How to Fire Those Bottom-Ranked Clients

When practitioners joke about 20% of their clients consuming 80% of their time, they are joking about reality. That's the very reason why they need to act like business managers and fire the 20% of their clients consuming an inordinate amount of time while adding nothing to the bottom line. Four steps to identify bottom-rung clients are: 1. Create a spreadsheet listing all clients and their characteristics. 2. Rank each client on a scale of 1 to 10 on characteristics such as: timeliness in providing information, completeness of information, truthfulness, integrity, payment habits. 3. Total the scores for each client and rank the clients based on the final scores. 4. Identify the clients in the bottom 10% and send them the dreaded letter.