February 8, 2020
What to do when you are being dominated by a whale client
Sent by Jonathan Stark on February 8th, 2020
Having a whale client is bad for your business.
Sure, it’s nice to get those big checks every month, but being dominated by a whale client leads to lots of problems:
- The whale tends to eat up all your time, which leaves you no time for marketing, sales, product development, etc.
- Your skills will likely atrophy as you spend months or years working on only the whale’s specific problems.
- The longer you work with the whale, the more they will treat you like an employee which will devalue your contributions and can lead to low-value busy work.
- The whale makes you lazy about landing new business, so if they dropped you, you’d be probably have no idea how to replace that income quickly.
- You become dependent on the whale for your livelihood which creates an imbalance in negotiating power for any new work with them.
I could go on, but hopefully you get the point.
Here’s the thing…
- Whales don’t leave a lot of time for you to do marketing and sales.
- Marketing and sales are major parts of running a business.
- If you’re not doing marketing and sales on a regular basis, then you don’t have a business. You have a job without benefits.
So… what can you do about it?
What to do when you are being dominated by a whale client
I think the best thing that you can do when your business is dominated by a whale client is to claw back some time in your schedule. See if you can get them down to 20 hours a week.
Then, use the stability of the regular income from the whale - decreased though it may be - to up your marketing and sales game in the newly available hours.
(NOTE: If you are running things too close to the bone to take an immediate pay cut, sock away some savings for a month or three before asking for the reduction in hours.)
Once you get into a routine with your marketing and sales, you will attract more leads and land new clients, which will make you less dependent on the whale.
Eventually, you can either let the whale go or renegotiate your deal with terms that are more favorable to you (and ideally more valuable to them).
Yours,
—J