18:32Taki Moore · Talking Head
I'm begging you to fire your worst clients
Taki Moore's case for sorting clients into negative, neutral and positive, writing entry standards for both logistics and vibe, and letting the bad ones go.
October 16thThe argument in one line.
Retention is results plus relationship, so coaches should replace bonus-stuffed irresistible offers with an experience that gives clients a map, AI power-ups, and a squad.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A business coach or consultant whose clients churn after a few months and who spends most of the week chasing new leads to replace them.
- A coach whose program has grown into a pile of workshops, portals, bonuses and calls that clients never finish.
- A coach with 10 to 100 clients who wants a lightweight weekly routine to know who is on track and who is quietly slipping.
SKIP IF…
- You sell a pure done-for-you service with no coaching or client implementation involved.
- You have no clients yet and are still working out basic marketing and sales.
The full version, fast.
Irresistible offers pushed coaches to promise and stuff in more content, leaving clients overwhelmed and coaches burnt out. Taki Moore says clients leave because they are lost, stuck, or alone. Fix lost with a simple triangle map: result, red obstacles, green milestones, blue missions. Fix stuck with custom GPTs that help beginners create or audit work. Fix alone with community, breakout rooms, and a weekly red, yellow, green traffic-light review of every client. Retention equals results plus relationship.
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- Clients don't starve, they die of indigestion: more content makes lost clients more lost.
- Lost clients need context, not content, and a one-page map of result, obstacles, milestones and missions provides it.
- You are doing sales because you failed at marketing, and doing marketing because you failed at product.
- Most coaches work hard on lead generation because they have leaky buckets, not because they lack funnels.
- Done-with-you beats DIY and done-for-you, but done-accelerated-for-you with custom GPTs gets beginners results faster still.
- AI is good at creating, but the client still needs taste to season and tweak the output.
- Moore says a live cohort of new coaches built and sold their first offers with AI inside an hour, with sales from $3,000 to $17,000.
- Clients who get results faster than their disbelief can talk them out of it are the ones who stay.
- Retention equals results plus relationship, and you need both to keep clients long-term.
- Most clients feel alone even when they run a company with a team, because few people understand the founder's journey.
- A 90-minute coaching call can teach nothing and still land hard if breakout rooms let clients find their people.
- If you don't know a client's traffic-light status, mark them red: the red flag means you don't know yet.
- The easiest relationship for a coach to control is the one clients have with the coach, and caring visibly drives effort and loyalty.
Fix lost, stuck, and alone
WHAT TO LEARN
Clients stay when they get results and feel a relationship, so design the program around a map, AI power-ups, and belonging instead of more bonuses.
- Overloading a program with content leaves clients lost, so give them a single map of result, obstacles, milestones and missions and cut everything that doesn't serve it.
- Find the exact steps where clients get stuck, then build a custom GPT that creates or audits that step so beginners reach a decent result fast.
- AI output still needs the client's taste, so teach them to season and tweak what the tool produces instead of accepting it raw.
- Faster early wins beat belief problems, because clients who see results quickly don't have time to talk themselves out of the program.
- Retention equals results plus relationship, so a program that delivers only one of the two will leak clients sooner or later.
- Most founders feel alone, so build a squad through breakout rooms and shared sessions where clients meet people on the same journey.
- Run a weekly traffic-light review of every client, treat unknown as red, and write the next action for each one so care shows up as behavior.
Terms worth knowing.
- Magic model
- A triangle map with the client's result in the middle, red obstacles, green milestones that flip each obstacle, and blue missions that move them forward.
- Done with you
- A delivery style between do-it-yourself courses and done-for-you agency work where the coach teaches and gives templates and the client fills in their own content.
- DXY (done accelerated for you)
- Done-with-you plus custom GPTs that help clients create or audit their work so beginners get strong results quickly.
- Traffic light meeting
- A weekly review that scores each client red, yellow or green and lists the next action, treating unknown status as red.
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I've got this great client. His name is David Dugan and he's been with me for 14 years. He's had something like 97 record quarters in a row.
So he's been with me a long time, but his average client stays with him seven and a half years. And that's average client over hundreds of clients. He asked me a question once that hurt.
He said like, Taki, how big would your business be if you had never lost a single client? If every client who ever started with you was still with you today? And I cried for days.
We've been focused a lot over the last couple of videos on how do we market and how do we sell? How do we get the clients? But that's like half the game because most coaches have to put so much work into marketing and sales because they don't keep the clients they got.
In the last video, I told you about this quote from Naval, which said, you're doing sales because you've failed at marketing. If you saw on the board, there was a dot, dot, dot at the end. I'd cut the rest off.
Let me finish the sentence. It was this, you're doing sales because you failed at marketing and you're doing marketing because you failed at product. Our product is coaching.
And I'm not going to tell you how to coach your clients, but if we can get them to win faster and stay longer, I think that's a conversation worth having. We shouldn't need to talk about this, but we do because coaches are working so hard on getting leads and finding new funnels and all this stuff because they've got leaky buckets.
So I don't know if you're noticing the same trend as I am. You probably are because we're in the same circles. There's a trend that was big a couple of years ago that grew in huge popularity and now we're reaping the downstream effects of it.
And the trend was let's create an offer so irresistible, so good that people would feel stupid saying no. And from a marketing sales point of view, it totally makes sense. But what has led to is a bunch of...
big promises getting made that now have to get fulfilled. And so we've got coaches who just want to run a coaching business, but now the proud owner of a software business as well, running an agency and doing done for you and doing tons and tons of one -on -one and stuffing their portals full of all of these like extra bonus material that they use just to get the sale.
Here's what's wrong with that. It's not good for anybody. Your clients are completely overwhelmed and the coaches, us, are completely burnt out.
And then there's AI. And I think, Some coaches are down this end of the spectrum, which is like, no, I'm not touching it, head in the sand.
And they're just getting left behind. And then there's other coaches who have gone all the way to the other end and they've basically uploaded them into an AI and that's what their clients get right now. And wonder why the clients don't get results and they want to bail because they can get the same answers for 20 bucks a month off GPT.
So if you want your clients to win and stay and for you both to enjoy the process, we've got to move away from irresistible offer to creating an energizing experience that's just as good for you as it is for them. I think I can show you how to do it. Let's chat.
I'm not going to teach you how to do basic stuff. Like you should have a community on school or on Facebook or whatever, or you should run Zoom calls. That's basics.
You know how to coach your clients and you know how to get them results. I think there's three reasons why clients leave or clients get stuck and why they drop out. Firstly, they're lost.
They get overwhelmed, bogged down, and then they lose heart and they fail. Second, they're stuck. Like even if they know what to do.
They're just not good at it yet. And so they don't get the results. And then third, all of this is compounded because most of our clients are operating alone.
And so they lose heart. If they lose heart, they run out of future. When they run out of future, they leave.
So we've got to fix lost. We've got to fix stuck. And we've got to fix alone.
And that's our roadmap for the next couple of minutes. Here's the biggest mistake we make. We want to help our clients.
We want to give them as much value as we can. Plus, we're trying to make our offer irresistible. So what do we do?
We give them stuff. We give them more. We give them content.
We give them workshops. We give them webinars. We give them Zoom calls.
We give them trainings. We give them PDF story. We give them all the stuff.
And in the middle of all of this content, they get lost. Clients don't starve. They die of indigestion.
Like if they've got too much stuff, they don't need more. And if they're lost, what they need more than anything else is a map. They don't need content.
they need context. That's the first fix for us to nail together. So if I'm sitting down with a new client and they want some help designing their program, there's a simple shape I use.
It's called a magic model and it gives their clients a map so they never get lost. It also gives the coach a real clear sense of what needs to go on the program and what they don't even need to talk about because it's not helping solve the problem. So we draw a triangle and in the middle, we just go, hey, what's the dream come true?
What's the result?
Every time a client hears a result, like a promise, there's a part of their mind that goes, yeah, but I can't because reasons. Guess what? Those reasons are important.
They're the obstacles that they need to overcome. So the second piece we add is the obstacles. You know, obstacle one, obstacle two, obstacle three.
I drew them in red because red's bad. Then we go, hey, what are they? What's the opposite of that obstacle?
What would it look like if they hit a milestone? And so the milestone's going green.
Simple, visual. I know, oh, that's the current problem I'm working on. That's the goal I'm after.
Then the next question is, well, okay, how do I do it? And then we give people a couple of missions, one or two projects that are going to move the needle. I draw them in blue because it sounds like a blueprint, which makes me feel like I should go to work.
So let me give you an example. My job is to help business coaches get to a million bucks a year. Let's call that the result in the middle.
There's three big problems they have. They don't have enough leads. Sales is awkward and clients bail because they don't get the results they're after.
What's the milestone? Well, we want to get leads every day. It's like a marketing job.
We want to make sales every week. We want clients who stay for years. Cool.
And then the blue are just the projects or the missions around it. Now, when you look at this, it's a super simple picture, but it gives your clients a map. Oh, I'm working on that problem to get that goal.
And that's my current project. I can ignore everything else. The benefit it gives you is.
You know all the other shit you know? All of this other stuff that you thought you had to put into the program to make it irresistible? You don't.
Because clients don't want your stuff. They want a result. They just want our help.
And the secret to helping a client win is to get rid of all the distractions because they're already chaotic and distracted enough in their head without us adding more. If your clients are lost, they need a map. They don't need more content.
all this stuff, they just need context. A simple picture like this with a clear plan shows them where they're at and where they're going, what to work on, and they believe that it's possible for them. First job, make them believe.
So the second reason that your clients don't win as fast as we like and don't stay as long as we'd love is because they just get stuck. They might know what to work on, but they still have to do it. I don't know if you've had this, but in the early days, I'd teach them and I'd show them and I'd give them examples and templates.
And they'd either go, oh yeah, that's cool for you, but I could never do that. Or, but you're so good at that. Or even worse, sometimes they'll try and they'd proudly show me their work.
And in my gut, I'd be like, that's just never gonna, it's just not good enough. It's hard work. Sometimes you just wish you could like, either just go, hey, all right, just let me do it for a week.
Which is cool, but that's not sustainable. It's not great for them. And it's super not good for you.
Sometimes I just wish I could. take what I know and my skills and just stick a USB in the back of the head and like upload my powers into their brain. And it didn't used to be possible, but now it kind of is.
So let me show you the model, how we think about different ways to help clients get results faster. I remember years ago, shopping at Whole Foods with the Hormoses. I don't know which one said it.
It's the muscly one. They're both kind of muscly. And they said, the secret to our scale is that like, how low can we lower the bar of how good a client needs to be before they join us and still make them successful, still get them to win?
I've been thinking about that a lot. So in the old days, there were really two main ways that people like us help their clients get results. And one of them was like, DIY, do it yourself.
Here's the course, good luck. I mean, that's great for the coach because it's super scalable. It's terrible for the client because like only 3 % of clients even finish the course, let alone implement it.
God forbid, like let alone get any kind of results at all. So that's not okay. The other end of the spectrum is like, okay, well, I'll just do it for you.
Done for you.
Agency model. Great for the client because either it wins or they fire us and switch you for somebody else. Not good for the coach because it's not sustainable.
And so about eight years ago, I was like, there's got to be a better way. And I coined the term done with you.
which is like at the time, the best way to like take the scalability of this and the resultiveness of that and help clients really win. And so to be like, I'll teach it to you, I'll give you a template and you just pour in your content and your personality and then we tweak it. It was cool.
But even despite that, the level that you can do versus the level that your clients on their very first time can do, it's just like night and day different. But now thanks to AI, there's just a better way. And we call it done, accelerated for you.
D -X -Y. And it's basically the exact same process, but instead of just learning the stuff and using the templates, learn the stuff, get some ingredients out and then use a custom GPT to get in the results. So we've been using this extensively every time we create a new training or there's an old training where people used to get stuck.
And we build custom GPTs that either help people like create the stuff or audit the stuff and get results that for a beginner are just like mind -blowingly great. Here's the thing. AI is good at creating stuff.
But someone, you and then your clients need some taste because you need to like season it salt -based. Oh yeah, that's good. But tweak it like that.
But now we can get clients instant results and get them out of their head and into motion and get results really, really fast. So your best clients probably don't need this stuff because they've gotten good by developing skills like the old -fashioned way. But new people or people who are early into your area of expertise, they could use a lot of help.
So a month or two ago, I was coaching four or 500 brand new coaches who were like new to online and hadn't sold anything before. And my job was like, help them design a program using the magic model map, build an offer using a custom GPT that we wrote and then sell it live for the very first time. And obviously that's big and scary, lots of big decisions to make.
So we stepped through it with the help of AI and a good old fashioned, you've got three minutes, go. Offer machine spits out a great offer. We showed them how to tweak it with a magic phrase that made it better.
And then it came time to like share it with people. And so I did my favorite trick in the book. I put on my personal trainer hat.
I was like, okay, so you know what to do? Post this message now. So they did it and I crapped themselves.
They were called team brown pants because they all had to do it with shitty pants. Anyway, they did it. And then people put out their hand and started going, this looks interesting.
Tell me more. And so then I was like, okay, that offer that we just created, send it to them. And then people started saying, that sounds great.
How do I pay? And live on the call, I think within the hour that we spent on this, 45 or 46 people made somewhere like the lowest was three grand and the highest was like $17 ,000 having never sold anything like this in their life.
And that never would have happened this way. It never would happen that way because we're going to help that many people. It could happen here, but it happened instantly here.
And the belief thing we talked about before got taken care of because they got results faster than their disbelief could talk them out of it. That's what I'm talking about. So if you think about this and applying it to you, once you've got a map, the question is, okay, well, whereabouts on my map do people get stuck?
What's harder than it should be? What takes longer than it should? And where do people just get this wrong?
If you just like highlight, well, you know, people tend to get stuck there and this bit's tricky. And here as well, you just go like, what's the specific thing they get stuck at? And if we can build a simple AI power -up that gives them superpowers, your clients are going to...
whip through the model faster and get to the result much, much quicker. The solution to stuck used to be training and reps and learning and reps and weeks and months and years. And now it's how do we get them from stuck to a result with the help of some AI superpowers.
Leverage it and help your clients win faster. Have you ever worked with somebody and they've got incredible results and they said, thank you, maybe even shot you like a testimonial and then asked to leave? That's happened to me a couple of times.
And at the time I was like, Like, dude, I had this guy join us at like $13 ,000 a month, got to a million dollars a year in like five months. And then it's like, I think I'm done.
What? And then I realized it wasn't his fault. It was mine.
If you think about what makes clients stay, you know, let's talk about retention.
It's a simple mathematical equation. Retention equals results, which we've just been chatting about.
In terms of relationships.
I have this client called Kurt. And he was a hard South African taskmaster. And he got incredible results.
In fact, I interviewed one of his clients once for a case study. He's like, me and Kurt have a love -hate relationship. I'm like, what do you mean?
He goes, I hate him every time we talk. I love him every time I check my bank account. He's like a results guy.
And then I know other coaches who are like, maybe they don't get as many results, but people feel connected and bonded and like friends. And they never want to leave because if they leave, they lose their friendship. Friendship to the coach and with their peers.
If you want to keep clients long -term, you need both. And the truth is that most of your clients, most of the time, feel really alone. And alone doesn't mean they run their business solo or they don't have people in their world.
Even if they run a company and have a big team, like who does the founder actually talk to? not that many people. And so this aloneness problem is a huge opportunity for you to create a place where they can belong.
The third transition is to take people from being alone to doing this journey in a squad. And the squad makes your life easier and their life so much better that they'll never want to leave. So if we want to make this switch from an irresistible offer to an energizing experience, the best experiences are the ones we share.
And really what we're selling often is proximity. proximity to you and proximity to other people just like me on the journey. Because otherwise, how on earth do they meet their people?
Let me give you an example. This morning, I ran a call with our clients in Black Belt. And over the course of 90 minutes, I taught zero things.
Okay? But what I did is I set up three questions for them to think about for a minute and then jump into a breakout room and discuss with like three or four people. And over the course of the hour and a half, they had like a chat with this group over here and then they switched to a different group and they chatted with those people here and they...
Chat with those people over there. Because the content's amazing, but what really makes it stick is I'm doing this journey with others. And at the end of the call, I was like, okay, so what were your best things?
What do you appreciate? And five or six people in a row just said, I feel like I found my tribe. I found my people.
When you can create a community, not just sell a coaching program, you build this power. I've got this friend, Peter Lowe, calls himself Hot Asian. One of those three things is true.
He said, If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you go together.
But if you want to go fast and far, like I think that's our job, right? We want to get them results fast and have them stay a long time. If you want to go fast and far, you go with kindred spirits.
So I think the secret weapon, the hack that almost nobody in our space really does is don't just sell a product or coach clients, but build a community. So we know that people stay when they're getting results and they're in a relationship. If you don't have like 10 clients or 20 clients or 100 clients, It's like you and a couple of clients.
This is still important, but they don't have to bond to each other. The most important relationship they'll ever have in the coaching space is with you, their coach. Ultimately, the easiest relationship for you to control is a relationship your clients have with you.
If they know you care, they'll feel it and they'll behave appropriately. They'll do the work to impress you and they'll stick around because they love being in your presence. The give a shit factor.
is kind of the secret sauce in this whole factor. Whether it's one client or 10 or 100, if you give a damn, they'll know it and it'll pay off in spades. So let's learn this plan.
I want to give you a really, really simple tool. Every week, my team meets and they run the traffic light meeting. You can do this by yourself.
It's quick. The less clients you got, the easier it is. Every client at any given moment is at a set of traffic lights.
They're either green, they're clear, and they're moving forwards towards their goals. Or... Let's go to the other end.
Or they're red, like they're stuck, stalled, and they've got problems. Or they're missing in action. Or yellow, somewhere in between, not sure.
There's a simple tool below. It's basically got the names of your clients, their traffic light score, red, yellow, or green, and then what the next action is. If you don't know the traffic light score, that's a red.
Because our job as a coach... is to know if they show up red flag it doesn't mean they're actually in trouble it just means we don't know and we'll find out this is a simple rhythm whether you do it once a week or once a month you'll have a finger on the pulse and know exactly how to move your clients forward they'll feel your care and they'll win and you'll get rewarded with great results you can brag about stories to tell and clients who stay for years so i was to summarize just to give you like all of this in one idea it's this don't just make an irresistible offer create an energizing experience and the easiest way to do that is to go look what would i want What's the kind of thing that I would love to be a part of?
Because it's one thing to have something that you think other people will buy. It's a completely different, way better thing to build the thing that you would be stoked to buy and be part of yourself.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Taki Moore opens with a client whose customers stay seven and a half years on average, then asks what your business would look like if you never lost a single client.
