It was our final coaching session in our agreement, and my client was late to the call. I sent her a quick email and she joined the Zoom call five minutes later, from a noisy café in Bali.
It quickly became clear that this wasn’t to be a coaching session instead, it was an extraction of value, from my head into hers.
I don’t gate-keep what I know and never give superficial answers to questions from clients, but it’s not helpful to do a ‘brain dump’ of insights and information, without context, strategy, or direction. I’d be amazed if she did anything different as a result.
This incident, which happened many many years ago, was a turning point in my coaching career. It made me realise that I needed to massively up level my standards if I was to avoid this happening. It led to a giant leap forward – in standards, boundaries, expectations, communication, clients and cash.
This is what I did to call in clients who were seeking a thought partner to co-create a bespoke strategy to get them where they wanted to go.
How to know when it’s time to raise your standards
Repeatedly feeling resentment, frustration, anger towards your clients means it’s time to raise your standards. When you’ve communicated expectations clearly and repeatedly, either through your proposal, your sales page, your contract, emails, or all of these, and clients continue to violate this – then it’s imperative you respect yourself enough to make change.
In other words, you’re mad as hell, and you’re not going to take it anymore.
(‘Not going to take it anymore’ is important, as there are plenty of business owners who’ve let their anger, resentment, or frustration morph into depression or anxiety, which generally doesn’t lead to proactive change.)
How to raise your standards, exactly
There are several practical ways to take a nebulous thing – raise your standards – and make it concrete:
1. Change your messaging
Your messaging works to call people in, and to repel others who are a bad fit. One of the quickest and easiest upgrades you can make with this is to stop talking to people’s problems and start talking to their desired transformation, or end state (through engaging your business). Stop focusing your marketing on fixing superficial problems and start talking to the complexity of your ideal client’s situation and the end point they’re after.
2. Raise your prices
Raising your prices is often a decision that’s postponed, but it’s a highly effective way to call in your next-level clients. There’s a keen difference between people who value time more than money, or money more than time. (Which also means that higher prices doesn’t mean over-stuffing your offers and working more hours.)
3. Seek higher commitment
If you’re going to do your best work with your best, ideal-fit clients, you’re going to need higher commitment from them, which might look like more structured sales calls, an application process, or turning down more clients who appear to have high expectations and limited follow-through.
4. Improve your onboarding process
So much of client satisfaction comes to setting expectations, under-promising and over-delivering, and making your communication as good as good as it possibly could be (and then some).
5. Modelling the behaviour you expect from clients
This one’s a biggun’ – YOU are the determining factor in your success, which includes modelling the behaviour that you expect from your clients. A lot of businesses talk about authenticity, but far fewer are walking their talk.
Mean what you say and say what you mean. Words are cheap. Actions speak volumes.
Embody the standards you seek to attract works not only to improve the quality of your clients, but it also improves the quality of your life, removing friction caused by incongruence, hypocrisy, shame, and the self-trust that this all undermines.
Standards and boundaries
It’s impossible to talk about standards if we don’t talk about boundaries. If you struggle with boundaries, if you’re a people pleaser, or if you derive a lot of your self-esteem from your productivity and the quality of your work, this is likely to be a struggle.
Raising your standards and reviewing your boundaries work hand-in-glove. Boundaries are one of the ways with which we model the behaviour we expect. It encourages us towards self-reflection and self-compassion as we examine what behaviours we allow from others, what behaviours we expect of others, and what we determine as ‘acceptable’, ‘unacceptable’, ‘classy’ or ‘in poor taste’.
Personally, I look for kind, classy leaders, courageous action-takers, and critical thinkers. I have deep respect for people who recognise that we are all interconnected, and bear the responsibility for the welfare of others.
This is the behaviour that I seek to imbue, and the standards that I set for my clients.
It is a pleasure and a privilege to work with clients. But we aren’t obligated to kowtow to others who squander our finite time and precious energy. Raising our standards, and following through with the behaviour we expect for others has another benefit. It encourages others around us to lift their game, too.
