#1 - The Client We Had To Fire

Sometimes, the best business decision is saying goodbye. In this episode, we tell the story of a client who made work unbearable, why we had to cut ties, and what every business owner should learn about spotting red flags early. To learn more about Integris Design, visit https://integrisdesign.com

Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.

Transcript

Introduction: 0:00

You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

Ken: 0:09

We fired a client. That's right. In our very first episode, we're going to talk about letting a client go and why we did it, along with what you can learn from it. Hi, my name's Ken, and welcome to the very first episode of Over the Bull. Now there's a funny thing about agencies. We want every business to think that we know everything to do in every situation. Now the truth is, every business is different and every situation is different. And along with it comes growth, learning, making adjustments, changing, and yes, even sometimes doing things like firing a client. So who is this client and why did we let him go? Now this particular client, he's a plumber. He has several people that work with him, and he has a great brand. Now, when I say branding, his logos, his slogans, his color usage, everything is brilliant. Now, we didn't create any of this, but we do recognize good work when it does happen. And he has some really good work. And we knew that if we could just work with the brand a little bit, we could make great progress for the business. And he needed a lot of help. When he first came on board and we started looking at his business, everything was broken. Everything from the way he tracked phone calls to the way he marketed to his website, even down to the actual web address that he used, which caused a lot of confusion. And so we had to start digging deep in order to make progress with this client. Now, before I go further, you know, over the last 20 years or so, we've identified clients that are at different phases. And understanding where this particular client's coming from helps kind of understand where we're at. So typically the first phase of any business is this kind of stage of innocence, where where they're sold things or worse yet, they have a punch list, you know, such as I need a website, I need a business card, I need different things. And then they also start having these fantasy expectations. Now, this is no fault of their own, because a lot of the services that are offered today are really are oversimplified and sensationalistic, such as the do-it-yourself website builders or even agencies that say they can launch ads and start promoting. And then they imply the fact that they're going to get a lot more out of those ads than they initially would and really kind of minimize the amount of work that has to go into it. Now, once someone goes into this innocent phase, they often get taken advantage of. There's really no nice way to say that. And oftentimes, those businesses will come out on the other side, and they may be jaded. Now, when they're jaded, they're angry or skeptical, and especially since the fantasy didn't come true. You know, they figured they'd put a little bit of money in it, have a website, get an email address. And when they did a little bit of marketing, the business would just come flowing in. And it usually doesn't happen. And in reality, it usually doesn't happen that way. Then what happens is, is some of those people go into what I call the Ponce de Leon phase. Now, Ponce de Leon was the guy who was looking for the fountain of youth. Since their perceptions of what should happen did not happen, typically the business may move into a situation where they start experimenting. by firing, hiring different people, moving around, are looking for that magic bullet that maybe somebody else is using and they're not. And so now this puts them on a journey that is basically directionless, and they become really low-hanging fruit for the clever sales company that comes to them and says they specialize in a certain market or offer a certain service that sounds really good. Now, one of the big buzzwords today, obviously, Now the next thing that that leads to is inconsistency. Now, I don't mean they don't fund it. I don't mean the business isn't paying for stuff. If a business isn't willing to commit a consistent budget, then they're kind of dead in the water to begin with. But some of these businesses still commit a budget, but yet they still are not getting what they want, and so they switch. Now, when they switch to other people or other services, they kind of reboot that service. And when they reboot it, they start back at square one. Now, It's obvious sometimes you have to, you know, there's too many of these sales pitches and the terminology is so, you know, technical and people use sensationalism to get you on board when in reality they have no business of doing it. And so it's a tricky spot to be, you know, when you're switching and moving from service to service or looking for that all elusive magic bullet. Now, this typically leads to the next phase, and that is either they go out of business, they run out of money, and the closer they get to running out of money, the more they need the expectation met. And so what I mean by that is, you know, they switch service, switch service, switch service, and then they're down to their last credit card, and then they're hoping that they can hire somebody that's going to be able to, you know, pull that fourth quarter Hail Mary pass and keep their business afloat. The other thing is they give up on internet marketing, they try other things, and they don't have high expectations of the internet. And some, of course, find a good service. Now, of course, some find good services early on, some find them later. But we often find today when someone comes to us, we have to get very grounded and very real with what the Internet is. And so when they come to us, it's really one of those situations where we say, OK, here are the facts when it comes to the Internet. And they're ready for that kind of sober approach and that grounded approach, which in some ways makes our life easier because we sell them reality. And when you sell reality, it makes for a more solid relationship. Now, this particular client, he came to us in the jaded phase. He was angry and skeptical, and he was also confused, and he was very scattered in everything that he had done. So like the perfect storm. But, you know, we face this sometimes. And it's very normal when we start talking with the business for them to do things like share ideas and concepts or question what we do or things like that. And so we kind of go through this phase of orienting a client to where they can have the proper expectation and we can start working toward achieving real goals. Now, one of the things that was unique about this particular customer was he never outgrew the skeptical phase. As a matter of fact, when he started out with us, there were some questions that he would ask, and those questions were normal. They were very inquisitive and things like that, and we'd offer education. But for some reason, the more that we offered the education, the more he almost took a liberty of being more aggressive toward us. Now, what fueled the aggressiveness for this particular customer was several items. Now, you can learn a lot from these items, and I'm sure you've faced some of these items already. Now, the first approach, one thing that just threw this guy off was what I would call the Good Samaritan. Now, the Good Samaritan, what that would be is someone who sends an email. So he'd get an email in his inbox. And in this email, it would say something like, Hello, I ran across your website and I saw some errors on your website. And I attached a report that you can forward on to your web person. Or if you need some help, just let us know. Now, this Good Samaritan or Lone Ranger approach was something he would look at, and he would take a look at that report, and then he would send it to us. And like I said, early on in the game, we would kind of write back and say, okay, this is what's happening, and this is why this hasn't happened yet, and those kind of things. But then later, it just started getting more and more aggressive, for lack of a better word. I can't tell you how many times, you know, he would contact me via text or via phone call. And he would demand that I jump into his Zoom session because he went to a trade show or received one of these email reports talking about something that we had missed or some things we had missed. So, you know, obviously as an agency with a full schedule, we couldn't just stop. But usually I would try to prioritize it and get in the meeting within an hour or so. So I'd jump into the meeting and he would, you know, proceed to, you know, be very short. You know, it would always be very short text messages or very short phone calls demanding that we jump into a Zoom session and get into it. And then he would proceed to like just question us. But the problem was he wasn't really technically savvy, and he was just kind of repeating the sales pitch and then interpreting the data based upon the sales pitch, but it was inaccurate. And there's a big problem with this whole report, but there's actually a lot of problems with this. But what it ultimately did was it just created this cycle. Now, this cycle is, you know, we have to account for our time. And eventually we started looking at the clock and realizing, you know, we're spending a lot of time just going back and forth and prioritizing, which is hurting our relationship with other clients or is making us have to work late. So we're making some really tough decisions. But let's really analyze what this report does. Let's look at the Good Samaritan. So actually, this predicates on probably back as far as Edward Bernays, which is one of the earliest of the influencers of modern marketing today. And then it kind of goes down, and you can see this kind of approach in the Hare Krishnas at the airports in different ways. But basically, the number one thing that it does is it's giving you something, and by nature, you want to respond. Now, human nature is to respond to certain things like that, and that's exactly what the Hare Krishnas would do. Give a flower or something like that, and then ask for a donation, and the person would feel obligated to give money. You see, it's this thing that they're taking advantage of. But let's really analyze this. The first thing that I want to point out is they're sending an unsolicited, spammy-style email. Now, sometimes it'll say R-E colon and have a subject, which would imply that you've already written them, so you've got a level of deception. And then sometimes in the body of the copy, they have your name. Now, for me, and I get spam stuff all the time, people wanting to sell us wholesale services, white label services, overseas services, you name it, promising everything. Now, here's the thing. When I get an email like that, the first thing that I do is block it. The reason I do is because they're intruding on my time. They're kind of sneaking the way in. They don't respect my time, effort, and energy. And by not respecting my time, they're costing me time even to block them. And I find that offensive. And so you have to come up with the idea, do you want to waste a tenth? You know, if you spend an hour a day or 30 minutes a day, you work a 10-hour day. If it's an hour, you've lost a tenth of your time you're putting into these spammy things you're looking through and reading. Is it really worth that time, effort, and energy? But hold on a minute. They sent that report, and that report looks like they put a lot of time into that. And it looks very technical, and it looks good. So what do we do with that report? Now, as an agency, I can tell you that I can run you a report on competitor Google ads. I can run one on search engine optimization. I can run one on a lot of different areas within your business. And it only takes me about three minutes. That's right. Three minutes. And that includes putting my logo, my branding, and even your logo in it. Now, agencies, we have the ability to use these tools. I mean, even looking at your Google My Business within a seven-mile radius, those just take a few seconds. So the idea is that report, let's say, for example, let's say I wanted to try a marketing strategy. I could hire somebody that doesn't know anything about marketing. and I can tell them to push a button and they could generate a report. Then I can give them a canned script and then I can tell them to send that script and attach a report. They don't know anything. Now I've lost about three minutes of that person's time to have them do that. So if I have them do that around the clock, well, there they go. And that's my marketing strategy. So what does that tell you about the business? That tells you that they can't market ethically. See, this is huge. This is why you block them. Because if they can't market themselves ethically, how in the world are they going to market you ethically? They can't. They're already showing you right out of the gate they don't have the capability to market. And if they did, they would market their own business ethically. Now, even at that, those reports usually are pretty good if they're running them from the right places. But they're actually useless. Now, let me describe this a little bit to you. Now, this is assuming you have a good person working with your company to grow it. Now, there are a lot, a lot of used car salesmen in our world. And there's a lot of them who don't know what they're doing. But let's just assume for the minute you've got the right guy and they give you a report. You look at the report and you see all the things that are wrong. Now, the reality is that I could look at any website virtually on the planet and find something wrong with it. I could probably find a lot of things wrong with it. Now, the right or wrong thing isn't really the issue. The more important issue is what's planned and when is it planned to be accomplished. So, you're not paying someone an infinite amount of time with an infinite amount of resources to have your work done. And if they're taking on a web project that's already in disarray, it's going to take a while to get that thing lined up. And so that report, although it's accurate, it doesn't take in consideration how that agency is going to take care of that elephant and clean up that website. And so the idea is, what's the strategy to get things cleaned up? It's not just the fact that something's broken. Is it in the works? Is it going to be worked on? And when is it going to be worked on? Now, those reports don't tell you that. And here's the thing. The person who made that report, even if they're fully competent, doesn't know where your marketing is at, what's being worked on, what's being adjusted. For example, as I mentioned, this particular plumber, his web address was horrible. Absolutely horrible. It sounded like an IT company or something. So those reports would often address an old web address or an old something or another that we've already handled and we're in the process of managing. So you can see those reports out of context are really no good. Now, what happened with this particular client with the Good Samaritan scenario was that, you know, a long time into the program. Now, this is even after we're running paid ads and we're getting phone calls at such a low rate that his independent coach would call us up and want to know more about it because he didn't believe we were converting phone calls at that low of a rate with the paid ads. So that's pretty phenomenal, especially in the plumbing industry. But he would call us up, or call me up, or text me and demand that I jump into a meeting. And then what happened was it'd be very short and very accusatory, and he would come in and demand this, demand that, ask this question, ask that question. And he kind of came at us like he kind of got us in something, you know, when in reality, there was perfectly good explanations for everything. And as I mentioned, after we lost two or three hours of time, he realized that basically he was given a sales pitch, right? Now, what was unfortunate with this particular person was he would forget that conversation. And so the very next report he got at a trade show or the very next report he got an email, it was the exact same thing all over again. So you can imagine how many times you could lose three hours just trying to re-explain where the project is at and re-explain the idea that these reports basically describe Don't consider any of these other variables. Now, here's the thing. This is not what calls the client. Now, it was frustrating. Now, there's no joke. When you get a text message or you get someone who calls up and they're constantly accusing you of something, you know, it's tough. Now, we do get clients initially who do have a lot of questions because they've been burned. And that's okay. We expect that. But when it continues for months and months and months and months, and they're continually being that susceptible to basically simple sales pitches, it makes it very difficult to work for that client. But guess what? This is not what cost the client or costed us to have to make a tough decision of letting the client go. So what else was going on? Now, there was something that he was doing good matter of fact, I would say probably pretty good. So what that is, is as we start working on his marketing, his SEO services, his paid advertising, his social media, all those kind of things, he'd bring to the table some new ideas. Now, what I mean by that are different ways that plumbers are marketing in the industry with niche-based services. So let me give you an idea. company comes to him and they say we have a website or we have a program in which we can help promote your plumbing business in your area and what we would do is typically look at it once he brought it to us and make a determination and we would say okay This is interesting. Now, he'd come to us overly excited, typically, because, again, he was very susceptible to sensationalistic sales pitches. And he'd bring it to us, and what we would do is typically look at it. And in a lot of those cases, especially in modern times, the businesses didn't check out. Now, they looked reputable and they sounded good, but they were very green businesses that really couldn't provide what they claimed to be able to give. And so those would be excluded pretty quickly. Then the next thing would be to determine if we wanted to test it, when we would start, when we would stop, and how we would track that particular project. So what we would do is we'd take a service, for example, we'd assign a custom tracking phone number to it, custom URLs to it, things of that nature. And then we would see how well they performed within an allotment of time. And then if they proved to be good, then great. And if they didn't, then we would disregard them. Now here's what's funny about the plumbing industry. I can tell you that 99% of what he was approached with, even the stuff that sounded good, did not check out. I find that really interesting because in today's world, there's so many people who are trying to offer marketing or creative services, and it looks like they really don't have any business offering those services. And so a lot of times it would just be very time consuming to go in there and set up the test and then stop the test. But here's the thing. He did good by this. I have to give him credit because the idea is that, you know, if we found one, you know, piece of gold and he was willing to spend some advertising dollars in order to allow us to test it, if we could just find one and it added and it was a good conversion creating service, then we'd want to put that into the equation. Now, none of them really checked out. Now, I can even tell you some of the games. For example, he called me up one time and he was really excited about signing back up with an email service he used years ago. And they gave him a report and he said that the emails that this plumbing-based email company would send out equated to like, it was a crazy number, like 20 or 30 percent converted into new sales for his business. So he called me up and he told me about that. And I thought, wow, okay. I said, that's really interesting. Now, We work with a lot of people, and we're partners with Constant Contact and some other guys, and we've been doing email marketing for a long time. And so for someone to tell me that's converting at that high of a rate, it doesn't. It usually does not do that. But I went ahead and I looked at it, and I recommended that he go back and look really hard at the numbers to find out if these were relationships he had already had, and basically these would have been orders that would have happened no matter what. He came back about two weeks later, and he said, yeah, he goes, none of that worked out. He says it turns out the number was less than half of a percent or something. So he wasn't going to invest in it. But if he went based upon their report, he would have honestly believed that that email service was generating 20% or 30% of new sales for his business. You've got to be careful with these reports and these services. So that's the big lesson. The other big lesson is, yes, if you can afford to test different services, then it's a great thing. Because if they can convert or they provide another outlet for you to market and it provides really good leads, then you'd want to do it. You'd want to add it to what you're already doing. So the equation is something like this. Let's say that you run Google Ads, and let's say for every dollar you spend, you make $2. Well, how many $1 would you invest? You know, quite a bit, right? Well, let's say you've got another service that you found, and let's say this other service gives you $1.75 for every dollar you sent. Well, would you do that too? Now, you see, at some point, you'd say, well, I want to do more in Google Ads. But at some point, you're going to hit a critical mass. And so you want to go ahead and distribute and you want to do as much as you can where it equals profitability for your company. And so that's part of what you do by kind of diversifying your advertising. Now, here's a free tip. When I worked with this one large company back in 2009, 2010, one thing that we distinguished was the idea of subscription-based services versus newsstand kind of services. You know, those services where you go into a service station and get that 75-cent newspaper or whatever. And what we found out in a lot of cases, subscription-based advertising has a limited shelf life, meaning we would advertise three months out of the year versus newsstand where we had advertised pretty much year-round, minus a few little points. And what we would find is that we were able to drive the the sales up, and then we were also able to greatly reduce the amount of sales advertising expenses that we had. And so we were able to reduce that dramatically. I think we took it from like $22,000 a week to about $13,000 a week. Now this is a huge company, and most of the people we work with do not have those kind of budgets. But we learned a lot through that experience back in 2009 and 2010. So going back to the client. Now, this is the thing. Now, this was a good practice. He had an extra budget that he allocated to special advertising and test marketing. This was a good thing. It was not a bad thing. And so if you can set aside a budget to test market, but you're able to qualify it, meaning don't just run ads and, you know, look for the phone ring and then you stop there. You've got to qualify that particular service. And if you can qualify it and you can spend the money and you're paying your agency enough to be able to investigate it, it is a great thing. And so this definitely did not cost the relationship with the customer. Now, this guy ran hot. Now, what I mean by that is He would be the kind of guy that, based upon his mood, he would call up and make these demands that just simply couldn't be done. He would call up and say that he needs more phone calls. As though, as an agency, we have a magic button that can just magically increase phone calls if someone calls and is irate enough or demanding enough that somehow we're going to be able to just magically increase that. No one has that button. No one. And so when you look at something like that, it was tough because he would do it. And usually our response after about a year of working with him was we could extrapolate it. And so what we'd be able to do is say, okay, our average cost per phone call would be X number of dollars. And so if you want to increase and get 10 more phone calls based on historic data, you need to increase your budget by this amount. So we're able to give him like analytical data. Now, what was unusual about that was he never took us up on it. He would always say he wanted to do it, but then he would go away and never do it, which was kind of odd. It was almost like he was trying to project his frustration or his fear about business or something onto us and thought that maybe if he called us up and just complained enough that somehow we would have some magic answer. So the big lesson there is there are no magic answers. And oftentimes, if you call and kind of overstep your bounds with your agency, what will happen a lot of times, because agencies are also people pleasers, is they may knee jerk and make big moves in your marketing. And that could actually mess up the algorithm in places like Google. Now, if that happens, it'll actually set you back. But if you create that fear within the agency, that's very possible that they do something like that. And so the idea is that when you do marketing, it's a lot of methodical movement over a period of time. A lot of times, you know, when you talk to Google reps, you know, a lot of them will call us up or, you know, we'll talk with them and they'll say, okay, when you make these moves, you want to wait a little bit of time, let the algorithm catch up to it, and let's see what happens. Now, this is true with making budget adjustments or creative adjustments or technical adjustments or campaign adjustments. There's a ton of adjustments you could do, but making too many adjustments at the same time is the equivalent of making too many adjustments on a stock car at the same time you know when you watch a stock car race they make these little minor adjustments let the car run and then they make another adjustment now only in crazy situations do they make big adjustments and when they do they know they're taking a chance well it's kind of the same thing with marketing now truth be known he was pushing it on the way that he conducted himself with us Not only with his irateness, but also what you'd find is in addition to this hot, cold, happy, angry kind of mentality that he had, he was constantly late for scheduled meetings we had with him to go over data. Not only that, but he would constantly stay later. And there was no easy way to kind of urge him to end the meeting. And then he would digress into other subjects. And, you know, there were some times where we literally couldn't have forced him out of the office with the crowbar. And that's pretty difficult for an agency too, because we do want to please a client. But then having to create those boundaries and then have them ignore those boundaries was extremely difficult. Another thing that he tended to do was send late night emergencies. So you could imagine getting a late night message saying that there was something urgent and it was not urgent at all. It was just something that he would want to talk about late at night, you know, when he was traveling or his wind down time or whatever. but he would make it to where it was an emergency in his own mind. And he got worried, didn't really care about respecting those boundaries either. But again, we kept massaging it and with the goal of knowing if we can just keep educating the client, keep pushing them. We knew that 2025 was going to be a big breakout year for this person. And honestly, I started to see him start to understand different things that were going on. And I started to see improvement from him as the owner of a business. So let me share some additional stories with that. When he first started working with us, he was very prone to quickly make moves. For example, he switched phone systems. And he did it without us. He basically caught up and said, we're switching phone systems. Now, he had no consideration or he didn't think through things like what happens to the tracking number when I switch phone systems? What happens to the phone calls? What happens to call routing? How do these different things work? in conjunction with his business and it made things a little bit difficult for us because he would call us up because the tracking numbers wouldn't work or there'd be something wrong with routing and so we would get pulled into conversations because of the decisions that he had made. Now Over time, he started to do a better job of including us, and then we could kind of say, okay, these are the problems that we see that may happen if you do this. And he did a much better job of accountability the further down we got, and we started just to see him start to look like he was becoming a little more clear in his path and in his vision. So that was really fun, actually, to watch him grow as the owner of a business and then understand kind of his limits and then begin to trust us to be able to help him make good decisions for his company before making these big movements that would upset his business and cause a lot of problems and a lot of things to kind of break down. Another example was he started doing some call routing at one point early, and he didn't think about the loops that it would create. And so what happened was was that he set it up in a way, because he had multiple people involved in his phone system. And so what would happen is someone would call in, but he would have a third party, another company he worked with do, routing in a way that it would loop the call and then break the phone call chain to where the phone calls wouldn't go through. And he would reach out to us because he would assume that it was something wrong with our tracking numbers, when in reality, the thing that he did with this other person caused it to break. And at one point, he broke his phone system, I'm wanting to say, maybe a month. And it was with certain tracking numbers. And we had to go back and then we identified that it was a movement that was made. Now, what was good was he did trust us to help him with those technical decisions and started connecting us. And then being able to be in those communications really helped us kind of orchestrate the changes and then make good recommendations to him. And then toward the end, before we let him go, he was really doing a good job of starting to trust us a little more with that. Now, with all that being said, he did something really good that we see a lot of customers not do well. And that was he was involved. Now, although the guy was bipolar in his actions, he was also one of those guys that was willing to participate, offer suggestions, and get on board with strategies that helped improve his business. Now, this is non-debatable. Now, the one thing that you want to know as an owner of a business is that an agency like ours, for example, full service boutique style agency, we're not an expert in your field. Now, we can bring a lot to the table because we work with a lot of businesses. We understand a lot of things that go on in business and probably one like yours. But the idea is your business is unique. And by you participating in what you see with your customers, what's good about your business, what's bad about your business, all those things help contribute to building a plan. So we've always believed that the best marketing strategy combines your experience with our experience. Now, a lot of agencies don't want this. And I'll tell you why they don't want it. It's not because it's not effective. It's because it's time consuming. So the idea is that if a website is built or a marketing strategy is created or social media is planned, your involvement in that every minute that you take is a minute that that agency could be doing something else. Now, so there is a push pull here. And the idea is that you want to be able to participate in your business and be able to offer information. So his contributions to the marketing strategy, which drove the cost of phone calls down, along with his willingness to be able to fund the marketing strategies well, contributed to his success that he had while he was with us. And so a lot of times when we work with the business and if they don't participate or they just expect you to magically know the answers. Now, we do that and we sometimes have success with that. But always, the business that participates more always does better. And at our particular agency, we like that. And the reason we like it is because usually the businesses grow, and then they trust us to do more, and then we grow with them. And then that's just a nice symbiotic relationship. So if you're working with an agency and you see they're resistant to your input, that's actually a bad sign. And so part of what kept us working with this client was the fact that he was hungry to be a part of things. He was a willing participant, and he did care about his business. And so as you can see, with all the negatives, you know, with all the hot and cold that this guy had, his passion, although sometimes misguided, contributed. And that meant a lot to us as an agency to see that, and that kept us hanging on. So what was it? Okay, so we're looking at this and you're probably asking yourself, okay, you know, this guy, he didn't cause the termination because of the hot and cold, the late night, you know, request for calls, you know, all these crazy things. So what was it that ultimately ended the relationship and forced us to make a decision? Well, it came down to non-payment. It turns out he got behind on his payments and he turned us into a collections agency. Now, part of what he did, and again, he was kind of scattered, so it's hard to tell if this was intentional or unintentional. But even that, what we found out was that, and we were willing to work with him. I mean, 100% willing to work with him on payments because we thought this was a breakout year. And we knew that if we could hang on and work through it, we knew that this was going to be the year. And he was starting to come around and trust us. He wasn't doing the late night stuff as much. All that stuff just started going. And so we didn't want to end based upon him being behind on his payments with us. But where it got tricky was we saw the same trends in his ability to try to settle things. the situation. Like, for example, one of the things that he told me personally when I called him up was that he said that the invoices that were smaller amounts made it to his inbox, but the larger amounts did not make it to his inbox. Now, the software we use is very common software used for most businesses, and you can actually see if it was delivered or not. And so knowing that those emails were delivered and knowing that that was kind of nonsensical was a flag. The other thing that he did was demanded that we go back and provide him a report of all of 2024. Now, you can imagine the work that it would take to do that accounting for him on his behalf to go back in and build that just so that he could try to find some way to not to pay his debt. And so by putting us through that extra work and by doing these extra things, it just created a sense that there was, you know, he was trying not to pay his bill. And that ultimately is what cost us the relationship. We figured that in culmination with everything else, it wasn't worth it. And we figured that we had gotten him into a good spot. Now, if I can conclude this particular part, one of the tough parts was even determining the, you know, the termination agreement. Because, you know, ultimately we said, hey, we just don't think this is a real good fit. You know, we don't think we're going to be able to help you moving forward. And typically, you know, like I said, this has probably only happened to us maybe six or seven times since 2006, right? When we create a termination agreement and we talk that over with the client, we normally send out to set the proper expectation. Because we want the client to leave happy with everything they want to leave with. And we want to do something that's reasonable. And we want to clearly define it to where we can meet the expectation. And even creating. Now, when we do that... I can probably tell you that I've had to create those, like I said, a handful of times, and normally it'll go through one revision. This particular person put us through about 13 hours of revisions. And so that kind of solidified the fact that he just was no longer a good fit for us. And so we do wish him the best. We do hope that he's successful in his ventures and that he does proceed in the right direction and he does learn from what we're doing. Now, the unfortunate part is prior to doing the podcast, I wanted to go look and see if what kind of moves he had made just by running some analytical tools. And unfortunately, he did start making some bad decisions. And we hope that... you know, he can correct those and get moving in the right direction again. Because in Asheville, North Carolina, there is great potential for a plumber to take over a large part of the market, even when there is brand recognition and other segments. So there you go. Hopefully that helps you out. And there's the case of the client that we had to let go. And next week, we're going to approach another story that crosses our agency, and hopefully that'll help you out too. Thank you so much for listening in to the first episode of Over the Bull. We hope it's beneficial to you. We hope you learn from it, and stay away from those unsolicited spammers.

Introduction: 43:41

Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bull, brought to you by Integris Design, a full-service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.