Why losing customers isn’t always a bad thing

So I just want to have a little caveat before I really get into this topic, because I’m not trying to be insensitive and I’m not trying to be callous, because I know business owners just like me have invested heavily in building up relationships over the years. So when you do part ways with a customer, the emotional impact is not to be underestimated. However, what I really want to talk about in this video is why there’s an opportunity in splitting up with a customer, and quite often, when your business is doing the right things, doing enough of the right things, then some people are going to love it, and some people are going to hate it. And let’s go into that.

As part of the Million Pound Business Model, essentially businesses are going to have to really, really niche to get that million pound valuation. That’s something we’ve identified for most really successful businesses. They are generally quite niche, which means they only do one thing for one group of people. But there’s different levels of it, some are extreme in how specific they are in terms of their solution and services, and others are a bit more general, but they’re still quite specific. But in general, businesses have to be very specific to really get ahead. What that means is, over the years, you may have had quite a generalised offering, and then as your business develops and you identify what your new priorities are in terms of who you really want to support and how, then what’s going to happen is the message and the types of conversation you’re having with people are going to change.

Over time, that other group, they may find someone else who is having the right kind of conversations that they really do want to be having, but it’s just not you, and that’s when you can essentially lose a customer. There’s sadness in it, but there’s also opportunity in it, because when you do lose the customer, what it does is it frees up your time and frees up the time of your team. And by freeing up that time, what you can then do is go and find more of the kind of people that you really can connect to. So there is that opportunity there.

But it also, it can be an indicator. The kind of clients you lose and the ones you keep can be a really good indicator of if you’re niching and being specific enough and adding enough value to a certain group of people, and sometimes when you do lose someone, you’ve also got to focus on the people you’ve kept as well and what that means. So once you get past this rejection, which has always got this emotional element attached to it, what you’ve then got to think about is actually, “Okay, now who is a group that we’ve kept and how can we be better for that group?”

A lot of you, as you’re doing this business development journey, you’re going to experience this yourselves, and I just wanted to talk about what the significance was.