. Yeah, and I think this is a good place to wrap up here. So, yeah. Yeah, but I’d say major takeaway for people listening to this: think about what your onboarding process is like. I’ll include a link in the show. We’ll include a link in the show notes to Nick’s welcome packet if you’re okay with sharing it. And my prospecting and onboarding questions, like the email I send leads and the prospecting questions I ask, just to. Find those brown MMs, find those, or I guess find the non-yeah, find the brown MMs and weed out the bad fits and just grab bits and pieces from here and cobble together something. Even if it’s just three steps, like the three questions you ask a prospect when they come in the door. And see if it triggers any red flags, because it’s always going to be easier to incrementally improve the process than wait six months and be like, oh shit, I need to start a process from zero. Start building it today.
Yeah. Yeah. Be very sensitive to how people signal and how you signal. Because even though they’re not necessarily being sensitive, there’s still a subconscious thing that goes on there. And I think that’s important to keep in mind.
Notes
- Nick's Welcome Packet
- Kai's Welcome Packet (nick's welcome packet with white-out applied throughout)
- Sunn o)))'s welcome packet
- Set Expectations
- Explain what you're doing and what they'll be doing
- Explain what won't be happening
- Give direction for questions
