Are You Turning Into A Parasite?
Clients are not blood bags.
In the movie Mad Max: Fury Road, the term "blood bag" refers to someone who is captured by the War Boys and forced to "donate" their blood to someone who needs it while chained to them.
It’s why Max is wearing this metal mask. He’s become the blood bag.
Kinda like a living, walking, and talking IV drip.
Coaches and consultants treat their clients this way, too.
The default business model incentivises reliance, not solving clients’ problems.
Some would say reasonable to “give them just enough to keep going until the next scheduled meeting”.
But me? I say it’s parasitical.
I say, help your clients, then let them go.
Everyone is trying to hold onto clients for life.
Fuck that.
Help them... then set them free.
Think ‘seasons’
The signing of a new client signifies the beginning of a season together.
And just like how seasons end, so does the time a client have together.
The exit strategy is built into the arrangement.
This is freeing.
Because it lets us focus 100% on getting results without any weirdness hoping to ‘keep’ them as a client.
Every season has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
And so does the journey with our clients.
Accept this. Make your peace with it.
Free yourself from it.
Help them.
Let them go.
But if we aim to let our clients go, how do we also keep working with them for a long time?
When you make people reliant on you, over time they resent you because you become another reluctant expense.
And once someone resents dealing with you, building positive word of mouth or referral business becomes impossible.
Meaning, you’ll never be able to build a real business that doesn’t churn clients.
Solve different problems.
Instead of making people reliant on you, increase your LTV by making better, more useful stuff that they want to buy.
Ok, easier said than done, right?
Not really. Think logically.
Your services help people with their current problems. Once they have their result, and they’ve received the value you promised, it’s likely they now have a different set of challenges.
Therefore, develop solutions to address these new challenges.
Walk with them up the mountain.
When designing offers with people, I find it useful to think of your offering as a client journey that steps up the mountain, rather than as a pop-up shop selling static products.
This isn’t to be confused with making problems for people and then selling the solution. That’s something else. That’s the territory of scammers.
Your primary offer helps people from point A to point B.
Pick a number you’re happy with, between 4-10, and keep focusing on getting that number of clients. Do this as fast as reasonably possible. 3-9 months is a reasonable length of time. If you get stuck, get help from YouTube or get a coach.
Once you hit your ideal number of primary offer clients, some of them will be ready for more.
Then, if those clients decide they want to go from point B to C, you can offer to help them with that, too. If you do it right, then of course they will take you up on it.
The sweetest words to hear at the end of the season with a client…
“This has been great, I don’t want this to end… How else can we work together?
It's easy to believe you put "people over profit", but if your business model incentivises dependency, it's lip service.
There’s a difference between a business model that serves people at deeper levels as the customer’s needs grow, and one that stifles growth and keeps the customer dependent.
One is a real business with room for growth… while the other is a scam where you treat your clients like a Mad Max blood bag.
Use The Calculator
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Resources
The goal is to help you get clients without doing stupid shit.
If you’re new, start HERE.
Educate yourself for free with my foundational YouTube series HERE.
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Thanks for reading
Cheers,
Pat
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