SUMMARY:

Hi, this is Aleks. I’m going to talk about how your imaginary relationship with your clients are stopping you from getting real results in business. Now, it sounds a little bit weird, but this is a term I heard from a friend of mine, Fritz, who’s also a member of Business Mentor Insiders, or daily business hustle, like it used to be called when he was a member, active member.

So, he told me this term and I was really carried away with it.I was like, wow, imaginary relationships with clients, what could that possibly mean?So, turns out, it’s actually quite a powerful term, and it’s actually very useful in understanding how issues with clients can appear, and how you can lose clients without even realizing it,and then get emotionally hurt by it.Which is, of course, not where we want to be as service providers.

So, if you’re running a business, or providing a service, and you’re noticing there is a certain miscommunication with clients, you don’t really know what’s happening sometimes, and things are going wrong in some weird way with communication or results, then this video’s for you, because we’re gonna solve that. We’re gonna dig deep into that and figure out what’s actually happening. What is an imaginary relationship with clients?

Well, have you ever had it happen where you’re just lying in bed and you’re just thinking, wow, I really like my business. I really, I have these amazing clients, and these amazing clients are getting amazing results, and they’re so happy. They’re so happy about their results. They’re so satisfied, they’re just recommending me to everyone. They’re ecstatic, they’re out of their minds happy about everything that’s to do with our relationship. And then the next week, the client’s like, well, you know, you’ve been doing these Facebook ads for us, or you’ve been building this website for us, but actually we’ve found this cheaper agency in India, or whatever, and they want to do it at one third the price.

So, we’re just going to move to them and just give that a try for a little while, but you’ll still be here if you want to come back if it crashes and burns, right? Yeah, yeah, well anyway, let’s just cancel the contract. By the way, can you refund us the last half month of the payment? Yeah, thanks. Have you ever had that happen, or some iteration of this? ‘Cause there are many similar things that happen, right, just clients that just suddenly leave.

In general, just clients that ask for discounts all of a sudden, or clients that are threatening in some way, or they start freaking out or acting weird.Well, that’s because, it’s either because they’re crazy, which is unlikely.Like, people are generally not very crazy,and business owners tend to be quite a bit smarter than the average person,and also a little bit closer to reality.It’s quite hard to run a business if you’re very far removed from reality.What is going on, actually?

So, it’s a level of miscommunication. So, the relationships that we think we have with clients may not be the real relationship that we have with clients. So, we have imaginary

relationships with clients where everything is fine, and you imagine your service is amazing, and everything is just dandy, and then there’s the real thing,which is what they’re actually thinking,what they’re actually saying, what their actual opinions are.And these two things are vastly different in most businesses.So, what most companies don’t do, is they don’t track client satisfaction,they don’t track how happy clients are with results, with working with them.They don’t track the client results,in some cases, they don’t have objective tracking mechanisms for that.

Of course, if you don’t have any of that, stuff just goes wrong. It’s so hard running a business if you don’t know exactly the results you’re getting for a client, ’cause the first thing they’re gonna think of when they need to cut on expenses, which is most businesses most of the time, is, oh crap, what is not getting us results? What is not contributing to the bottom line?

And if you’re not showing them that it’s you, if you’re not showing you that you’re indispensable while working with them, then there’s a problem, because you’re gonna be on top of the list to go to the chopping block to get removed as an expense, right?

And then you get messages from clients who are getting fantastic results, or decent results, according to you. You get messages like, oh yeah, we just don’t want this as an expense anymore. It doesn’t make any logical sense, but from their point of view, they don’t see the results,because it’s not being tracked.It’s all just imaginary.So, there is this imaginary relationship in terms of results, there’s an imaginary relationship,but there’s a friendship, and all these imaginary relationships that business owners tend to have with their clients.How to resolve the friendship thing.

Well, there’s a very big difference between a friendship relationship and a business relationship.I have zero problems stopping a business relationship with someone.But maintaining a friendship relationship,they’re just two separate things, right?Like, maybe you want to do business with someone but you don’t wanna be friends, or maybe you want to be friends, but you don’t want to do business with someone.Those are two very different things, right?

We should not rely on the friendship relationship as much, to maintain the business relationship. That’s unrealistic in most cases. I know some people do that, but it’s kinda old school, and even though it works to some degree, it’s not sustainable. Like, you need those results. You need the bottom line to be there. Once the bottom line is there, having a friendship relationship on top of that is great. Like, why not know a bunch of successful entrepreneurs, and hang out with them, and have that relationship with them? Why not, right? But, both things need to be there, especially the results. So, the next thing is communication.

So, in terms of communication, do you have regular communication with clients, and do you honestly ask them, okay, what would you rate this, what would you rate results, what would you rate your experience so far, what would you rate the communication so far, etc, etc. Maybe you wanna do it anonymously. Maybe you wanna have a third party call them and collect this information. What if they don’t respond? That means things are bad. What if they don’t show up on meetings every week? Things tend to be bad when that happens.

What if they send you random, angry stuff all of a sudden? Well, people are weird, and some people don’t know how to cut a relationship, how to cut a business relationship, and had bad experiences in personal relationships, so they cut business relationships in a way they would cut a personal relationship, which is like, yeah, I always hated you. You know, that kind of stuff.

You wanna anticipate that, and there’s certain things that clients do when things, in their opinion, start to go south, right? And you can create ways to counteract that, so when you see someone’s less responsive, that tends to mean that they are going to stop doing business with you in three to six months. Because, oh, you know, first you’re unresponsive, then you do some other thing, then you kind of blame the company, you know, that you pay to do something, ’cause they made a mistake, and then you’re like, aha! A mistake, I always knew you could make mistakes, right?

So, clients do that kind of stuff.It’s just human nature, and you can’t really screen for that very easily.It is possible, but it’s, how far are you willing to go with this?So, you’re going to have to anticipate that based on people’s behaviors,and sometimes, in some industry,I just spoke to a business owner yesterday,actually, and he was running a certain type of coaching company, and he hated his clients.He just hated waking up in the morning,having to close people he didn’t like for money they didn’t have, and then deliver results he couldn’t deliver, right?So, he just hated that.So, what he did was, he found his ideal client,then he started selling to his ideal client,who he loves working with, have the money,and they get great results.

So, suddenly he’s waking up in the mornings like, wow, this is awesome. I love this, this is amazing. My business is fun, everything is great. All he did was switch niches. He wasn’t really imagining things,or maybe he had been imagining things for a long time, that everything was going fine, but one day he just woke up and realized it wasn’t true anymore. And now, his life is better, ’cause he figured out a new niche. He put himself out there, he fired all his clients. Most of them at least, like 90%. And he just started  pitching to a new niche, with a new service, and it’s working out for him fantastically well, so far. He’s only been doing it two weeks, but he’s already closing sales.

That’s basically what I wanted to share with you. This is all great and dandy, so if you’re looking to start a business and you’re looking for lead generation, you’re looking to have luxury problems such as this, you know, if you want to run a business like these guys are running, make tens of thousands of dollars. So, we have figured out ways to do that. If you go to my website, which is here, BusinessMentor.com, and you click on results, you can see hundreds of success stories of people who have done this successfully. So, if you wanna look how people have done this, look at all their secret sauce, then click on that link, go to results, and take a look.