Toxic Client. Garrett Sutton

felt like he was in limbo. Should he scratch Kerry’s name from the tight schedule and book another client in that time slot? Surely, Kerry would make good on the missed appointments, Martinez thought. After all, Kerry was an important business man, one who valued the training and understood what it meant to make appointments.

      The following week brought two more missed sessions. Martinez saw Kerry’s teenaged daughter working out at the club.

      “I asked her what had happened to her father,” Martinez says. “She said he was out of the country on a trip to the Far East.”

      Martinez left another voice message for Kerry, this time saying that the club would be charging him for the missed appointments.

      Martinez turned in the usual slip at the club desk so that the family’s account would be billed.

      It was Kerry’s wife who responded to the voice message.

      Evidently, she’d reviewed her husband’s missed calls in preparation for his return. She was not pleased that they had been billed for the no-shows. She called up the club and demanded that her husband not be charged for the missed sessions. The clerk left a message for Martinez to call her.

      “I’m not paying for this bill,” she told Martinez over the phone, in a superior, snobbish tone.

      Martinez protested: “He didn’t tell me he’d be gone, and I was there. You’re paying me for my time.”

      Kerry’s wife did not raise her voice. But she did not change her position, either. “I’m not going to pay for the time,” she said, smugly.

      Martinez was flustered. It’s standard practice for personal trainers—and for professionals in other fields that set appointments with clients, such as dance instructors, massage therapists and hairdressers—to bill clients who fail to give a minimum 24-hour notice of a cancellation.

      “I fill my hours,” Martinez says, “and if somebody flakes and has already bought my time, that’s how it works.”

      Martinez explained this to Kerry’s wife, but it was to no avail. Her mind was set. Martinez was not paid for the no-shows.

      The long-term listening strategy involves hearing and evaluating what the client says throughout the term of the relationship. In the case of the personal trainer, Jeff Kerry was constantly complaining about everything, including the hour of his appointment. A client who constantly wants to shift his time to fit his ever-shifting schedule is ignorant of the fact that personal trainers need to assign people to fairly fixed schedules in order to maximize their earning potential. The client who is unwilling to stand in the shoes of the provider and appreciate their business position is the client who must be told the rules early on.

      When the trainer, Matthew Martinez, kept hearing about schedule changes, he needed to interpret and evaluate what was being said.

      Essentially, Jeff Kerry’s actions revealed that he did not care about Martinez’s business model. If Martinez had given Kerry’s words a proper evaluation, he would have developed a written policy about missed appointments. If Martinez had addressed the issue early on, in anticipation of the inevitable problem, he would have had a client who called ahead to cancel, out of consideration for his time, or who would at least have paid him for the missed appointments. Instead, he had a client who took advantage of his time and valued it even less.

      Case No. 2: The CPA

      Victor Lee was a CPA in Seattle. He had a good practice handling the bookkeeping and tax work for a number of businesses and individuals.

      One day, John Yang came into the office looking for a new CPA. He indicated that his last CPA had improperly filed a tax return, which had caused him problems with the IRS. As the initial client consultation went on, Yang also complained about two other previous accounting professionals he had used. He said that they didn’t know what they were doing.

      Lee liked to bring in new clients to the firm. As some of his elderly clients passed on, he always felt the need to attract new accounts so his billings would be equal to or higher than those of the previous year. He listened to Yang’s explanation of his background without focusing on the caustic comments expressing dissatisfaction with all his previous accountants.

      Lee agreed to take on Yang’s work. He filed an amended tax return for Yang, sent out a bill, and did not hear from or receive payments from Yang.

      Three years later, Yang called Lee in a panic. The IRS had put a lien on his bank account. Yang was furious that Lee had allowed this to happen. Initially, Lee drew a blank. He hadn’t heard from Yang for a few years and couldn’t recall the file. He asked if he could call Yang back, and that’s when Yang made another disparaging comment about accountants.

      Now he remembered Yang.

      If Victor Lee had listened carefully to John Yang, he would have heard the signs of a Toxic Client. He would have heard that John Yang has financial trouble—why else would he repeatedly have problems with the IRS? He would have heard John Yang say all his previous CPAs didn’t know what they were doing – a sure sign of future trouble for you.

      Listening is a key technique for dealing with or avoiding Toxic Clients like Yang. Too often, business owners see listening as a two-step process:

      1. Listen to what is said.

      2. Respond to what is said.

      But this doesn’t account for your processing of the information you take in when listening. Rather, you should consider engaging in active listening, which is a four-step process:

      1. Listen to what is said.

      2. Interpret what is said.

      3. Evaluate what is said.

      4. Respond to what is said.

      As you listen to the client, you need to interpret and evaluate what is being said. Actually, you unconsciously do this anyway. But by recognizing and focusing on these steps, and making them a priority, you will be much better at identifying the true natures of your potential clients.

      When you force yourself to actively interpret information as it’s given to you, rather than passively taking in the information as it’s presented, you’re assigning it meaning. If you’re not sure that you have correctly interpreted what’s been said, ask questions until you can make a clear interpretation.

      When you make an evaluation, you weigh the information and decide how to apply it. The task is to keep listening (and to ask questions to further your listening) until you have enough information to make the correct decision.

      The active listening process is both a short-term and long-term strategy for avoiding the Toxic Client. In Victor Lee’s case, the client made his dislike of accounting professionals known in the initial interview. As longtime professionals know, when someone complains about the mistreatment he’s received from others in your field, chances are good that he’ll be complaining about you next.

      Active listening requires singular focus. Too many of us are trying to do too many things at once—checking email, looking at notes, responding to texts and thinking of what next to say. But if you’re going to avoid a Toxic Client, you can’t be distracted.

      A part of listening and evaluating is paying attention to those non-verbal signals that clients give us. You can ‘hear’ what people say in part by what their body language and tone of voice indicate. Learn to interpret the various non-verbal cues to your advantage.

      Signs of impatience or annoyance include finger tapping, shifting of weight from one foot to another, abrupt or rapid speech, or a rise in voice volume or pitch. Clients shouldn’t display anger or impatience in an initial consultation. If one does, there’s a high likelihood that you’re interacting with a potentially Toxic Client. Their next bout of anger may be directed at you.

      As well, clients shouldn’t go on and on with elaborate tales of woe. Many want you to be an enabler of their victimhood. You probably won’t be able to help this person and they will drag you down even if you somehow can.