17:58Taki Moore · Talking Head
Irresistible offers are overrated. Build this instead
Taki Moore argues coaches should stop stacking bonuses and build an energizing experience that fixes three reasons clients quit: lost, stuck, and alone.
July 17thThe argument in one line.
The wrong clients cost more than they pay, so you should set explicit logistical and vibe standards, apply them to new and existing clients, and remove the negatives.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A coach or consultant who took clients purely for the cash and now dreads certain calls, messages or community posts.
- A founder running a group program or community where one disruptive member can lower the experience for everyone else.
- An early-stage service seller who needs a simple filter for who gets in at the application and sales-call stage.
SKIP IF…
- You sell a one-off product with no ongoing client relationship, so client fit barely matters.
- You are still at zero clients and need volume before you can afford to be selective.
The full version, fast.
Bad clients drain your energy, sour your community and quietly hurt your marketing, so the video sorts every client into negative, neutral or positive. The speaker builds two lists, logistics and vibes, of who is and is not a fit, then writes those standards into marketing, applications, sales docs and calls. Existing clients get ranked against the same list: negatives are cut kindly, neutrals stay unless the community depends on high-caliber members, and the bar is raised again once the negatives are gone.
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00:01 – 00:58
01 · Cold open and the caller ID test
The promise of a client base that gives energy, and a gut check using the phone's caller ID.
01:28 – 03:00
02 · Why we chase the wrong money
Clients took bad-fit customers because they needed cash, and the dinner-table test for choosing your squad.
03:01 – 04:30
03 · Negative, neutral and positive clients
The three categories and the bivamp definition.
04:30 – 08:00
04 · Impact on you, the community and marketing
How each client type affects energy, the room and referrals, plus the pain-and-growth idea.
08:47 – 10:40
05 · The turd in the pool and the bouncer
The swimming pool story and the nightclub bouncer metaphor for setting entry rules.
10:40 – 13:45
06 · Logistics and vibe lists
Two lists of who is and is not a fit, and where to apply them in marketing, applications, docs and calls.
13:45 – 17:30
07 · What to do with existing clients
Cut negatives kindly, handle neutrals based on program type, and examples of letting people self-select out.
17:30 – 18:32
08 · Action steps
Raise standards, set entry requirements, rank current clients, and raise the bar again later.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- The only thing worse than not having enough clients is having the wrong clients, because some cost you more than they pay every month.
- The caller ID test: if a client's name makes your heart sink, that client is draining you.
- Most people take bad clients for one reason, they needed the money and chased it.
- Sort clients into three groups: net negative, neutral and net positive, and everyone you work with already has a label in your head.
- A positive client is batteries included and value adding: they bring their own energy and make the room better.
- Negative clients talk smack behind your back, neutral clients say nothing, and positive clients refer their friends.
- If running your business is painful, growing it means more pain, and you will not deliberately grow into pain.
- One negative client in a group is a turd in the pool: it doesn't matter how nice the pool is, nobody wants to swim.
- Set standards on two lists, logistics and vibes, then use them as a bouncer would at a nightclub door.
- On a sales call you are the doctor asking about problems, not the contestant tap dancing for the judge.
- Letting a disruptive member help write the ideal-member list and then score himself against it made him leave on his own.
- Neutral clients are fine in most programs but stand out in a room built entirely on A players.
- Capping a community and openly inviting passengers to step down got five people to leave without conflict.
- Raise the standard in steps: remove the negatives this week, then later remove the neutrals.
Standards protect your energy and your growth
WHAT TO LEARN
Choosing clients by fit instead of cash makes your business easier to run, easier to market and easier to grow.
- Use a gut check like the caller ID test to find clients who drain you, because the dread you feel is data about fit.
- Sort every client as negative, neutral or positive, and judge each one on its effect on you, your community and your marketing.
- Negative clients cost more than their fee through lost energy, frustrated best clients and a damaged reputation.
- Write two lists, logistics and vibes, of who is and is not a fit, and make them your entry requirements.
- Put the filter into marketing, offers, application questions, sales docs and calls so the wrong people self-select out.
- Cut negative clients kindly, and let neutrals self-select out when the room is built on high performers.
- Raise the bar in stages, removing negatives first and neutrals later, and keep the community size capped to protect quality.
Terms worth knowing.
- Caller ID test
- A gut check where you imagine a client's name appearing on your phone. If your heart sinks, that client is draining you.
- Bivamp
- Short for batteries-included, value-adding client: someone who brings their own energy and makes your program and community better.
- Bless and release
- The polite way to end a client relationship, used instead of firing.
- Net negative client
- A client whose presence makes your experience, your community and your marketing worse.
- NPC
- Non-player character. Used here for a neutral client who fills a seat without adding anything.
Things they pointed at.
01:05productBlack Belt
05:30productBoardroom
Lines you could clip.
00:01
“The only thing worse than not having enough clients is having the wrong clients.”
09:45
“If there's a turd in your pool, nobody wants to be in that pool.”
21:20
“There is nothing better than raising the caliber of the people in your room.”
Word for word.
Read-along
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The only thing worse than not having enough clients is having the wrong clients. And some of your clients are costing you more than they pay you every single month. They drain your energy, they frustrate your best clients, and they make you secretly dread growing your business.
I'm begging you to fire their asses. Sorry. I'm begging you to bless and release them.
In this video, I'm gonna show you how to set a new standard so that we only attract clients who give you energy, who stay for years, make the place better, and tell their friends. It's going to be fun. Let's do it.
We've got some cards in here. This is what we're going to cover. This is what we need to know.
The first thing I want you to think about when it comes to the clients you've got is what I call the caller ID test.
You know when your phone rings and you look at the screen and the name comes up and you either go, oh yeah, or oh no. That's the caller ID test. If you've got any clients right now that...
even just saying their names, you just thought of them now, saying their names or seeing them in the community, or when they send you a message, your heart sinks a little bit, that person needs their ass fired. It's the difference between draining your energy or someone who is exciting to work with. And it doesn't just impact you, it impacts your other clients, it impacts your growth, and it affects your marketing.
And so I was on a call with Black Belt a week or so ago, that's where this idea came from for today's video. I asked my clients if they've ever had a client that wasn't a great fit. And everyone's taken a client that they shouldn't have.
I asked them why. And almost always the answer was really simple. They took the money because they needed the money.
They chased the money and regretted it. And I get it. When you're early stage, of course, You know, there's a desire to get the cash.
But as your business grows and as you feel the impact of having bad clients and the incredible impact that having great clients can have on you, I want you to make the change from chasing the money to something much more fun.
Back when I was doing sales calls a long time ago, one of the questions in my... head in the back of my mind while I was talking to this person was, obviously, logistically, can I help them and are they the right fit? But also, is this the kind of person that I would love to have at my dinner table in front of the kids?
And if they weren't someone I'd want to hang around, I'd just pass. That idea of choosing your squad has been in my head early just because life is too short to work with non -fun people.
I think there's three categories of clients.
Three categories.
We've got people who are a net negative. In other words, their being there makes everything worse. There's clients who are neutral.
Nothing gets worse, but nothing really gets better. And there's clients who are a net positive.
I call these guys bivamps.
What's a bivamp? Well, my friend, it's a batteries included, value adding motherfucker. So we've got these three kinds of clients.
We've got negative, we've got neutral, and we've got positive. That sounds simple enough, but they actually impact more than you think, particularly if you run a group program. So each of these clients has a direct impact on you.
If you run a client community like I do, a group coaching program, They impact the community.
And they also impact your growth and your marketing. And this is the one that almost no one thinks about. So what I want to do in this video is just quickly explain the differences and how they impact each, and then let's set some rules so that the clients you've got, you're stoked on, they give you energy, they help you grow.
We might need to make some decisions about who stays and who goes. If you don't have enough clients yet, do not freak out. We're going to help set some rules around who's allowed in from now on.
And then we can ratchet up the stakes from there. All right. So client impact.
Positive clients give you energy. They give you a charge. They're so fun to work with.
Neutral clients, they're kind of just taking up space.
And you know what? Honestly, often that's fine. But negative clients, they don't charge energy, they drain it.
And if you're talking to people on a regular basis for a period of time, there's nothing worse than working with people who are just not fun. In terms of the impact on the community, this only applies if you've got, if your clients ever meet each other. If they don't, this is probably a non -issue.
Positive clients, they... They lift the room.
When we're filtering people for boardroom, one of the questions we ask in the application and we interview afterwards is, if you were to give a one -hour talk about any topic that would add the most value to the rest of the crew, what's the thing that you would talk about or teach on that would blow their minds? In other words, I don't just want the client.
Because I'm selling a community, their presence, like the community is the product. And so they need to... They need to be better.
People need to go, holy crap, I'm so glad they're here. Whether they're a big name or they're not doesn't matter. Just are they adding value?
Their battery's included. They've got their own energy. And they add value.
That's what we want. Neutral clients could go either way.
Again, they're just filling space.
And they're kind of a bit of an NPC, non -player character. If your clients don't talk to each other, that doesn't matter. If your client group is kind of average or okay, that's probably fine.
But if you've got a room full of gangsters and there's a non -gangster, like there's gangsters here and there's an NPC walks in, that's a negative just because the standard is so high. And negative clients, net negative, people who are a net negative in terms of their experience, those guys sour the room.
Marketing -wise, These guys are amazing. These guys are attractive from a marketing point of view.
I don't mean they're hot. You can be ugly and a great client. But I mean, sometimes they're a big name.
And people are like, oh, crap, I can't wait to be in the room with them. More often than not, you can tell their stories.
And the good ones refer and tell their friends. Neutral ones, they say nothing.
And the negative ones, they talk smack behind your back.
Right? So this gives us three groups of clients. And the question I've got for you is like right now, if you think about the clients you've got, if I say this, probably some names come to mind.
If I say that, you've probably got some other names come to mind. And like just the fact that we've got the labels, you know who they are. And so the question we want to be asking is, is that okay?
Because it might be just fine. I'm going to posit to you that having clients who are negative is not good for you or your other clients or your business as a whole. There's this crazy idea that I learned from talking to a client of mine called Alex Sharfman.
And he said, if running a business right now is painful, And growing it means more pain. You will never grow your business because you'll never deliberately grow into pain.
So it shuts you down kind of at this weird subconscious internal level from even growing. So if you're not growing, maybe look at is there some pain I need to remove so that then I feel actually good about growing this thing because you can't tough it out forever. So here's what I want to do.
Next card. I want to set some rules for you about... Who should and who shouldn't come in and then we can make some decisions about what do we do with the negatives?
What do we do with the neutrals and what do you do with the positives? I'm not saying fire the neutrals It really depends on the kind of program that you run. So, you know, let me just let me just rant Years ago, I was a beautiful summer day in Sydney in Manly Beach where we live and At the end of my cul -de -sac you go down the stairs and there's this swimming pool It's like an outdoor pool that fills up with the ocean at high tide and empties out It's beautiful.
It's a glorious day. The pool's full. I'm like, this is a perfect day for a swim.
I walk down there. People are out sunbaking. The pool's full.
And I'm like, great. I'm going to do some laps. So I jump in in the lap lane.
And I swim up to the end. And I'm like, this is the best day ever. And I get to the end.
And I'm just about to touch the edge to turn around and go back. And I notice right there in the corner, in the dark corner, someone has shit in the pool. There's a freaking turd floating in the pool.
Well, I got the fuck out of that pool. It doesn't matter how great the day is or how nice your pool is or how good the company is. If there's a turd in your pool, nobody wants to be in that pool.
That's what it's like having a negative client in your group, right? So I want you to set some rules about who is and is not allowed in your pool. So I'm going to switch metaphors.
It's not a pool anymore. You're a bouncer at a nightclub and you're the person standing at the door and you get to decide who comes in and who doesn't. We're going to use this firstly to filter in.
filter in or out the new people who want to find out more about you. And then secondly, we'll use it as a lens to assess the people who are already in your world. So we're going to have two lists.
So not four. We're going to look at them through two lenses. First, we're going to have a look through logistics.
Are there any people, kinds of people who've joined your program who, from the outside, there were some tells, not that they were mean or anything, but they just weren't ready or they weren't right, or you couldn't help them win because they didn't have certain things in place. Like for me, Like clients is the program that gets people to 10 grand a month, but Black Belt's for people who already passed that.
So if somebody's under $10 ,000 a month and they apply for Black Belt, it's not for. So that could be about what stage they're at or what level of income they're at or audience size or prior experience or whatever. Obviously, are they in your niche?
And then, so the first step is just to have a look at the... Anyone who worked in the past was like, you know what, knowing what I know now, I'm not going to take people like that. On paper, you can go, that's not for me.
And on the flip side, these people are for me, and it's the opposite. They're over 10K.
They've got an audience of 500 people or more. They're a coach in our niche, and they've been doing this for a little while. They've got room to blah, blah, blah, blah.
So that's logistics. The other part, though, is like vibes.
And we make a list of all of the things which would make someone a non -fit. for you. And for me, like one of those is like, do they have batteries included?
And you can tell, I'll show you how in a second. Victim versus ownership. Are they generous?
Et cetera, et cetera. So here's what I want you to do. Make a list of, just grab a sheet of paper.
In fact, you know what? I'll take some photos of this book with my scribbles in it, put it on as a download and you can write on it if it's helpful. Make a list of who it's not for logistically.
and who it is for logistically, who is not a vibe match and who is. Once we've got this list, we want to apply it to a few places. As soon as we've got the standards, we make it the entry requirement.
So now our marketing only talks to people just like that. When we make an offer, in the offer, it says it's for people like this, it's not for people like that, both logistically and vibe -wise. If you have an application form, make sure there's a question or two questions in there that filter people in or out, right?
like the question about what value do you bring to the rest of boardroom or monthly income. If you're selling with a doc, make sure it's in the doc. If you're selling on a call, make sure we got our ears out and we're running it like an interview.
Remember, if someone's on a sales call with you, remember, you don't need to sell anything to anybody. They're the one with the problem and you're the one with the solution. So our job is to go, okay, I'm the doctor.
Tell me about your problems. Can I help or not? Right?
You're Simon Cowell. on American Idol, not the person tap dancing on the front trying to impress him.
So that's how we use it in marketing. Set the standards and then put it in your marketing, in your application, in your content. Choose topics that relate to the people that you do want and not the people you don't in the doc and in the call.
But now comes the fun bit. We get to apply this thinking to your existing clients.
Because they're either going to be negative, neutral, or positive. And then what the hell do we do with it? The first thing we want to do is we're just going to decide we're not taking any negative people ever again.
I think the first thing to do is to announce to your clients that we're raising the standards and why it's better for them. Because it is. Your best clients are secretly going, man, I wish he'd stopped going to that person first on the Q &A call.
They're so freaking annoying. They take forever. And they're asking the same dumb questions again and again and again.
You know what I'm talking about. So what do we do with the negatives? I think we cut them.
You don't have to be rude about it. But I had somebody who'd come to the event and was kind of disruptive and a bit of a downer. And so I was like, I need to address this.
But I didn't have the guts to go, hey, man, you're a bit of a downer. You should bounce. So I ran an activity.
where I got them to describe the ideal member of my program. Like, they would look like this, logistically and vibes. And then this would rule somebody out.
If logistically they look like that, mm -mm. And if vibe -wise they look like that, mm -mm. And I got them to make a list.
And the guy who was disruptive and a downer helped with the list. He's like, so what do you do with a list like this? He goes, this is a great list.
I'm like, it's a quick question. If you had to score yourself against this list, do you fit or not? He was like, Nah, I don't.
Amazing. Mission fucking accomplished. So what are you going to do about it?
Because you can either stay and play by these new rules or you can leave and find somewhere else to go. I don't fire clients, but we bless and release a bunch of people every year. Bless and release is the nice way of saying we fire their asses.
For the neutrals, what do you do? Well, depending on your program, it might not matter at all. If they're taking up some space, they're paying good money.
They don't say anything. They're not disruptive. They're not hurting anybody.
That's fine. So keep them. But if you run a program like we do in boardroom and the whole community is built on bivans, batteries included, value -added motherfuckers, if I've got a room full of A players and there's a B player in it, the B player stands out like a sore thumb.
So we need to ask them to leave.
About a year and a half ago, I was at a boardroom event in California. and announced that we'd... It was two years ago.
I put a cap on Boardroom. It was capped at 100 people. I don't want to increase the number of people in Boardroom.
100 is a great number, but I want to raise the caliber of the people in the room. So I'd made that announcement maybe six months before. We get back together.
I'm like, hey, I told you six months ago or so that we were going to cap Boardroom and that we want to raise the caliber. It's 100 people is what we want. We're at 94.
There's only six spots left. And there's... a wait list.
So we need to figure out what to do. I love you guys, but there's some of you guys here who are like, frankly, you're passengers here. You come and you enjoy the crowd and you're fun to hang out with, but you're not getting a lot from us because you're not doing a lot.
You're not giving anything to the others.
And so I'm stoked that you're here, but by the time we finish up this workshop, just come tap me on the shoulder and say, hey, I don't think I'm giving much here. It might be time for me to go. And we'll have a chat about it.
And if I agree, I'll give you a hug and we'll work out a plan for you that isn't here, but it's something else. And I had five people come and say, hey, I don't think I'm adding much value here. One of them I fought tooth and nail to keep because he just was being humble.
I didn't see his own amazingness. But the others, I was like, you know what? I respect that decision.
And off they went. Cool.
There is nothing better than raising the caliber of the people in your room. It makes your marketing more attractive. It makes your community much more sticky.
And frankly, it makes your energy significantly better. So listen, action steps.
Here. I'll take a screenshot of that if you want to. Number one, raise your standards.
Who it's for, who it's not for. Number two, let's set that as the new entry requirements. In marketing, in your application, in your doc, and in your call.
Then we need to rank your current clients. There are some we're going to bless and release and the rest we're going to raise your standard because I reckon the game is this. This week, we let go of some people, we raise the standard and we get rid of red.
So we're only in neutrals and positives now. Later on down the track, whenever you're ready, raise it again. And now we're only positives.
This is the thing that's helped me build a business that I love with my heart and soul.
If you want to build a business that gives you energy, that as it gets bigger, your life gets better. Watch this video next and I'll show you the game plan.
It's the simplest way I know to get you to a million bucks or two or three with a business that fits you like a glove. Watch that next. I'll see you soon.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The only thing worse than not having enough clients is having the wrong clients. Taki Moore opens with that claim and spends the next eighteen minutes showing how to sort the clients you have and decide who stays.
Named ideas worth stealing.
03:01model
Negative, neutral, positive clients
- Net negative
- Neutral
- Net positive (bivamp)
Every client either makes things worse, changes nothing, or makes things better for you, the community and your marketing.
Steal forany service business reviewing its client list
10:30model
Two-list bouncer filter
- Logistics: who it is and is not for
- Vibes: who is and is not a match
Write who is a fit and who is not on both logistical and vibe criteria, then apply the lists to marketing, offers, applications, docs and calls.
Steal forapplication forms and sales calls
Visual structure at a glance.
