Clients in Denial: Navigating Client Resistance Without Losing the Gig

Welcome to Your Business, Accelerated! Digitally remastered with AI, Your Business, Accelerated! is the go-to podcast for entrepreneurs ready to scale smart. Hosted by Attorney Shaune B. Arnold, it delivers strategic business insights, legal frameworks, and real-world solutions to help you operate with clarity and confidence. Get actionable guidance to protect, grow, and optimize your business…one smart move at a time.

When clients resist the truth, your consultancy can stall. In this candid episode, Attorney Shaune B. Arnold reveals how to recognize denial, navigate resistance, and deliver honest assessments without sabotaging the relationship. Learn to assert yourself with clarity, build trust, and keep clients engaged—even when the truth is hard to hear. 

Transcript

Hello, everyone. I want to welcome you once again to your business accelerated. I am your host, attorney, Shaune B Arnold, and I am, as always, very excited to be talking to you today.

We are going to discuss the state of denial that your clients may or may not be in and your need to get them to face the issues that are crushing them - without you losing the client.

But first, I want to do a little bit of housekeeping. I want to remind you that I am a California business attorney. That means that to the extent that we talk about legal issues here on your business accelerated, they need to be taken in that context.

So, if you live in another state or another country …or just another state of mind, then please take this information to an attorney in your jurisdiction to make sure that there are no differences between the law where I live and the law where you live.

I also want to invite you to listen to my other podcast, legalbiz cafe. Here, on your business accelerated, we deal with these hardcore business and legal issues that you'll deal with as an entrepreneur. But over there on legal biz cafe, we talk about your mindset. We deal with those issues that stymie you and keep you from starting, fixing or building a business that you'll absolutely love. If you listen to both shows, you will get both sides of that entrepreneurial coin, and you will be strong in your business.

All right, let's dive right in. We are really talking about client assessment today. When you have a new client and you are addressing perhaps organizational problems, it depends on your consultancy, so I'm going to try and make this conversation as broad as possible. But what we're really talking about tonight is getting your client to be open to the discovery process as you explore the issues and problems that they are having in their business. It’s extremely critical for them to be open to this discovery process. It's even arguably more critical than you being correct in your assessment and your analysis of whatever their problem is because without their buy-in, you are getting nowhere with you consultancy.

In order to get them relaxed and open and sort of into what you're doing, then you may have to spend a little bit of time on your relationship with them, building rapport, building trust. You also need to think about building their commitment to your process at each step along the way. You want to make sure they remain committed to your process to the end. You don't want to wait until you give them a report, and suddenly you find out they're not committed to the process, they're not committed to your recommendation, and they're not committed to your relationship. Basically, they're not committed to anything except not giving you another check. You don't want that to happen to you.

You want to deal with those resistance issues that clients have, and you want to deal with your own emotions that come up when clients are resistant. I'm talking about your sense of frustration, your sense of rejection.

Your emotions will come up while they're in the midst of their process. Just know, if they are feeling resistance, then you are on target for identifying the problem. Resistance is an absolutely natural part of the consulting process. They will either resist you, they will resist the process, or they will resist the problem. They will start to tell you how everything is great, show you how busy they are, and start taking calls in the middle of your meeting. They will do all kinds of things to deny and evade, but you're going to hang in there, and I'm going to give you some tips tonight on how you deal when your client is in denial.

They could have denial over one of several things. They could have been denying there's a problem at all. This happens a lot when you have a client that's an abuser and they don't want to face their own personal foibles. I had a well, actually, I was on a job once, many, many years ago, and the upper management on that job was very, very abusive to their assistant, and they went through a succession of assistants. And unfortunately, because this person was considered a rain maker at that particular business, nothing was done about them. It caused such a problem that I actually left that company because I just didn't like the culture. I didn't feel that I was able to really protect my assistant, and frankly that person’s assistant, from the wrath of this individual. It just it really wore on me.

If you have this kind of a personality at work in the organization, you might be dealing with someone who just doesn't get there's even a problem. They don't understand what's going on. It may be that they are not the Rainmaker, or that the person who hired you sees that there's a problem with the Rainmaker and they still don't want to do anything because they don't feel that emotionally beating the staff is a problem. If you do, like I did, then we're going to talk later about what you should do as a consultant.

Your client may be in denial over their role in causing the problem. They could be the abuser, for example, or someone who is a micro manager that doesn't trust anybody. They've got this, competency convincer of infinity, and unless they're watching you do a task, they do not and will not believe that you can do it competently. There really are people like that on the planet. And if you've ever worked under one of them, then you've lived in hell. Yes indeed.

And if this person is a micromanager, unless they are open to realizing this and really seeing the impact that the micromanagement is having on their underlings, so to speak, then you're going to have an issue. We’re going to talk about how to deal with that as well, because people are going to be unhappy and people are going to start making mistakes, and this manager isn't going to understand why everybody around them seems to fulfill that prophecy that everybody around them is going to be incompetent.

They may be in denial over their own role in perpetuating the problem, even if they didn't cause the problem. I was told recently of a company that brought workers over from a foreign country, and in this particular foreign country, the bathrooms didn't have porcelain toilets in the way that we in the United States know them. The workers would stand on the toilets and break them rather than sit on them the way Americans do.

The reaction of management was to put these new folks in their own restroom, and forbid them to use any other restrooms, rather than go through a training or bring in consultants to train the people on how to properly use these facilities, or some other relationship building or educational workshop. They sequestered the people and they created an even bigger problem. So even though they didn't create the initial problem, they perpetuated and exacerbated the problem by sequestering the new workers in their own bathroom, where they continue to break up the toilets because they weren’t trained on how to use them.

Now you've got a new problem, because they think they're being discriminated against, and under the strict definition of discrimination to make separate, they are. That's a lot of potential liability.

So, if you're having those kinds of problems in your organization, or you are consulting with organizations that are experiencing those kinds of problems, you might even want to bring in a specialist, an attorney that does employee-employer relations. That would really be supportive and help the situation, so that you can come up with some real solutions for your clients that are going to help.

This is a really painful issue, and they will love you when you're able to help them with it. So often, you will find that your clients don't get feedback from their subordinates because they are abusive, because they micromanage, because they respond in ridiculous ways to problems that are created, and they sequester people and do things that make you just go, Hmmmmmm.

They don't get the feedback that they're looking for due to these reasons. So, you, as a consultant, are in a really unique position to give them that feedback. You're going to be talking to all of the subordinates, and you're going to be hearing that cooler talk, the bathroom talk, the sitting around at lunch talk.

You're going to hear all of that, and you really do need to give it to your client in a straightforward assertive manner that they will understand and support. Be non-punishing, of course, but assertive, just give them the information. They're going to need it. So your job, then, is to get your client to face all of these issues without losing that client.

I'm going to give you, first, some do's and don'ts on how to deal with the client, and then I'll give you some very specific tips on how to address these organizational issues.

First of all, you really want to be careful that you don't collude with your client; that you don't allow them to blame the subordinates and blame the higher ups and blame the economy and blame everything except things that are in their power to control. Because if you do that, if you allow them to blame outside forces, they are not going to feel that they are empowered to do anything about the problem.

You want them to have solutions that are within their control, within their grasp, so that they can make it happen. You also don't want to play down the impact that the difficult relationships that we were talking about earlier cause in creating the problem. And please don't project your feelings into the problem. What I mean is when they describe the problem to you, does the description of the problem make you feel anxious, as for example, when they describe the problem of the people being sequestered in their own bathroom because they were breaking up toilet seats and peeing on the toilet seats and being unsanitary?

The fact that they were sequestered, made me feel really anxious. That is not necessarily what the client is feeling. You need to be able to distinguish between what you're feeling, and don't assume that the client's feeling it too.

Make direct statements to them and give them the data and feedback from their subordinates and their higher ups. They're going to need that information. Don't assume they can't handle it. Assume they can instead and support them.

You want to reinforce their knowledge. You want to reinforce what they're doing correctly. You want to reinforce what is working in the business. And you want to reinforce whenever you find that they are being reasonable to you.

As to the content of your discovery process, well, that's going to depend on the nature of your consultancy. If you're a systems person, ...then chances are you're going to look at information requests. If you are an engineer or a scientist, …then chances are you're going to be looking at technical questions. …Financial experts look at money and economics …and organizational development experts look at asset-based or problem-solving-based change efforts within the company.

Here are some tips that I have for you on dealing with these organizational issues that are going to be universal to you no matter what kind of consultancy you have. I want you to consider asking questions regarding the client's personal role in causing or maintaining the problem. We talked about that extensively at the opening of the show, where your client is in denial over the fact that there's a problem or that they had a role in causing that problem, or perpetuating that problem. Ask them lots of questions, and then ask them questions about what other people are doing to cause the problem.

This way, you're going to start to get a 3d picture of what's really going on in that organization, and then recognize the similarity between how the client manages you and how the client is managing others in these scenarios as they're coming up. You’ll find, if they're really being a jerk to you and they're really being a jerk to others, that this is something that you might want to point out to them. You know, they do sometimes they just want it and they don't want you to sugar coat it.

By all means, involve the client in interpreting your data and in drawing your conclusions from your analysis because they have some back story that you don't have. You want to condense your data into just a limited number of issues that your client can deal with, because if you give them this laundry list of stuff, they're not going to know where to begin, and they're going to think that you're well, crazy. Use assertive language. Be authentic with them.

They hired you because they saw something special in you, and you do have something special in you, so be authentic to what's special in you and offer it to your client in everyday language that anyone can understand, even if your expertise is technical. If you're an engineer or a scientist or a financial expert, break it down into language that an eighth grader can understand. If an eighth grader can't understand you, then you need to break it down just a little bit more.

Recognize whether the problem at issue has an underlying problem. You want to distinguish the impact of each of those underlying problems. You want to elicit how the problem is being managed. This is the water cooler and bathroom talk. You will interview all concerned parties and elicit how the problem is being created and managed.

Management issues are, frankly, typically more interesting than technical issues. Management issues really are watercooler conversations. People will know what's being done wrong, and they will know what should be done correctly and why. There may be some interfacing issue that you're unaware of with this company and a subsidiary, or the paperwork, including invoices and documentation.

There may be something that is really basic to the problem that the higher ups don't know about because they're not the guy on the line. Be certain to interview everybody and get as broad of a perspective of the problem as you possibly can at this point.

When you're doing all of the problem identification, there's absolutely no reason for you to offer any recommendation to the client, not at the discovery stage. The recommendation stage comes much later.

I wanted to have that conversation with you today on client assessment and addressing organizational problems when your client is in denial; getting them to face those issues without losing that gig.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for joining me today on this week’s episode of Your Business, Accelerated! I’m attorney Shaune B. Arnold. I invite you to follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter X. In all of those places, my moniker is S.H.A.U.N.E dot Arnold.

In the meantime, and in between time, I am, …as always, reminding you to MAXIMIZE your COMPETENCE to get the CONFIDENCE YOU NEED to succeed.

I’ll see you right back here next week, on Your Business, Accelerated! …Bye-bye, friends.