Why Relationships Outlast Revenue

In December, Juming Delmas lost three clients in one month. He also hired three new team members in the same month. This is how that's possible — and what it taught him about building a business that can't be held hostage by bad clients.

In this raw solo episode of the Un-Traditional Entrepreneur Podcast, Juming breaks down everything that happened — the late payments, the red flags he ignored, the clients who left, and the decision to walk away from revenue that was quietly destroying his team. This isn't about blame. It's about boundaries, leadership, cash flow strategy, and why not all money is good money.

Topics covered:
- Why late payments are the number one red flag for every service business
- How to identify bad clients before you sign them — and what to do when you've already signed them
- Why 82% of small businesses fail due to cash flow problems (and how to avoid being one of them)
- The "bonus income" strategy: how Juming never counts unstable client revenue in his operations
- Why December is the highest client churn month — and how to prepare for it
- How to fire a client without burning a bridge or losing your peace
- What the Wartime CEO mindset means and when to activate it
- Why relationships will always outlast revenue in service-based businesses
- The 50% rule: how to budget personally and professionally so you're never a slave to a client or a job
- Lessons from The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

If you run a service-based business and you've ever let a bad client stay too long — this episode was made for you.

The Un-Traditional Entrepreneur Podcast with Juming Delmas. Relationships over revenue. Always.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

What's going on? What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the Untraditional Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Jameen Delmus. Man, listen, today's gonna be a good episode. You know, this is gonna be one of probably my favorite episodes. In this live episode, I'm gonna be breaking down real what happened in December, the month of December, that real conversational conversation talk. Um, we lost three clients simultaneously while at the same time we hired three new, three new people on our team, right? This episode isn't about drama and it ain't about blame shifting. It's about relationships, it's about boundaries, it's about leadership, it's about maturity, and it's about operational discipline. Many entrepreneurs were taught to go and go and chase the fucking dollar, right? This conversation challenges that idea and explores why not all revenue is good revenue and how late payments and misaligned values quietly damages your business and why protecting your team sometimes means walking away from the wrong type of clients. If you're building a service-based business or you're managing people, you're trying to scale without burnout, this episode is for you. I'm your host, Jameen Delmas, and welcome to the other side of motivation. Let's dive in. Okay, listen, man, listen, listen, listen. I'm gonna be a hundred. Um, I'm going through the motions right now. Um but I'm what I'm about to tell you guys, this right here is exactly what it means. What I'm going through right now is exactly what it means to be a business owner. What I'm fucking going through right now. There is no what I'm about to share with you guys. There is no, I gotta chill out, I gotta take a break, I gotta stop, I gotta sit down, I gotta do this. I got no in business ownership. This is why people decide to keep a job and not go into business because of what's happening right now in my career choice, right? As a business owner, this is this is this is the nitty-gritty. Literally, we literally, literally, literally lost three people last month in the month of December. And we're gonna come in this episode and really just break it down for you guys on why we lose so why we lost three people, what that looked like, some red flags we could have um identified early on in the game, and we chose to ignore them. You know what I'm saying? But now we're revamping the way we do business, and um and we're changing. And I'm gonna I'm gonna be honest, man, like business ownership is extremely fucking hard. It's really hard. And it's not even about you're not even thinking about taking care of your family. But when you have a team, you have to also think about taking care of them and their family as well. I mean, that's what you think about. When you're working for somebody, it's just you and your family. But when you run a company, you're thinking about your team and them and their family, and then you and your family as well. So it's all in one encompass. Let's dive in. Okay. So, first thing I want to talk about is we lost three clients, right? Um, you know, to be fair, there was a couple of things that we could have paid attention to early on that would have happened. Now, don't get me wrong, we let these clients go. It ain't like people were, it ain't like we weren't doing our job or nothing like that. I want to set the record straight real quick. We let people go. So we lost three clients in the month of December. And the primary reason, the primary reason was because of late payments. Um, I'm gonna break something down to individuals who start a business so that you can start what we've noticed with all of the clients that we've ever had and even clients that we've let in go, they all share some commonality with each other. And one of those commonalities is late payments. Um and late payment to me is anything due on the day of andor after. That's late payment to me. So it late payment to me is if a person has to, if we as a business owner have to chase you for invoices, that's not a good sign. You know, there's a category that we put those kind of people in, which I'll discuss with you guys here on the live. But chasing for invoices is not a good sign in business. Um, you got to think about you and how like you operate as a human being. Like, I don't chase invoices. I mean, well, I chase invoices as a business owner, but I'm not a client that a business has to worry about. Like, I just pay my bills. I understand that bills have to get paid. I take care of them. I pay my people on time. I don't like that. That's just whom I am. Um, so um, you know, I don't get into that. But here's the here's a red flag that we noticed up front when it came to business owners um up front when deciding to keep them or to bring them on or not. One of the biggest that one of the biggest red flags we saw was um one, they had the late payments, they were late behind. Another thing is they were very demanding, right? In the beginning phases, uh business owners can be very demanding. There's business owners who come in and they're they're demanding during the interview process or the initiation phase, but once you hit the ground one and their objective, they just leave you be because they trust you in the process. If you find business owners or a client who's trying to hold your hand through every process of the of the uh every step of the process, that to me is a red flag. As a business owner, as a business, that's like, hey, these people require a little bit more attention. I've worked with enough businesses to identify certain behaviors to say, hey, this right here ain't hitting, this ain't cutting it. Um, the other thing that I've noticed is they oftentimes require a lot of attention up front. Um, when you're talking about some decent clients, they understand that their time is money and money is time. They don't have time to be spending all this time uh uh micromanaging what you guys are doing as a business. They don't have time for that. They say, hey, we trust you could do the job and get it done, boom, boom, boom, give us the numbers and report later. Bam. Get that shit done. Then there's clients who just kind of like have this micromanage-y kind of thing. Like, I gotta manage you. And remember, you're a business owner, you're not an employee. So once somebody starts treating you like an employee, that's red flag number one as well. Um, so the the one of the biggest things that I've done when I saw certain red flags is I never count their income in our operations. That, and and I'll dive into that a little bit more. But when it comes to clients with red flags, I don't count their income in our operations. They're a bonus, right? Um, which is why we were able to bring on three people even after losing three people, because obviously I saw things within these clients that made me say, huh, I probably should not count on this because this is probably not going to be sustainable. And to be fair, as a business owner, what I should have done was I shouldn't have even brought them on, right? And I think that as business owners, you have to understand, you know, some some some money is not always necessary. Like if they start exhibiting certain signs, I think you need to start picking up those signs. But anyhow, we'll we'll dive into that a little bit further. The other thing is, um, we walk away from misaligned values, right? The moment a client shows you that they don't value you, the moment, and that's what we fuck out. We got that shit. The moment they showed us they didn't value us, I knew it was time to go. And how do you identify shit like that? Like they start questioning things when you give them advice on something, or they challenge your thoughts on things, um, which, you know, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but if it's a continuous thing, it becomes a problem because now you're running into someone who does not necessarily trust with you what you say or what you do, or maybe people who like to do it themselves, or people who are like, I'm just gonna do this myself. Those are also red flag things, too, because clients that do things themselves, um, for and you're the business owner that does it, that's also something to look out for as a business owner. Like, even if I was, if I was a if I was uh cashier at like a Publix, I would leak, like I would be like slightly worried that there's more self-checkouts than there is employees to run with cash registers. That means that these self these people can do this themselves without you, which also puts you out of a job, which is also a red flag for me. Because I'm like, okay, if we have clients who are like we can do it ourselves, and then when they do it, it don't even really typically look that good. But we don't say shit, we just let that shit go. But or or if they already had services prior to your service and they had multiple businesses like yours similar. That's a red flag too to me. Like they can't be in the same, they can't have 12 producers before us in in in in in five months. That's red flag number one. Like, how many businesses are you going through on a year-to-year basis? I'm gonna be honest, man. The way we built right now is I mean, those three hit hard because those were three clients, regardless of the way, either way, income is income. So it hits, so it hits differently. But at the end of the day, I'm built different. I'm gonna tell you something that I don't haven't that I haven't shared with my with with my with my followers. Man, I left my mom and house at like 14 years old. I left the crib at 14. I learned to survive at 14. I'm 37 years old. And since I was 14 years old, I have been surviving on my own. So when people like I want to be a business owner, you really have to understand what the fuck that really means. Because I came out from 14 and 37 and built everything from the ground up. I slept on buses, I slept in parks, I slept in train stations, I slept in New York. Like I was doing all of that. So I understand what it's like to really go up in the struggle. So when I'm thinking of things like I'm about to lose three clients, that shit don't scare me. Why? Because I've already been through the mud and back, and I already know what time it is when it's time to get when it's time to get dirty. When it's time to get nitty-gritty, we got to do what we got to do to survive. I don't sweat nothing because at the end of the day, I've already been through that. Look at my crib, you know what I'm saying? Like I had I had no crib at one time. You know what I'm saying? I ain't have a house, but here I am as an entrepreneur running my own business, doing my own thing. One thing I don't do is allow a client's revenue to dictate me or my company's success. You know, you lose some, you keep it pushing, you keep going. I had a client one time tell me she didn't gonna pay us because she was upset. You can't do that, right? This red flag, right? That's red flag number one. So, you know, losing clients isn't necessarily necessarily a strategic correction. I'm sorry, let me rephrase that. Losing a client isn't a setback, it's a strategic correction. That's what I meant to say. So this is not a setback for us. This is uh uh this now opens up doors for us to now align ourselves with the way businesses operate and how we need to maneuver when we lose these clients. The next point I want to bring up um in this in this slide is is this common? Right? So it's like, is this common for you to lose that many clients? Fuck yeah, this is common. Did you know that 82% of small businesses fail due to cash flow problems? Oftentimes when we meet in up with a client, it's not that we don't get good services. What's really happening is they have weak cash flow, they don't know how to manage their money. And that's probably oftentimes why they're late payers or on-time payers because at the end of the day, there's no um there's no organization in that cash flow. We can lose three clients and hire three people the next month later because we have a good control of our cash flow, right? So 60% of invoices are paid late. This is very common. 60% of invoices are paid late. You know what's crazy? Every client who paid us late were the clients that we lost in December. Every client who paid us late consistently, we lost them in the month of December. Facts. We and I'm really happy with the current client we have. Like, I'm not, you know, pressing any whatever cases, but at the end of the day, that's what business ownership is about. It's about understanding that you gotta hustle. Like, people gonna make people gonna have emotions about things, and and let's be real, man. It was fucking Christmas time. So most of these guys probably use their money to do other shit and was like, look, I can't pay my X, Y, and Z, my services this month because I had Christmas shopping. But that lets me know you have a cash flow problem, that you were not, you're not properly organizing your finances. You're kind of like paying this on the whim. And those are also telltale signs of those kind of clients. So you need to be weary of because if they're like, hey, you know, I got to pay this this on this time, like I have to pay late, that's letting you know that they don't have a good cash flow. Because you can't go, you can't run a company and have employees working for you 40 hours a week and say, hey guys, um, I'm gonna be we're gonna be late with the payment for another week or so. Them employees are gonna be mad and they're gonna be looking for another job because they don't want a company that's consistently late paying these guys every month when they got bills and they got things that they got to take care of too. I mean, it's just basic common sense, right? And did you know that business owners spend this is crazy, this is absolutely crazy. 10 they business owners spend 10 to 15 hours per week just chasing payment. Just chasing payments, sending out invoice, just chasing payments. The average business owner spends 10 to 15 hours a week chasing down invoice. Did you know that that's actually unpaid labor? To send somebody in there and say, hey, we need to find out what's going on with invoices, we need to find out what's going on with invoices, who's paying, who's not like like that? Is unpaid labor. That's those are the red flags, too. Like, hey, we have these things that are due. Now we have a problem because now we have to chase people for invoice. Then I have clients who just the moment we send it to them, it's like they pay it immediately. Obviously, we will love those kind of clients. But you know, in business, most businesses will love those kind of clients. Look, man, I take pride into paying bills, I take pride in everything I do. I take pride in my crib, I take pride in my truck, I take pride in my toys, I take pride in my company. When it comes to shit, I take pride in that. I don't play I don't play about no late shit. Like I've again, I'm always here because it's already got to be allocated for. The way I look at this is if somebody is showing you that they can pay on time or pay late, what they're also showing you is that when it's time to pay, they're probably gonna stop services abruptly. And that's what happened in every case that we've had. You know, it's always that last minute thing, kind of like waiting up until the end, waiting up until the end because services didn't stop because services were bad, services stopped because their cash flow was an issue, right? So therefore, you have to be mindful for that. 15 to 10 to 15 hours uh uh a week goes to strictly chasing invoices for the average business. It's really sad. That is really sad. That's a part-time job. So, anyhow, so my next uh talking point here is um how to still how did we still hire three team members after losing three clients? This one here is gonna be like a big part for you guys. This is gonna be really good. We didn't depend on unstable income. I never I I do that with my personal life. Like if something seems unstable, I will never never fucking depend on that. And even like for people who work a regular job, so I can break it down here too. Let's say you work a regular job, you make three thousand dollars a month. The way I'm looking at this, if I'm making three bands a month, I'm only spending$1,500 in bills total. That's all I'm spending. If I gotta spend more than if I'm max, if I'm maxing out my income to pay bills, I'm in a bad situation. I'm a slave to whatever I'm doing, I'm a slave to that job. I do the same thing for my business. I do not max out our income uh because I don't want to be a slave to our clients. I mean, we want to service our clients, we want to give our clients, but we never want to be a slave to our clients. Because if if they're doing something that offends my team, we got to be all right with letting them go. Like I've never put myself in a situation personally or in the business sense. We do not depend on unstable income. I don't care how much, how long they've been with us. If they've shown you that they've been late multiple times, let it go. One of the clients who we lost in December, she was with us for over a year and a half. And that income was never counted for. It was never counted for because the year and a half, there were 16 late payments, right? So therefore, it's kind of like do you wanna, do you really want to do that? Nah, I don't. What we use that income for is called bonus income, right? To me, that's bonus income. I use that as bonus income, not income that our that our business will rely on for survival. I don't do that shit. I'm smarter than that. And how do we identify those types of clients? By the by the things that I talked about earlier. Identifying late payments, identifying if they're demanding, identify if they're already kind of doing work themselves. Because if they're doing things themselves, that's letting you know as well, there's a good chance your position could be threatened too, because you don't want somebody doing work themselves that they're already paying you to do. So there's double work happening. That's not a good sign. So you have to put certain business, certain clients in a certain category so that if something comes about and they're like, well, you know what? I've been doing this myself the whole time. I've been doing this, I've been doing that. And we're in the service business. So everybody feels like they can do what we do. Therefore, we have to be prepped for that. And then there's clients that I'm like, yeah, let's do this. See, we're we we budget, I budget very safely, both personally and professionally, right? Everything that I do when it comes to my life and business is all built in. I don't rely and I don't become a slave to a job or or a business or my or my or my ownership, right? Because if I do, then that means that I have to be a slave to the individuals behind the money. When that ain't that ain't how that works. That's why we were able to let go of three clients and still hire people because those those incomes were never counted for. We never counted for that income. I didn't care how long they've been with us. They would have to show a history at this point of repeated payments, less demands, more appreciation. I have a client that I will go to bat for. I will do, we will go to bat for this one client. We give her free shit all the time. Why? Because this client, one is our longest standing client, one, our highest paying client, and two, this client doesn't push, you know, push those kind of boundaries. So for me, the way I'm built is I feel like as a business, we pick and choose our bosses, and those are our clients. That's the beauty part about being a business owner. You pick and choose the people you work for and work with. And so this individual allows us to want to give us autonomy to create. But she doesn't even know that I be paying attention sometimes to her social media accounts, and she gets all kinds of compliments for her her handles, all of her handles. And she replies, no, this ain't me. This is the I have an amazing marketing team. I have an amazing digital marketing team. I have an amazing, like, and it's the value of us. And I feel like clients will show you if they value your services or not. They will show you that. And so if they show you that they don't value you, they'll show you that by challenging you, by questioning your motives, by questioning what you do, by questioning how you do things. Eventually they're gonna leave. Because if they have to question everything, that means they don't trust nothing that you're doing. And that's not gonna be a client for long, anyways. But if they're saying things like they appreciate you, they they show these values, not just not just to you, but they show up for you even behind your back. Even if someone is talking ill about your company, they the clients that you that your loyal clients are gonna be like, Well, that's your experience. I never had that experience with these guys. These guys are great. This team is great. This is what this is bap, boo, boom. That's the kind of clients you want, and that's why we talk about relationship. Because relationship is important because when you lose a client, obviously the client that you lost is gonna probably be upset, and they're probably gonna say things that probably isn't true because it's not like that you lost them because you didn't do your job, you lost them because they didn't pay, they weren't on time. You just lost what you lost for. That's what it comes down to. We didn't lose nobody ever because of our services. We lost them because typically of finance. So, and then you know they might go back and say something crazy, but then we have clients that are just like, hey man, that's your experience. We don't have that issue with those guys. Why? One, those people are typically the ones who are always playing, so it's an agreement that you create with your clients. Hey, we have an agreement, you we do these services for you and you pay us. That's the agreement. That's it, you put us on top. That's the agreement. You know what's even you know it's crazy that I forgot to bring up another red flag is that the individuals who pay late are usually the ones who complain if something is is not right or is late. So if you're late behind something, they will make the biggest fuss first. But these are the people who pay late all the time. But and like sometimes because sometimes there sometimes you don't meet deadlines, sometimes that's just how business works. And you know you have to pivot. And so some deadlines aren't met because sometimes the project is too big. But the people who are always so demanding, they're always nitpicking about deadlines. But when it's when it's time they make their invoice payment, it's like it's like you don't they don't even know what deadline means. Huh? What who how they don't know what due dates is? But you want to push us on motherfucking due dates. That shit don't make no kind of sense to me. Listen, man, identifying that up front, we have a client that just like we've been late on her problem. We've been late on her more than she's ever been late on us. And because of that, we don't just be late on her. What we do now is if we're late on something, because we care about that client so much, we're gonna make it up with something else. She's getting something else out of the deal because that's that's how me as a person operate. I work better when people are a lot more pleasant, a lot more uh it makes me want to do things for people who are nice. I don't do well with confrontational people. I'm gonna be a hundred. So if you're trying to come on and be uh a client of ours, just know that I don't do well with confrontation at all. If you were like threatening us and making me tell making it seem like you're gonna leave us or whatever, bet you gone. There is nothing to talk about. Like that, like we I'm not here to debate you. Like, I ain't here to argue with you. I'm here to run a business and find people who appreciate us and values me and my opinion and our company and our opinion and trust us with their process because the biggest thing here is trust. If you can't trust me, I can't keep you as a client. No way. There ain't nothing I can do to keep you going. I got shit going on in my business life. I got shit going on in my personal life. But as a business owner, this is the key right here. It doesn't matter what you have going on in your personal and your business. You as a business owner still have to get it together. You still have to fight through it. You might have to fight the world and fight your personals, but you have to still persevere and get through all that shit because it's a battle, it's a constant battle, and you're gonna get clients who are going to test those waters. So it's easier to find people that you want to work with, people that they they be they're so pleasant to you, it makes you want to do more for them. Because I don't just want to be a big business owner, I also want to be a good client to services that I'm paying for. I don't just want to be a good business owner because do the math, if you ain't doing what you're supposed to do as a business owner and paying shit late, whenever the business owner comes to you and say, Hey, what you think about this person here? You don't think we're gonna sit there and be like, hell no, that motherfucker do not pay on time. Leave that motherfucker alone. You about to have problems, and they're demanding, they want shit for free and then question everything you do. I don't want to do business with people like that no more. I don't want to do business with me like no more. I don't want to go. I don't want to fucking don't want to do it. I'd rather just leave. Here's the deal I am big on peace. If there is something that gives me peace, I'm always gonna go to that before I go to revenue. Revenue is the last thing. I would go to peace before I go to revenue. I would go to peace before I go to anything. If that area over there is peaceful, that's where I'm running to. And if you're a client that's always nagging and coming or fussing or coming at me about something, I'm gonna always go to the peace side. And when you be like, I'm just gonna leave. Not one client that we let go, we have ever, ever begged for them to stay. Never. We ain't never begged nobody to stay. The moment somebody says they're out, they're out. Ain't nothing to talk about. They're out. You say you're gone, you're gone. There's nothing to talk about. We're not here to make you stay because the moment you tell me you're already gone, you've already set the standards that you will be in and out. And that is not a stable, that means you're that's the same thing in any anything you do in any relationship. Somebody's always in and out of your life. They're in and out, in and out, in and out. That's not stability. That ain't stability, it ain't stability in your personal life, it ain't stability in your business profession. Be able to identify the three. So that's how we were able to hire three people even after losing three clients. The next thing is why December is so tough. Okay, there is that myth, right? This is so fucking true that agencies report that 15 to 25 percent of clients churn in December. There's always some type of client loss in the month of December because I just said it earlier, people got Christmas and shit coming up. So we lost three of our clients in the month of December. This is a very common month to lose clients because they have overspent their cash flow on items to make other people feel good, but in return, their business suffers for it. These aren't these aren't entrepreneurs, these are business owners, people who own a business. Because an entrepreneur is gonna automatically think we still gotta feed our household, we still need services, we still need things to do. And as a business owner or entrepreneur, you gotta understand that certain things have to be sacrificed. I don't give a fuck if I got a small Christmas. Look, if I'm chilling at the crib watching TV, eating popcorn for Christmas with the peeps, that's that's our that's a good Christmas for me. As long as ain't nobody fussing at me or yelling at me about no shit, I'm happy. But if I if we're going through some shit, like, come on, like listen, you you gotta remember that this is this is a business, and business ownership is never personal, it's all business. Do not let your personal life dictate how your business operates. Those two motherfuckers should be separate. If you had to cut off in Christmas because you had to pay off some Christmas gift, well, there's a reason why they didn't make it. And there's a reason why we don't take people back. Because if they do it now, they'll do it then. You know, they don't, you know, again, budget recess. Emotions run high during Christmas. You know, it's the year-end stress. This is this is where people are stressing the most. But then you want to know, we don't want to know when they start trying to come back. I bet you nobody can guess when they can start trying to come back. People start motherfucking coming back around tax season when they got a little bit of money and they wrote off all their shit to make it seem like their business is broke and shit like that. And that ain't no good either. Because you ain't gonna buy no building like that if you're always writing shit off. So, I mean, at the end of the day, man, it's like I'm an I'm just not a good client. I'm a good business owner. I'm both. I don't pick and choose one. I'm an all-around guy. I'm an all-around person when it comes to paying bills. I don't just pay for my team, I also do the same thing in my personal life. Business isn't about business is about relationships, right? That's what it's all about. It's not about revenue. Business, you you, you, you didn't just, you know, you didn't just lose a client when you lost a client. You lost trust, you lost respect, you lost mutual understanding. But while we lost all of those things, you know what we did choose? While we lost trust, respect, and mutual understanding, what we chose was peace over over proximity. We chose standards over survival, we chose team stability over client appeasement. Because at the end of the day, if there is a client who we have to chase the revenue, that means I have to have one of my team members chase the revenue. That's something that they have to do on top of the things that they already have to do. That's just crazy. And then now my team gets burned out. If my team gets burned out, I have no company. You know, you know, we want to appease our clients, but if the clients are very demanding and pushing boundaries and wanting all kinds of free, crazy shit, you're gonna always run into motherfucking problems. It's gonna be a always be a thing. So, what I decided to do was say trust and respect matters in our company, boundaries protect us, and then people will always try to question your profit, never question your value out of video on that. Don't question that shit. If they can't afford it, they can't afford it. Move the fuck on. It don't matter, right? All right, the next point I want to talk about is um why walking away was the right move. One, setting the, you know, I'm big with boundaries. I like I'm a loyal person, and it's really hard to find loyal people. I be talking a lot of shit, but like I told you I was in the streets for a very long time. And so when you're in the streets for a long time, that means I'm living with homies. We all on the streets living together, trying to survive. And so loyalty is really big from just me coming up because I I had homies who showed me loyalty and I had to show up for them. So now, because I learned loyalty at such a young age, and now it's ingrained in me, like my team is my team. Like, I talk a lot of shit to my team. Sometimes I'll be like, hell no, this shit ain't it. I'll say this. I will fuss with them about some crazy shit. I'll fuss with them all the time. I don't give a fuck. I don't give a damn. But at the end of the day, my clients can't do that. Uh-uh. That's my team. Like, uh-uh, that ain't cool. Now I will go to bat for them, right? I just that's just something that's not cool. If you have an issue with the company, holla at me. Come at me. And even if you yell at me, I'm probably gonna terminate the services anyways, because I don't do well to yelling. Like, if you're yelling at me on the phone call in person, whatever the case is, bet I'm gonna let you get out what you gotta say, but you're gonna get a real nice, good and professional email. And it's gonna be something alongside uh we ain't doing this shit no more. And you know, so bad. Like, I'm gonna be a honey. Like, you know, I'm big with respecting my team and my team respect my clients as well. But that's just what loyalty does. It naturally, you know, I'm a natural loyal person, you know, and I want to make sure that when we are, when we have when we're meeting clients, we're setting boundaries. You know, this isn't about ego, or it's and it's not about quitting. It's just saying, hey, this shit ain't gonna work out because you've already exhibiting signs of frustration, signs of aggression that me or my team can't probably can't work under those conditions. They don't need me yelling at them and you yelling at them. What the fuck is this? They say, what the hell? I mean, I already do enough yelling. They probably got tired of here in my mouth all day, every day, any motherfucking way. But I don't give a fuck. You know, you know, it's crazy because I told you guys this is a time that you know we are we are we are going through the motion, but we are not behind. We are well prepared. I am not worried about a motherfucking thing. We can lose two more clients and be fine. Why? Because of the way I have my business set up. We are not losing people. If we lose people, it's because they got lost themselves. They terminated their own position, right? That's why we would lose people. So never be fooled by that. Um, the last you know, thing I want to talk about is just our final takeaways. I feel like relationships will outlast revenue, right? Relationships will outlast revenue. People will try to hold revenue over your head as a business and dangle these dollars in front of you, like you better do what I say, little puppet, or this, then, and that, third. No, goddammit. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Revenue is how we sustain our business, but I will always stand on loyalty and relationship first. If you, if we have to dance to the tune of your dollars, I'd rather not take it. All money ain't good money. I would rather focus on trimming down as much friction as I can within our client base, protecting my team, and strengthening our foundation. And we strengthen our foundation by creating, we had all of our clients sign a new uh contract, updated contract. This is this is designed to strengthen our company, not hurt our company, not hurt our clients. It's designed to strengthen our company. Because when we do something like this, we see that our clients say, hey, shit, well, maybe that wait, wait the fuck a minute. Maybe I need to do this. Maybe I need to do this. Listen, I'm gonna say this here. For me, I was I'm reading this book called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. And um in the book, it talks about all the struggles that he goes through. You guys are my people, right? I'm gonna be 100 with you because when we going through things, I want you guys to know this is what we're going through. I want you guys to know, oh, they in the bad right now. Oh, they're in there down. I don't want to always come to y'all when we up. That's crazy as hell. We ain't always up right now. We are not up, but we sustain it. We are not down. Well, we are down, but not in income. We're down because we lost three people, regardless of the way we still lost three people. That's not good, right? But because of the type of leader I am as an entrepreneur, we're still gonna keep moving forward. I've now worked night and day to strategize on ways of not just getting clients anymore. We want to, we want to get quality clients. We want to get clients that are going to be like, hey, these guys we trust them. We like now we're re-strategizing. I was talking about the a hard thing about hard things. He's he mentioned about, you know, there's um he called it a wartime CEO. A motherfucking wartime CEO. And then he said there's the easement CEO. Like there's the CEO, the peace CEO. Right now, we're in wartime. I'm wartime CEO. What that means is I'm about to go to war. If that means we got to lose people to reset the foundation, we got to lose people. That's fine. We got to do what we got to do. We're gonna keep pushing forward. If that means that we have to revamp our entire operations system to make sure that our business needs to be where the fuck it needs to be at, guess what the fuck we're about to do? We're about to do that. It's wartime. I'm wartime CEO. And the hard thing about Hard Thing talks about that. He said, you know, at some point in time in your organization, you got to get to a point where you got to be like, you know what? Look, we down. We need to figure out what we need to do to get up. And I'm happy to say we're down. I'm happy to say that we're getting it together. I'm happy to say that we got shit going on. I'm happy to say that. I'm happy to tell y'all I got shit going on in my personal and my business life. I'm happy to tell y'all that I'm doing this shit on my own. I'm happy to tell y'all that I'm figuring it out. Because at the end of the day, this is what business ownership is. It's not pretty. It's not always pretty. It's not always fluffy. You're gonna lose people personally and professionally. But you have to keep pushing forward because at the end of the day, nobody's like, I don't have a shoulder to cry on. I got people who cry on my shoulder. I got people who depend on me. I can't stop there. I can't stop because the clients like I got them out. I can't stop because people are like I'm in and out. 2026, this is it. This is that year. We're gonna lose so many things, but we're gonna gain so much because even the new strategy that our organization is coming up with since we are now developing our company in a way that's going to be sustainable. I'm really excited. I don't I can't even share it. I got so much shit going on, I can't even share it. But only people who's gonna see that is primarily our primary clients and the new people that we target. We don't even want everybody anymore. There's prerequisites for you to come to our services, and one of those is we gotta fuck with you, first of all, on a serious note. So, anyways, look, man, wartime CEO. This is this is where we're at right now. I'm in the wartime CEO. We're in our battle phase, and I'm still sitting here smiling. I should be crying with the way we're set up right now, but I'm not. Why I'm not? Because I trust my process. I know that we can lose more people and still be all right. We will still keep pushing forward because that's what a leader does. He doesn't just own a business, he runs and leads a team. And you don't just do that in a business, you do that personally too. That's why we're not tripping. I can promise you right now, I will promise you this. I will give you my word as a business owner. You see these motherfucking lights on in here? You see this motherfucking roof over my goddamn head? I can promise you, you will never, ever see me in the streets again. You will never see me sleeping at a subway again. I have done this long enough to understand how to make money. I have done this long enough to understand how to budget my finances. I have done this long enough to understand that I would rather, when we get to millions and millions of dollars, right? We get to the millions, I want to come back and say, you know what? Here's the deal. We never let people try us. We never let we never let somebody cross our boundaries. We stood firm on loyalty and respect, even if it means our business was running out of revenue. We stood on that because that is what's gonna carry us. That's what's been carrying me all this whole time since I was 14 years old. And that's what's gonna continue to carry me. It's what I've seen that work again. If you're a business owner, even personally, you're working a job. An example, if you're working$4,000 a month, if you make$4,000 a month, you should only be paying about$2,000 in expenses. The other$2,000 you should be saving that shit. Because at the end of the day, don't be a slave to a to a company, don't be a slave to a client. Being a slave to these things makes it hard for you to run a business. Run that shit like a fucking pro. Don't be a slave to it. If you make if you make four bands, 2,000 should go to expenses. That's it. House, lights, cars, gas, food, the shit you need to survive, 2,000. That's it. If you over that, if you spend over half, you already in trouble. You already a slave to the place you work, you already a slave to the clients you serve. Listen, man, I'm your host, Jameen Domus. I hope that you guys got a lot from this episode today. Um, you know, I'm I'm I'm happy that you know you guys stuck through. I'm I'm happy that we're going through our downs. Not only going through our downs, but we got you guys here right now. I'm letting you guys know we're going through our downs so you don't see all the fluff shit. This is what it's about. This is what business ownership is about. We can't cry about it, we can't complain about it. We got to get the fuck up, figure out how we're gonna do it, and keep making that money. I'm your host, Jameen Delmus, and welcome to the other side of motivation. I'll see you guys on the next episode. Talk soon.