“If you don’t feel comfortable with the way they’re doing business,” she says, “that could potentially reflect poorly on you. What is it that we really have to sell? Our reputation. We want to have a reputation of doing things properly and ethically, as well as maintaining the buildings to the highest standards and providing the best services to clients and tenants.
“Your first goal is to never lose business,” she concedes, “so your first action is to try to get them to do it properly.”
Glenn says she has only “fired” one client, after the new board president at a condominium community insisted that the building that housed his own unit be the first one renovated during a major rehabilitation of the property. That demand created resentment and infighting among board members, who blamed Glenn.
“I was taking this stuff home with me in my head, thinking about it, dwelling on it,” she says. “It never feels good when somebody talks bad about you, but you never want to give up an income stream if you can avoid it.” Still, she resigned from the contract.
“If a client is taking up a lot of real estate in your brain, if you’re obsessively thinking about them, rehashing or rehearsing conversations that have happened or that you would like to happen, you’ll be constantly distracted,” says Elster.
That, she warns, is not good for your other clients. “If it’s just unreasonable or it’s gone too far, they can soak up all of your time and you won’t be productive in other places,” she says, “then they’re not cost-effective as a client.”
Even so, says her co-author, Harvard-trained psychotherapist Katherine Crowley, most people are reluctant to “break up” with a paying client for fear they won’t be able to replace the business. Her advice: “Even before you fire the client, start pursuing new and better clients. Usually we hold onto these toxic clients from fear.”
Part of that fear reflects the dread most people feel when it’s time to confront a client with the ugly truth: This just isn’t working out. But parting doesn’t have to be sorrowful, says Joe Jernigan, president of Real Estate Associates, a property management firm in Durham, N.C., who has resigned from contracts just twice in his long career.
“We accept the responsibility for things not going well,” he says. “We don’t say to the client that they did something wrong. We say, ‘We’re not able to meet your expectations.’ Then it’s our fault.”
The tactic, says Jernigan, preserves whatever is left of a once-productive relationship. “After time lapses and the smoke clears, you want the client to be able to look back at the situation and say, ‘Well, Real Estate Associates resigned my account, but at least they were professional in the way they did it,’” says Jernigan. “You want the client to always think well of you and to speak well of you because we’re always in the business of building business and reaching out for new accounts.”
